Lecture on Veiling

Lecture on Veiling Practices, Islamic Feminism, and Responses to Western Colonialism

There are four major discourses on this topic:

1. Feminist discourses: grounded in the framework of Islamic modernism inspired by Muhammad Abduh.
• IJTIHAD: independent inquiry into the sources of religion.    First, started by upper-class, educated men.  The debate broadens as women and the lower middle class enter into it.
• Feminist writing becomes more mainstream as they reach a wider audience through the press.
• Interestingly, early feminists actually opposed the unveiling of the face that male feminists advocated. For women, veiling was a practical matter; for men a matter of ideological and symbolic value.   
2. Liberal Nationalist discourses: primarily spearheaded by upper-class men who supported feminism.
• Men from more modest middle-class origins were antagonistic towards women’s emancipation which they saw as emanating from foreign Western influence.
• Political indepence top priority; women’s rights secondary.   Initially, male feminism was more radical than women’s; later, women’s feminism became more radicalized.
3. Islamist discourses:   A conservative popular Islamic movement grew up in the late 1920s (1928) with the formation of an Islamist party called the Muslim Brothers.
• The large majority of supporters were drawn from the middle and lower middle class.  They had a strong nationalist platform: opposed British military presence and economic imperialism (p. 209).   As Badran points out, during the 1919 revolution, feminists and nationalists across class differences could come together.   However, after the revolution, these class differences came to matter quite a bit.  The Egyptian Feminist (EFU) union came to be regarded as pro-Western because they used primarily French; Westernized men not regarded with as much suspicion.  Raised questions of cultural authenticity.
• THEREFORE, we have Islamist women like Zainab al-Ghazali who marked her secession from the EFU and founded the Muslim Women’s Society and saying that EFU was secular, ergo Western, and that Islamist women were consciously basing their feminism on the Shar`ia.
• Islamist men also went on the offensive, equating colonialism with the pernicious effects of feminism.
4. Statist discourses:  The state had a dim view of feminism in general, whether Islamist- or EFU-sponsored, because of the political criticism inherent in these discourses.
• Non-radical, non-threatening feminism was allowed to flourish that did not ask for drastic social reform, when feminism coincided with the state agenda.  Therefore, Zainab al-Ghazali and Nawal al-Sa`dawi considered threatening and was imprisoned but Bint al-Shati was lionized by the state because of her non-militant stance. State supported, however, educational and employment policies for women.  In 1956, women given the right to vote in Egypt.  Women’s literacy rate increased; women university graduates increased, growth of a class of professional women.