Spirit21

Today I’ve been blogging at Faith Central, at the Times Online. Guess what, the face-veil is in the news (again!). Here are my thoughts on the trend sweeping Europe:

Bess (of Faith Central) writes: Faith Central welcomes back Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, blogging today on the topical issue of new laws in Belgium and France regarding the Burka.

Shelina writes:

No matter how itsy-bitsy the face-veil might be in physical size, it has the ability to drive political and emotional sentiment at a national level.

Recently Belgium became the first European country to vote for a full ban on the face-veil in public, and the law could come into force by July. The 400-odd women out of Belgium’s 280,000 Muslim population who wear the face-veil could face fines of £110.

A woman in Italy was recently subjected to a 430-euro fine for wearing a face-veil on the way to a mosque. And the French, in a show of one upmanship, are to introduce sanctions that would fine husbands who force their wives to wear the veil up to 15,000 euros and send them to jail for up to a year.

France is particularly worried as  it has such a huge immigrant population that it simply doesn’t know how to handle. Ghetto-ised  in suburbs, without jobs, education or prospects, the five million or so immigrants who hail mainly from North Africa and identify themselves as Muslims are increasingly agitated.

The wider French population has been encouraged to see them as problematic, and instead of identifying the lack of policy to resolve these issues as the cause of  riots, are instead jumping on their “Muslim” character as the problem. 

The face-veil is, of course, perceived as the symbol par excellence of Islam. This was particularly apparent over the weekend when two passers-by pulled the veil off a Muslim woman  in a shopping centre in France, telling her “Go back to your own country.” The violent nature of the attack hardly flies the flag for ‘enlightenment’ values, and the remark reflects a worrying racist undertone.

So far Britain has taken a different stance – with politicians arguing for women’s choice to dress as they please. Even Jack Straw – who stated in 2006 that he felt uncomfortable when he spoke with his veiled constituents – has stated that he believes it is still up to women to decide for themselves.

Just what has made continental Europe veer in such a different direction to the UK?

France would argue that it is the entrenchment of secular principles in their constitution and its historic trailblazing of human rights. But today’s human rights lawyers have been telling Sarkozy that such legislation would be contested on those grounds.

So maybe the reason for Europe’s stance is more about “defending our values” from overrunning hordes bent on Islamisation? Certainly that was the sentiment behind Switzerland’s vote to ban minarets. It wasn’t about the size and shape of the minarets given the number of physically similar church spires that dot the Swiss landscape. With  provocative posters that depicted minarets as missiles, it was clearly about fear-mongering. Unsurprisingly the posters featured images of  a woman in a face-veil – linking the idea back to the concept that face-veils are a threat to Europe.
Is it about security? Well most Muslim women who veil have no objection to being cleared through security, in fact they most likely would support such security checks.

Is this about racism? The difficult question that no-one dares to ask is whether in this vitriolic response to a group who looks a little different continental Europe is reverting to type? Dare anyone mention the scapegoating that took place in Europe in the 1930s?

Maybe it is simply a symptom of insecurity within Europe about its identity. Given recent troubles in Greece, Spain and Portugal, Europe’s power on the world stage is looking shaky. Sometimes it’s easier to know what you are in opposition to  – the ‘other’ -  rather than having the self-knowledge and conviction to stand for what you actually believe in.

Europe has always taken upon itself the burden to “liberate” Muslim women, blind to the suffering of its own women. For Muslim women who choose to veil, being forced to strip off and pay a fine hardly seems any kind of liberation. For those who are in fact forced to cover, such legislation will only confine them to their homes, rather than allow them to talk to their peers and neighbours, get educated and assert themselves. It’s not just Muslim women who face oppression and domestic problems. In France for example, 40,000 women a year suffer domestic violence at the hands of their partners.

When arguing in favour or a ban on the face-veil, Europeans often resort to what I call the “reciprocity” argument saying in effect “if women are forced to veil in countries in the Muslim world like in Saudi Arabia, then why can’t they be forced not to veil in Europe?” I wonder  do we really want to look to oppressive non-democratic regimes for guidance on freedom?

