Alison Donnell, 'Visibility, Violence and Voice? Attitudes to Veiling Post-11 September'
In: Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art. Edited by David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros. Published by Institute of International Visual Arts in Association with Modern Art Oxford, 2003, pp. 120-135.
In the television documentary, Behind the Veil that was shown to British audiences in June 2001 and to American audiences in late August 2001, Saira Shah, a British-born Afghan entered Afghanistan undercover to film and narrate a piece which documents in graphic and harrowing detail the human rights abuses and in particular the sanctioned violence against women under the Taliban. Despite Shah’s own conviction about the need to draw international attention to the situation in Afghanistan, in an interview with CNN just weeks before 11 September, Shah pointed out:
Afghanistan used to be important, but so many things happened there, and things have happened because Afghanistan was used as a pawn in the â80s. There is now no international interest in Afghanistan. People have to care about Afghanistan around the world, and maybe a head of steam can be built that can do some good.[1]
Although 11 September provided a scalding head of steam, it is not so easy to decide whether it has resulted in any 'good', or provoked a new global ethic of care. Indeed if Afghan women are now receiving the kinds of international attention that many had worked and hoped for, then it has to be noted that they are doing so very much on the West’s terms. It is neither surprising nor incidental that media coverage of Afghanistan post-11 September relied heavily on the veil as an effective visual shorthand which draws on dress codes already naturalised within the West as emblematic of oppression. However, it may be possible to argue that the over-determined and over-simplified representation of the veil in Western cultures has been thrown into a different floodlight post-11 September, one that casts new and ominous political shadows.
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RAWA’s website crashed as a result of overload when it was cited on The Oprah Winfrey Show on 5 October 2001. However, it is important to note that the show itself did not foreground the agency and potentiality of Afghan women demonstrated by RAWA and other groups, but rather devoted most of the airtime, supposedly dedicated to an introduction and explanation of Islam, to a discussion of hijab. Again, the veil or scarf became the focal point. Discussing the way in which the programme intended to take up the urgent challenge of introducing and explaining Islam to the American public only to be derailed by a focus on hijab, Afra Jalabi argues that the veil has now become a tool of political distraction. For Jalabi, the veil is a false centre to the discussions of social justice and a highly charged symbol of difference that paralyses productive cross-cultural debate and communication:
But did we discuss the meaning of being Muslim, or the problem of violence, or even the rage caused by American foreign policy in the region? No, the Muslim audience had more pressing things to discuss. The show proved to be a mirror of our intellectual bankruptcy, a mirror of our true obsessions and fixations, because after a quick discussion of what Islam was about, the show veered off to discuss woman in Islam, particularly the dress code. The âafter show’ segment, which the program puts daily on its website after the life recording in the studio, was entirely about’ Hijab’. This was both insightful and disheartening. It seemed that the gender question in Islam had become the central issue and what Muslim women wear the core of the debate on Islam, both internally and externally. It was disgraceful to see how our contemporary discourse as âmodern Muslims’ has become so focused on the scarf at the expense of the real paradigms that define Islam, its history and its universal values. [7]
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Indeed, it is important to ask whether veiling has not only been used to simplify the issues regarding the position of women in Afghanistan before 11 September, but also to distort their situation almost a year hence. If the image of women taking off their veils and men shaving off their beards have been described as âthe most joyous journalistic images of 2001’ and constructed to offer a promise of liberation and politics of hope, do such images equate with a new just politics and gender equality in Afghanistan? [9]
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The most complex and urgent questions around veiling, such as the need to differentiate, historicise and locate women’s own creative and differing responses to the veil, as well as the issue of rights in relation to compulsory unveiling, are the subject of many scholarly debates. [12] Nevertheless, the differences in social conditions and political status enjoyed by different communities of veiled women and the many cultural variables and specificities that attend the wearing of veils are seldom the interest of those that represent the veiled women to and for the West. Even the word âveil’ implies the fixing and homogenising of a range of dress practices and garments which are worn in accordance with hijab. In Egypt today, where the full continuum between Western dress, the tarah, hijab and niqab can be seen on the streets, these garments not only serve to signify the Western or non-Western forms of identification, but also class position and political allegiance.
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The multiple functions and values of the veil also need to be acknowledged. For some women, the veil empowers them by removing their bodies from the male scrutiny and the social judgements of beauty and sexuality and they wear it by choice. For others, enforced veiling is a political oppression disconnected from Islam, as experienced in Afghanistan by Latifa: âI climb out of the burqa feeling humiliated and furious. My face belongs to me. The Koran says that women can be veiled, but that she must remain recognizable. The Taliban wants to steal my face, forbid us all faces.’ [13] Veiling can also be a conscious drawing attention to oneself - not as a beautiful and sexual being â but as a political one. In âAlgeria Unveiled’, Frantz Fanon documents how in relation to Algeria’s struggle for independence the veil was âtransformed into as technique of camouflage, into a means of struggle’. [14] Fanon not only refers here to the pragmatic value of a garment that conceals arms and confers anonymity but also to the struggle for ideological identification in which the veil represents the wilful abrogation of Western values.
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The concentration on the veil in Western discussions of Islamic societies can legitimately be seen to divert attention from other issues such as legal rights, education and access to healthcare. However, given the fact that attitudes to the veil post-11 September have only conï¬rmed Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s proposal that the âveiled woman’ is one of the âuniversal images of âthe third-worldâ woman ⦠setting in motion a colonialist discourse which exercises a very speciï¬c power in deï¬ning, coding and maintaining existing ï¬rst/third world connections’, then any serious and sustained attempts to interrogate, destabilise and reconstruct the political biases which inform acts of representing the veil may be a useful and signiï¬cant starting point from which to redeï¬ne the terms of the âinsider/outsider’ divide that 11 September all too often and disappointingly provoked. [16] In the light of political failure, perhaps cultural interventions can bring change to the pattern through which Muslim women only achieve Western visibility by suffering violence.
[1] 'Journalist Saira Shah: Life in Afghanistan under the Taliban', 27August 2001 (www.cnn.com/2001/COMMUNITY/08/24/shah/index.html).
[7] Jalabi, Afra. âTo Veil or Not to Veil, That is the Question’ (www.mwlusa.org/hijab_oprah.html)
[9] Gardener, Marilyn. âLifting the Veil on Women’s Subjugation’, in Christian Science Monitor, 28 November 2001.
[12] See Blank and Göcek in âThe Veil: Postcolonialism and the Politics of Dress’, in Alison Donnell (ed.), Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, London: Routledge, vol. 1, no. 4.
[13] Latifa, My Forbidden Face, London: Virago, 2002, p. 41.
[14] Fanon, Frantz. Studies in a Dying Colonialism, rev. ed., London: Earthscan Publications, 1989, p. 61.
[16] Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, âUnder Western Eyes: Power, Representation and Feminist Critique’, in Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds.), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, p. 73.