Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance

Fadwa El Guindi has done a great service to readers interested in veiling and its social significance and symbolic meaning cross-culturally. She provides students of Islamic societies in particular with an informative and incisive book that draws on a variety of sources and approaches. These include dress literature, Islamic textual sources, ethnographic studies in Egypt, the Sudan, and Jordan, etymology, Egyptian social history; and perhaps most important, her own work in contemporary Egypt, particularly on the Islamic movement over the last two decades. She is a gifted cultural anthropologist who has used her literacy in Islamic textual sources and her ethnographic skills to yield insights on the meaning of veiling as part of a general pattern of dress and public demeanor. Her book includes illuminating chapters on "Ideological Roots to Ethnocentrism," "The Anthropology of Dress," "The Veil in Social Space," "The Veil Becomes a Movement," "Contexts of Resistance," and "Veiling and Feminism. " One of its important messages is that veiling, particularly in the Arab Middle East, is not a reference to shame and oppression of women, but rather to privacy in the public arena, the identity of the group, and rank, respectability, and power. A related message is that veiling must be placed in its social context and seen in relation to men's behavior and dress. Indeed, she points out that the primary Islamic textual sources (Quran and Traditions of the Prophet or hadith) either make more references to the proper dress of men than women or introduce verses regarding women's proper behavior/dress with verses regarding men's proper behavior/dress. El Guindi's point is that veiling must be viewed in its historical, sociocultural, and situational/spatial context in order to ascertain its meaning and significance. In addressing the social/situational/spatial context of dress (Ch. 6), she distinguishes the various items of women's dress and the different degrees of modest behavior they provide-covering head and hair vs. covering the body vs. covering the face. Each degree of covering symbolizes a different degree of modesty and religiosity. But El Guindi also emphasizes the dynamic flexibility of meaning that is allowed and realized by women as "they pull down to cover and pull up to uncover" (p. 97), depending on changing social situations. For instance, the modesty code is relaxed when women are in the presence of their mahram (male kin bound by the incest taboo). In addition, different cultures emphasize systematic changes of different kinds by changes of modest dress. Veiling in North Indian villages symbolically separates the wife from her own kin group and absorbs her into her husband's group; whereas veiling among the Rashayda tribe of the Sudan indicates the particular life-cycle stage the woman has reached. El Guindi supplements this social, spatial analysis with etymological and textual analysis. She points out that the Quranic denotations and connotations of the term libas (dress--cover, haven, sanctuary, shelter, morality-are quite different than the denotations and connotations of the term hijab (woman's dress, a term little used in the Quran but popularized by the Islamic movement of the 1980s and 1990s)-meaning sacred, separation, partition, resistance. She argues (Ch. 9) that Quranic verses on modesty address both men and women, do not demand face-veiling, focus mainly on the special status of the Prophet's wives, and do not refer to sexuality or sexual shame, but rather to sacred divide, sanctuary, reserve, and privacy. …