Of course, while the politics of the veil hints at  wider tensions between Europe and the Muslim world perhaps this is more to do with faith than politics. Religion has been getting a hard time recently, being pilloried and driven out of public consciousness as no longer important in our national life. Islam is painted – wrongly in my opinion, as it shares an Abrahamic heritage with Christianity – as different and alien. So when it comes to rejecting faith, rejecting Islam is the most symbolic way of expressing this rejection. And when the face-veil is seen as the most potent reference to Islam, it’s no surprise that Europe’s many insecurities and tensions become focused on a seemingly innocuous bit of fabric.

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This article was published at Faith Central at the Times Online

Bess Twiston-Davies writes: Melanie Reid, our columnist, is merely one of many commentators who has asked why Britain’s soldiers are apparently fighting for the right of Afghan men to mistreat their wives, in the wake of the new so -called “Marital Rape” Law (although the original clause permitting men to withold food from wives who refuse sex was eventually removed). Here Faith’s Central’s Muslim guest blogger, Shelina Janmohamed, author of Love in a Headscarf and the blog Spirit21 looks at the disturbing, related issue of the lack of legal protection for many Muslim women who marry in Britain

Shelina writes: One of the reasons Britain gives for its military intervention in Afghanistan is the liberation of Muslim woman from oppression.

But what if anything has really changed for them in the 8 years in which the UK and US have been present in the country? In fact, with laws like the recent legislation dubbed the “marital rape law” where a husband can supposedly starve his wife if she does not have sex with him, it’s hard to see that Muslim women are indeed being ’saved’.

Let’s look at the example of veiling where women are forced to wear the Afghan-style burqa. This is utterly wrong as it is a woman’s choice as to how she should dress. Some in Afghanistan, however, who would argue that it is a more traditional society, where women being uncovered is ‘alien’ to the ‘culture’. This really is about culture not religion because this is absent in the majority of Muslim countries bar a few exceptions.

Back in Britain, some Muslim women do face pressure to veil, but on the whole veiled Muslim women are exercising their own freedom of choice. This can be seen from the fact they tend to be younger, well-educated, British-born women, often decked out in the latest fashions. These women are exercising the same freedom of choice that Britain says it is fighting to give Afghan women.

Now let’s look at marriage. Married Afghan women have little protection from mistreatment and abuse. The scale of magnitude in Afghanistan is clearly different to the UK, but British Muslim women can suffer from lack of protection by the law in Britain too. If we care about Muslim women’s rights in Afghanistan, we must demonstrate clearly that we care about them here as well.

I’m referring to the ‘nikah’, the Islamic wedding ceremony, which is not recognised under British law as a legal marriage. For this, the bride and groom must undertake a further civil marriage ceremony. A Church of England marriage by comparison is automatically registered as a legally recognised marriage. For Muslims, as with many of other religions, it is the religious ceremony that is paramount, and once this is conducted the couple are considered married. Rightly or wrongly, the civil marriage is often not carried out.

If the marriage doesn’t work out, or the husband leaves the wife, the wife is still married but has no legal protection under British law. Further, if the husband proves unscrupulous, he can marry another wife legally under British law without committing bigamy. Recognising the nikah as a valid British marriage with all the parameters of the civil marriage is the first step to solving this problem. Some mosques do insist that the civil marriage certificate is proffered before they will conduct the nikah, but these are too few. Tying the nikah into civil marriage has nothing to do with ‘Islamifying’ Britain, but is rather a small development which will offer much needed British legal protection to Muslim women in marriage.

