Translation of Mohamed Kacimi article: Veil or Headscarf, an
ancient alienation
Posted on December 10, 2003 at 02:16 in Libération: Voile, une aliénation
antique.
When we know the little attention or concessions granted by the left and
rightwing political class to the Muslim community in France, we are surprised by its
sensitivity, its thoughtfulness and its concern of rhetoric in this case of the
veil. Convinced, for my part, one cannot speak of respect for the freedom of
religion or belief when it comes to imposing a sign of debasement to girls and
women in public spaces, I went by curiosity, to meet teachers and activists in
several cities in France.
Every time I asked, they were all convinced of the relevance and urgency of a
law, but told me on a confidential tone
"Yes, we know, but we cannot. You know, the poor ... "
Everyone will understand that by "poor " they understand that this
community was first dragged through the mud during the colonial period, and
then short changed since the famous Marche des Beurs (beurs = French nationals
of North African descent). However, conceding those people the veil, this
instrument of alienation, will not be a compensation.
Whence this story of the veil? An ancient Semitic belief was considering the
hair as a reflection of the pubic hair ! This belief was so prevalent in
Eastern countries, especially in Mesopotamia,
it ended up having the force of law. This way, the veil became mandatory in the
twelfth century BC by the king of Assyria,
Tiglath Phalazar 1: "Married women will not have their heads uncovered.
Prostitutes will not be veiled." It was seventeen centuries before
Muhammad and this was in Assyria, today's Iraq.
In the Hebrew Bible, there is no trace of this custom, but the Jewish tradition
has long held that a woman must cover their hair before men as a sign of
modesty. It is not until the advent of Christianity that the veil became a
theological obligation prior to the
relationship between the woman and God. It was St. Paul who first imposed the veil on women,
putting forward strictly religious arguments. In the Epistle to the
Corinthians, he writes: "Every woman who prays or speaks under the
inspiration of God without a veil on her head, commits the same offense, as if
her head was shaved. So if a woman does not wear a veil , she should shave her
head, or rather put a veil, since it is a mistake for a woman to have her hair
shorn or shaved." And further, "...Man, he should not cover his head;
he is the image and the glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For it is
not the man who was pulled from the woman, but woman from man , and man was not
created for woman, but woman for man. That's why women should cover her head as
a mark of servitude to the man". The Church will use it against women, to consider
them as inferior creatures by nature and by law. Thus we can notice that initially
the veil is used as an instrument of segregation that made women inferior
beings, not only towards the man but also towards God. It is interesting to
note that this passage from Corinthians is taken today by most Islamist websites
which glorify the headscarf.
Islam was born seven centuries later. The Koran dedicates the veil these
passages : " ..... and tell the believing women to lower their gaze and
guard their modesty and not display their ornaments except what appears thereof
and to draw the fabric material of their veil on their chests . " Holy
Qur'an (24:31) . Finally in Sura 33 Al- Ahzab ( the Confederates ) , in verse
59, it says: "Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and to wifes of the
believers to draw around them large piece of fabric, they will be quickly
recognized and not molested " Qur'an (33: 59).
Without being too pointillist like the Orthodox, I'll point out that nowhere in
these Suras, it is explicitly mentioned veil (hijab ) covering the face, hiding
the hair and even less the whole body. In the first Sura, the Qur'an simply
calls the believers to cover their breasts. The very serious Encyclopaedia of
Islam (LEYDE Editions ) provides this explanation: "In pre-Islamic Arabia, a tribal custom was that during battles, women
rise above the dunes and show their breasts to their warrior husbands to excite
their fighting spirit and keep them coming back alive to enjoy these charms."
The verse in question would have inspired the Prophet to establish a new moral
order among the tribes. Regarding the second verse, it has been the object of
lectures and controversies, and one of the most interesting being that of a
great imam during the golden age of Baghdad in the ninth century. He made this original
reading " the Lord has recommended the veil only to the wives of the
Prophet, any Muslim woman who would wear the veil would be wrongly taken for
the Prophet's wife and therefore would be sentenced to 80 whip lashes." From
then on, the veil became the hallmark of rich urban ladies, but remained
unknown in rural areas where men didn't want their women veiled, impeding them
in their heavy works.
