Women’s Issues

evealing Reveiling: lslamist Gender Ideology in Contemporary Egypt

Sherifa Zuhur

Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. 207 pages, photos. SUNY Series in Middle East Studies. LC 91-3408, ISBN 0-7914-0927-9 $47.50 hardcover. ISBN 0-7914-0928-7 $15.95 paperback.

Review by Joel Gordon, Ph.D. Franklin and Marshall College

T h e woman pictured on the cover of Revealing RmeiZing remains enigmatic, two decades after she became a familiar sight in Egypt. She sits in a university class. A white head scarf covers her hair, save some around the ears and forehead, and is gathered at the neck. With a bare hand, she gestures, accenting a statement. Her eyes are alert, her look thoughtful. She embodies what the author calls the “new Islamic woman,” or at least one manifestation of her many faces and guises.

the facade of the ”veil” (higab) in Egypt, the most studied society in which the so-called return to Islamic dress has been largely a voluntary phenomenon. The women Zuhur studies act not in conformity with state decree, but of their own volition, and often in dissent against state policy and state-sponsored images of propriety. Zuhur seeks to understand not only why ”veiled” women (muhuggabat) have chosen to wear higab, but how they view

Sherifa Zuhur’s is one of the latest attempts to peer beyond

themselves in relation to their history, as Muslim and modern Egyptian women. As she states early on, a "new image, or role model, for contemporary Egyptian Muslim women has arisen from the conjuncture of history and sociopolitical pressures" (p. 1). Her ambitious goal is to sort this out through the eyes of a small group of women whom she interviewed, many of whom are muhaggabat.

In so doing she takes a more positive approach than that of John Williams, whose article, based on discussions with his students at the American University in Cairo over a decade ago, remains one of the soundest pieces on the subject, or that of Arlene Macleod, author of a recent, insightful study of lower-middle-class Cairo women. More positive in that both these authors highlight veiling as a creative, yet ultimately defensive, response, a strategy for dealing with a society in which changing gender roles are quickly outpacing social mores. Thus women, to use Macleod's terminology, engage in "accommodating protest," wearing higab as a statement of respectability even as they seek educational opportunities and broaden their participation in the work force.

Zuhur does not negate such propositions. Nor does she negate other theories that postulate veiling as a strategy to cloak social status (although here she very correctly notes that no outfit can cover up family name). Rather, she sees veiling as a construction of a positive self-identity, that of a "virtuous woman'' whose image "centers on the piety, modesty, and chastity of its receptors" (p. 4). This self-proclaimed virtue may carry with it a degree of holier-than-thou arrogance, as it may be utilized to bolster self-image through sisterhood. Nonetheless, those muhaggabat with whom Zuhur discussed the issue spoke in positive terms of recapturing an abandoned code of morality and rediscovering a sense of femininity which the previous generations had lost. To this end they seek to emulate archetypical historical women beginning with Eve and culminating in the women of the early Islamic community.

These are, of course, archetypes whose lives are understood and interpreted in different ways. Zuhur does not limit herself to muhaggabat. In some ways her most intriguing chapter is that in which she lets her "unveiled women" reply. She writes judiciously; she refuses to accept simple dichotomies between veiled/ pious and unveiled/ irreligious women, between traditionalists and feminists, or between foes and keepers of the status quo. Her veiled women, while invoking tradition, are creating new images and opportunities for women, and her unveiled respondents are "careful to stress

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Women’s Issues

women’s primary importance as wives and mothers,” (p. 4) and often prove equally dissatisfied with their society. The two groups differ in their prescriptions for its remedy, and, more fundamentally, in their self image as ”believers who are women” or ”women who believe” @. 124). Interestingly, the unveiled women tend to understand their veiled counterparts as adopting the types of negative strategies Zuhur tries to get beyond.