Of course the Muslim community – mosques and Imams – who have conducted the marriage ceremony should be held responsible should a marriage break down, but this doesn’t always happen. Ensuring that mosques and Imams are abiding by procedures which give both bride and groom their full rights is the next step, and for that we need to talk about those so called ’shariah courts.’ In fact, a better description would be ‘Islamic advisory panel’. At the moment they consist of volunteers with various levels of Islamic training, probably few social or counselling skills and even less legal training under British law. This is hardly surprising, since they state quite openly that their remit is to offer Islamic advice. Often faced with marital disputes Muslim women prefer to go to these panels because their faith is important to them and they want an Islamic resolution to their problems. Also, they live as part of a family and community, and any resolution agreed with such a panel is more likely to stick with the people amongst which they live.

By recognising the nikah as legally valid, these subsequent links in the chain will be forced to deal with such issues with higher standards and in line with legal norms, thereby respecting the religious wishes of the Muslim woman, and at the same time affording her full protection in the law. A standard of behaviour and guidance amongst mosques and Imams becomes normalised over time, and the woman becomes automatically protected.

If we are busy fighting in Afghanistan for legal protections to be put in place for Muslim women, then we need to do the same for Muslim women here. The issues are different in magnitude but are still about both choice and protection. Not only will implementing such laws and protection in Britain squash accusations that ’saving’ Muslim women is just a pretext for war, not only will it actually protect Muslim women, but more importantly it will also demonstrate that in word as well as in practice we are genuine in our intentions and actions.

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Yesterday the French president said “The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic.”

This follows the establishment of a parliamentary commission to investigate whether the wearing of the burqa should be banned in public.

Following his speech, he is due to meet the Emir of Qatar – I wonder if he will suggest to him that women there should also remove their veils? If his view is that it is wrong in France as it “reduces them to servitude and undermines their dignity” then he ought to make the same point to the Emir about women in Qatar.

Except he won’t. His speech yesterday was held to the French parliament – a right he put into the constitution for himself last year. This is the first time that such a speech has been held in over a century. Following in the footsteps of his imperial predecessor at yesterday’s speech, it seems that in a hundred years, little has changed in Mr Sarkozy’s mind about imposing his version of liberal values.

Let’s remember what Obama said in Cairo, ‘it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practising religion as they see fit – for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.’

In the shadow of the sumptuous Versailles Palace, Sarkozy’s comments seem little other than cheap shots at winning political points, without really addressing the heart of the issue. How can a politician determine what a woman should wear? If she is wearing it out of choice – as some women do – not that I necessarily agree with them – then refusing a women’s right to choose what to wear is a form of oppression that women have long fought against.

If she is being forced to wear it – and this of course does happen – then what that woman needs is not a patronising president, but real tools to help her take control of her life – education and economics.

Besides, those women who wear burqa’s are a tiny minority of Muslim women – why single those who are forced to wear it as sufferers of domestic oppression, when so many millions of women face domestic violence? A more holistic approach would reap greater benefits for women in both quality and quantity. It seems from his words that he cares more about his own popularity, then making changes for burqa-wearing women.

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[This article was published in the March issue of EMEL Magazine]

I’d like you to try an experiment that I have conducted regularly for the last year: Google the search term “Muslim women”, click on “images” and then have a look at the pictures that are returned to you by the search. The first time I did this, I was shocked, very shocked, but not surprised.

You’ll find the first several pages are populated almost entirely by imagery of women in black niqabs, black burqas or black trailing cloaks. The others are unnerving pseudo-pornographic images with translucent veils that are best left un-described in a family magazine. The sad fact is that this result has changed very little over the time that I have been observing the phenomenon.

Google’s mission statement is ‘to organise the world’ using algorithms that return the results to us that we were looking for. In any search we usually get a result that matches well what we were looking for, which is why Google has become an institution in our lives. When we are searching for information about Muslim women, the intelligent technology throws back these sombre anonymous uni-dimensional images assuming they are what we were referring to by ‘Muslim women’. Worse still, perhaps that is all the imagery and information that it can find. If it is the former we can blame lazy stereotyping. If it is the latter, then it is we who are to blame by not providing alternative, compelling and more widely spread diversity on who and what Muslim women are.

