What Is Veiling?

3. Politics and Sociocultural Practices of Veiling

56 It has been proven that the hair of a woman radiates a kind of ray that affects a man, exciting him out of the normal state. —Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Iran’s first post-revolutionary president It is not that we wear burqa because it is shameful to go without it, but because it’s beautiful to go with it. —Woman from Oman My scarf covers my head, not my brain. —Hayrunisa Gül (wife of Turkey’s president Abdullah Gül) C H A P T E R T H R E E Politics and Sociocultural Practices of Veiling Religion and piety are not the only factors that determine whether a Muslim woman will veil, or even how she will veil. In a handful of Muslim-majority societies, the government mandates hijab and legislates the particular form that veiling must take. The Euro-American print and broadcast media reports disproportionately on these conservative Muslim-majority countries and their restrictive veiling practices. As one student interviewed by the anthropologist John Bowen astutely pointed out, “on the television, it is as if there are only two Muslim countries in the world, Afghanistan and Iran.”1 Covered far less are the specific historical context of governmental veiling legislation and the voices of resistance from Muslims to such veiling regulations.The coverage of government-mandated veiling practices also fails to mention that in most Muslim-majority societies, veiling is adopted voluntarily because it is a common cultural practice and often out of deep piety. Politics and Sociocultural Practices 57 POLITICS, HISTORY, AND VEILING REGULATIONS Until 1979, Saudi Arabia was the only Muslim-majority society that required the veiling of women (both native and foreign) when going out in public. Today, veiling is imposed on women in four countries in the world: Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Sudan, and the Aceh Province of Indonesia .2 This means that the requirement to veil in Muslim-majority societies is a rare and very recent phenomenon, one tied to specific historical and political conditions. In Iran, for instance, hijab was imposed on women after the 1979 Islamic Revolution that established the Islamic Republic of Iran under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini. At the time, a great number of Iranian women had demonstrated on the streets in support of the revolution and demanding their right to wear the chador. Euro-American broadcast and print media at the time marveled at Iranian women’s enthusiastic adoption of a conservative form of Muslim dress during the revolution. What was not generally understood, however, was that the adoption of the chador did not indicate a sudden rise of piety among the population or a wholehearted embrace of conservative forms of Islam. Rather, wearing the chador largely symbolized resistance against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who had banned the veil in 1936 and imposed Western dress. Many of the secular and modern Iranian women who appeared in the newsreels of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution had adopted veiling not always because of their own religious beliefs but in support of the thousands of pious Iranians who had been oppressed and excluded from education and government jobs simply as a result of the Shah’s forced sartorial policies. Their veiling symbolized solidarity especially with the working-class Iranian women who had been subjected to mandatory unveiling under the Shah. After the 1979 revolution, however, Iranian women who had demonstrated for their right to choose to wear the chador unexpectedly found themselves forced to wear it. According to today’s Iranian Islamic Penal Code, women who are caught unveiled or improperly veiled (wearing long boots over their pants, hats instead of scarves, or the wrong color— anything but black, blue, or brown) are fined or face penalties ranging from seventy-four lashes to a two-year prison term. Chief Brigadier General Morteza Talaie of the Tehran police reports that 30 percent of all complaints made to the Iranian police today con- 58 Islam, Politics, and Veiling cern inappropriately attired women. The business proceeds of such mandatory veiling are enormous: the sale of black veils has become a $40 million industry in Iran, profiting conservative bazaar merchants who have become staunch supporters of the current Iranian government . Just as the Shah used physical force to implement his compulsory unveiling policies in the late 1930s, today’s Iranian government employs a special morality police (referred to as Kommiteh) to enforce compulsory veiling. Similar policies hold...