Zuhur is clearly working through some interesting ideas. Ultimately, her study proves less satisfying than it promises. In part the problem is over-ambition. Rather than focusing on her informants‘ perceptions, Zuhur attempts a synthesis of secondary literature on gender issues relating to Muslim women, an analysis of Islamist gender ideology as propounded by leading thinkers, and a social history of Egyptian women. In separate chapters each might have proven valuable; instead they tend to overlap each other, with the ultimate result of muffling her informants’ original voices.

This is most problematic in the chapter on archetypes of Muslim women (chapter 3). Here the predominant focus is on intellectual and academic interpretations of key historical figures’ rather than on how these archetypes are received and understood by average women. Essays on Hawwa (Eve), Khadijah, and Aishah are dominated by Islamist ideologues and Islamic scholars, many of them non-Egyptian and non-Muslim. A cursory listing of well- known women, Egyptian or Egypt-related, follows, some more important as intercessors for practitioners of folk religion (Sayyida Zaynab), others hardly relevant to virtuous womanhood (Shagarat al-Durr)! The reader is left tantalized as to what Zuhur’s respondents really make of feminist pioneers Huda Sharawi and Doria Shafik, or even what they know of female Islamist pioneers like Zaynab al-Ghazali. A similar overemphasis on Islamist and academic arguments dilutes the chapter on the ”Construction of the Virtuous Woman’’ (chapter 5), which should have been the keystone to the book.

doing so she hopes to test common hypotheses that posit veiling as a response, particularly of young, lower-middle-class women, to frustrated ambition. To say that some older women of better means have also adopted higab is not to say anything novel. Indeed, her sense, based on an admittedly small informant pool, is that the common wisdom is largely correct. Younger, lower-middle-class women, she finds, are more ”receptive”-she prefers this to ‘‘susceptible‘‘-to Islamist rhetoric, but ”because they lack the

Zuhur’s other ambition is to cut across class and age lines. In

avenues for self-definition and self-expression that some of the older women possess” (p. 108). So, despite her admonitions, we come full circle, with the exception of a sub-group of older pious women who are, undeniably, quite interesting. Yet, what we have lost is the opportunity to learn something more insightful about this or any particular group, class or age based, of women.

Zuhur’s women never really come to life. Their attitudes are summarized; at times we are told how they feel about a given social issue, point of theology, or historical event. But their voices are too rarely heard, and this is unfortunate given the emphasis on identity construction. We learn little of their lives, dreams, aspirations, or personal and political grievances. Intriguing observations are often dangled and dropped. For example, Zuhur notes that her younger respondents, most of whom wear higab, take a much more simplistic view of piety and religious duty than the elder, mostly unveiled women. Is this a matter of age or ideological grounding? The protest by unveiled women that they, too, embody ethical and family values rings particularly poignant. A statement that “the higab has acquired too much symbolic value to be negotiated (p. 107) is not explicated.

stress the flexibility of the oppositionist Islamist message and its resulting strength. Indeed, Zuhur points to the variety of modes of higab, ranging from the niqab, which covers all but the eyes, to “rather daring styles,” bright colored head scarves (I note that the scarf of choice last spring in Cairo was an olive-green leopard pattern), often worn with designer clothes and makeup. She also recognizes women for whom the choice to veil was not entirely individual, but encouraged or imposed by husbands or brothers, as well as those who won over begrudging parents or spouses. The woman pictured on the book’s cover thus fits somewhere in the middle of a broad spectrum. Generally speaking, she rejects ”the guiding principles of state policy regarding women over the past thirty-five years“ (although she may not know the history of her forbears’ struggles or achievements), as well as ”the principles of secularism and Western models and ideals in general” (p. 108). Yet her ideology, if she can be said to have one, is flexible, somewhat ambivalent, and not always in keeping with Islamist orthodoxy. Revealing Rweiling provides a framework to learn more. But in the end the virtuous woman remains enigmatic, veiled. Perhaps this is how she would have it.

This latter statement seems to contradict earlier assertions that

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Women‘s Issues

References

Macleod, Arlene Elowe. Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Williams, John A. ‘Veiling in Egypt as a Political and Social Phenomenon.” In Islam and Development, edited by John Esposito. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1980.

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