Conduct a similar experiment on Amazon or in your local high street bookshop. The same images abound of books with subtitles like: “A heart-rending story of love and oppression”, “sold” “burned alive” “honour killing”. Even those books that tell of courage, struggle and freedom use this lazy visual shorthand of anonymous women’s faces to adorn their books, despite the fact that the writers and protagonists themselves have gone to great lengths to make their names, ideas and voices heard.

The stories that are told in our public discourse about Muslim women are depressingly predictable. Most common is the Oppressed, as we’ve seen above. Some of these women truly have horrific stories, and it is absolutely right that they are at the forefront of our consciousness, and that we are working constantly to eradicate the attitudes and actions that give rise to these terrible experiences. However, these same images are used ignorantly as shorthand for the ‘barbaric’ and ‘mediaeval’ views that Islam is said to hold about women.

Then we have stories from the Liberated, who escaped from the Oppression, and have ‘freed’ themselves, and at one extreme of the scale have ‘enlightened’ themselves and even rejected Islam utterly, and yet peculiarly still continue to define themselves in relation to it.

And somewhere in between are the soft sensual tales from the ‘hidden world’ of Muslim women, the Exotic, which Eastern doe-eyed beauties inhabit and where secrets of desire, womanliness and oriental allure reside. This is a world of voyeuristic otherness.

In order to register in the public consciousness, Muslim women must fit themselves into one of these categories. But they don’t. And they don’t want to.

The challenge is that Muslims too have ideas about how and what Muslim women should be. They offer Muslim women a choice between hijab-religious or non-hijab-irreligious, making sweeping assumptions about a woman’s moral and religious character based on what she wears. But this is a false dichotomy that is saturated with an irony that most Muslims are not even aware of: that the recommendations on modest dress in Islam are specifically in order to avoid defining people by what they wear, and yet we use religious clothing as a way to pigeon-hole women.

Whether Muslim or otherwise, the paradigms within which we understand Muslim women have been limited to these caricatured notions. In doing this, we ourselves have removed the freedom from Muslim women to express their own voices in a way which allows them to represent themselves as they wish to be represented.

We need to create a change in the perceptions about Muslim women, their rights and the way that they are treated. In order to do so we need first of all to create in our public discourse the possibility of different ways of being.

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We are nearing the end of the year, and it is the traditional time to look back and see how we fared over the last twelve months. In particular, it’s been a year since I won Best Blog and Best Female Blog at the Brass Crescent Awards. Much to my excitement I’ve been nominated again. It’s not the only recognition the blog has received. I won Best Non-Fiction Writer at the glamorous Muslim Writers Awards, and was named an ‘influential blog’ by the BBC.

Shari’ah was big news this year. The Archbishop of Canterbury made some comments about Shari’ah courts which created a national controversy, and which reverberated round the world. I tried to get underneath the dense text with a detailed analysis of his speech. I mentioned a few other words too to highlight that we need to have a conversation about real meaning, not just tabloid screaming. (I used words like Shariah, fatwa, hijab, apostasy, niqab, cousin-marriage, Imam, Muslim women. I think some readers had anxiety attacks after that.) Separately, the Lord Chief Justice re-ignited the debate started by the Archbishop, and I commented that we had a significant problem with the S-Word.

I spent a lot of time writing about Muslim women, and declared that it was Time for a Womelution. It is time for things to change, and I kept up the pace demanding “Let Muslim Women Speak” both here at Spirit21 and at the Guardian. It seems that everyone out there is happy to tell Muslim women what they should think and say, but won’t let them say it for themselves. It wasn’t the only thing that made me cross. I was riled by the book Jewel of Medina, written by an American author about Ai’shah the wife of the Prophet. It wasn’t about blasphemy or censorship that the author annoyed me, but rather at her delivery of a sex-obsessed Mills and Boon frippery, about a woman and a period of history that was crying out for a high calibre text. What a wasted opportunity. I read the book and wrote a review for the BBC. It was painful. Watch paint dry, I advised readers, it is more fascinating than the book.