This is the 1979 Iranian Revolution which led to generalize the wearing of veil.
The hijab, innovation straight out of Islamist tailors' head, supplanted in the
Maghreb the traditional Haïk, a square of
white cloth. Of course, these are the signs of an Arabo-Muslim society in
crisis, without a project, without prospects, subject to totalitarian regimes
and whose only breathing space of utopia is religion. Pierre Bourdieu explained
that in colonial Algeria,
the colonized man reflected on the woman all the violence he had suffered in
the hands of the colonizer. Now the Muslim man throws back at the woman all the
chaos of the planetary crisis he is suffering.
In these countries without freedom , Islam works as an eschatology. It has
become a kind of propaedeutic of death. It erases all the asperities of life and
only dangles the pleasures of "its vast paradise."
Here is also the question of the place of Islam in the Other . Unlike Judaism,
which was forged in exile, or Christianity which invented itself during the
persecutions, Islam came to the world as a state religion and a religion of
conquest. It was not often a minority and the place it has given to other
religions was not an example of tolerance. So we have to end up this parity of religious
symbols. In Rome or Jerusalem, those who have forgotten their cross or Star of
David are not lapidated, however, from Tehran to Khartoum, from Kabul to Casablanca
every day women are raped, are sprayed with vitriol, killed, flogged, or
dismissed because they have not covered their face and body. The hijab is the "yellow
star" of Muslim women, and any Muslim woman is a Jewish fundamentalist
that every man dreams to imprison five times a day. The hijab is the virtual
deletion and abolition of the woman. All fundamentalist writings argue, "
the veil is mandatory because it should hide the woman's aoura." That is
to say that her whole body is perceived as a shameful part. The Hijab fills up the
function assigned by Paul two thousand years ago; thus notifying to the woman
in public that she is an inferior being, good enough to be shorn and muzzled.
Any pubescent girl is seen as a shameful part. From age 8 on, she is educated
to perceive herself as a potential sexual object to be hidden from the lustful
eyes of the crowd. Behind every veil , there are three thousand years of hatred
towards the woman watching us. Tolerate the veil, is to deliver a generation of
girls bound and gagged in the hands of brothers and fathers who are eager to
impose this outfit of infamy.
Finally, what will we
do tomorrow, we citizens of Muslim background who fled our country because of religious
dictatorship, of lack of democracy, we who have chosen France to find
refuge, and to be become our country?
What will we do when our daughters at public school will be called whores
and be dragged in basement to be gang rapped because they don't wear the
Hijab? And our boys will called impious
for not having observed in school canteens ? Not giving up in the matter of
veil is doing a great service to Islam; it's teaching Islam as not the only
religion but one of the others and that France
or Europe are not lands of conquest but
territories of sharing.
We clearly have in the religious texts a hatred of women;
the idea that man is the image of the monotheistic god and the woman is the
image of nothing, she is literally without a soul, a thing, an object to hide,
diabolical and evil that must be muzzled, beaten and treated as subhuman
In the Qur'an, for having read it, there is actually not a single sura about
wearing a veil on the hair but a veil to put on attires, on the chest and on private
parts, but there again, those racists , full of hatred have decided to
stigmatize, to destroy the woman, turning her into a sub-being.
The woman is still in the 21st Century, the only person subjected to a slavery
code. She belongs to the family, specifically to the man, she is a kind of
object that can be coupled, which can be killed, she is forbidden to have a
free sexual life, the message is clear your body belongs to us, as it was done
with the slaves in the Antiquity !
And in the early 21st century, we see people, mainly from the leftwing, defend
this infamy in the name of democracy, it is an abomination, it is Kafkaesque,
Orwellian to see that we use the democracy, which principles is equal rights
between men and women, to impose an ideology which proclaimed dogma is
inequality between men and women and a wild desire to make women a thing, to
turn her into a non-existent thing, formless, lifeless.
