A Wild Hair About Hijāb
Next Monday’s issue of Time Magazine is running a story entitled “Fast Times in Tehran” by Iranian-American journalist and author Azadeh Moaveni. I don’t speak Farsi, have never been to Iran, and know very little about Iranian culture or history. That said, Moaveni’s article seems like a pretty good human interest story. But here’s what really caught my attention:
(I apologise for the quality of this photograph: I was unable to get the scanner at work to function, today, and so had to resort to a digital camera. I’ll try again tomorrow.)
This is the picture from Time’s table of contents, visually defining Moaveni’s story. The photographee, Laleh Seddigh is a female race-car driver. She gets one, relatively unimportant paragraph in the article:
The social mores are relaxed enough to accommodate even women like Laleh Seddigh, 28, a race-car driver who is the Iranian version of Danica Patrick. Seddigh wears bright pink veils, designer sunglasses and has won a race or two on Iran’s racing circuit. State television has refused to broadcast her standing on the podium to receive her prize, but that has allowed Seddigh — in the manner of [rock band] 127 — to protect her radical chic. It’s a win-win arrangement: she gets her fast cars and fast lifestyle, and the regime gets a poster girl for its new tolerance. “Women haven’t gone after many of their rights here,” she tells me. “If they pursue them, so much is possible.” She pauses, perhaps realizing she sounds like one of the regime’s chador-clad apologists. “Not that it’s easy.”
Seddigh sounds like an interesting character, but what matters, here, to me, is that despite her insignificance to the piece as a whole (which focuses on current popular political apathy) this photo — this particular photo — becomes the visual focus.
The picture is of an attractive young women, flashing a welcoming smile (will the reader see it as flirtatious?). Her hands are poised above her head, lifting her hijāb and revealing her hair. The text reads ‘Iran’s youthful generation keeps politics under wraps’. It is difficult to tell whether she is removing the hijāb (matching the inviting smile), or putting it on (matching the bad pun, and implying that it is the notion of a smiling woman who is political, and who must be hidden). No matter what Seddigh was doing, what her intentions were, the photograph is used to tease the reader.
Equally important is the tag line on the photo — ‘under wraps’ is a barely veiled reference. This despite the fact that Moaveni’s article never once mentions the issue of veiling as political. How is it that this issue has become so important to our culture that we read it into Muslim and Islamic issues even when it isn’t present?
Take a look at Muslim WakeUp! — one of the most progressive American Muslim sites on the Web. In the upper righthand corner, Amina Wadud, imām at the recent controversial woman-led prayer in New York, is smiling in her white hijāb. In the Sex & the Umma section, columnist and sometimes Muslim erotica author Mohja Kahf sports a bright pink covering.
Hijāb is an issue in the Muslim world. In certain societies, at certain times, women have been forced to wear hijāb regardless of their will. But it is a peripheral issue — reaching nowhere near the importance that our media’s constant referencing and punning would lead one to believe. Islam is a “veiled” religion. We seek to understand Middle Eastern countries “behind the veil”. (An aside: The different ways in which Islam, Muslims, and Muslim cultures are cast into particular gender roles in American popular media is hecka interesting.)
Neither are we preaching from any real moral high ground: Somewhere between one in six and one in four American women has been raped. American women die every day from anorexia and bulimia. Millions of American women are afraid to walk alone after dark for fear of what will happen to them. I think what concerns us, here, is not so much the apparent misogyny (which we share), but the strangeness of its (perceived) form.
I’m reminded of something I recently read in Theodore W. Allen’s The Invention of the White Race. Allen is talking about the English perception of the “degenerate English” — the Anglo-Irish who had lived in Ireland for generations. He quotes Curtis’ history of the Irish:
…now many of the English of the said land, forsaking the English language, fashion, mode of riding, laws and usages, live and govern themselves according to the manners, fashion and language of the Irish enemies, and have also made divers marriages and alliances between themselves and the Irish enemies aforesaid; whereby the said land and the liege people thereof, the English language, and the allegiance due to our lord the King, and the English laws there, are put in subjection and decayed.
This is, note, from before the advent of Anglicanism, while the British monarchy was still Catholic. What was objectionable, there, was not any sort of rational immorality implied by the Celtic language or culture. It was the un-Englishness of it — and it wasn’t that Celtic culture was supplanting English on English soil — it was Celts’ being Celtic at home.
Those English who bemoaned the Gaelicisation of their Anglo-Irish cousins are America’s direct cultural ancestors. For them, Ireland was the savage Other that the Middle East is for America today. In Tyrone’s Rebellion, a deliberate English scorched Earth policy would lead to the deaths of at least 100,000 Irish (of a population of perhaps 1.2 million). How many Americans have any sort of clear idea of how many Iraqis and Afghanis died in our recent wars? In that light, our unthinking, unreflective obsession with the obvious cultural differences between American and Arab/Muslim cultures is deeply disturbing — this attitude makes it just too easy to dehumanise. How many times, following the fall of Kabul, did American periodicals and news television programs tout women’s liberation as a justification for the invasion?