I was still fascinated by hijab, niqab and modesty and wrote several articles trying to understand the different perceptions of modesty and hijab. Modesty is not a black and white issue got some interesting feedback – some people told me in person that it was the best piece I’ve ever written, others said they didn’t get it at all. I also asked, whose body is it anyway, and wondered why it is considered inflammatory by some for a women to cover her hair or face. I made reference in the former article to the rise of the muhajababe, the fabulously stylish and sometimes skimpily clad be-headscarfed Muslim woman, and posted a cartoon asking, what is the meaning of hijab, and wrote a piece considering, can you dress provocatively and be religious? It should all be based around a woman choosing her clothing for herself, but is it really a free choice, and what exactly is she choosing?

The amazing Muslim women who often are considered oppressed and forgotten inspired me to create The Magic Muslims, ordinary Muslims with Extraordinary superpowers, foremost amongst them being SuperJabi. They also included MagicMullah, HipHopHalalMan and WonderBibi. Watch out for them, there will be more in the coming year!

I was also published in the book Conversations on Religion, alongside other high profile dignitaries in the field of faith (or absence of) such as Richard Dawkins, the Chief Rabbi, AC Grayling and the Archbishop.

On the subject of conversations, I had some amazing dialogues with people in Indonesia and Turkey, where I spent a good amount of time this year. Indonesia prompted me to think of sun, smiles and spirituality, whilst in Turkey I found myself asking, what does a Muslim country look like? Hopefully I made some fans whilst out there too…

My comments about Valentine’s Day being banned generated some interest as i was asking if it was the day or love that was being prohibited; just as exciting was an interview with the charming and sparky Riazat Butt for the Guardian about hajj. They also enjoyed posting a piece exploring our modern ideas about what kind of hero, messiah or mehdi, we are looking for these days. Do we really need one?

Most controversial were two pieces related to what was happening on the political scene. I had people respond to them with enormous prickliness (or excitement, depending) even months later in person, so they’ve hit a chord! I tried to separate out the political agendas that have confused the need for social cohesion with preventing violent extremism, and seems to see Muslims only through the prism of (potential) terrorism. Later in the year the political insinuations that Muslims were not wanted in politics appeared to grow stronger, and I wrote with much passion that it seems that we Muslims were being told that “The only ‘proper’ Muslim is a non-political one.” The article proliferated wildly and despite a certain level of anonymity as a writer, i had people ‘in person’ searching me out to comment on it.

Phew! What a year! And inshallah, 2009 is going to be even more exciting – there are already some fabulous things in the works – watch this space!

(p.s. vote for Spirit21 Best Blog and Best Female blog at the Brass Crescent Awards to show your support!)

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Modest dress is a key component of Islam, but it’s important to retain personality and aesthetics in the way we dress

This week I tried out the most extreme black cloak to make it into my wardrobe. A piece of elastic attached it to the top of my head, and then the single piece of long fabric hung snugly over my hair, sweeping over my shoulders and down past my feet. The final flourish was for me to hold together the two edges under my chin. Two eyes, a nose and a squashed mouth peeked through the gap under the black sheet. My husband peered into the bedroom, and nearly dropped his mug of tea.

“You look like a black blob,” he said, horrified. “Where have you gone?” He poked underneath the black cloth like a serious Sherlock Holmes. Despite feeling uncomfortable about the cloak, no man was going to tell me how to observe modest dress. “Don’t you want me to hide my figure so I’m not attracting attention?” I barked at him. He froze, rabbit in headlights, and then looked at me for a clue.

“Of course I want you to be modest,” he said, certain that this was the right answer.

“And isn’t this long cloak, the most modest thing I could wear?”

“Well yes. Erm, well no, well yes, no, yes, yeah… no? yes, yes… ”

I looked at him sternly, with the if-you-dare glint of a determined Muslim woman, who has pro-actively chosen to wear the headscarf and modest dress. He looked more terrified of me in my new guise of crazy-eyed Muslim harridan than he had of the black blob. But he was right to be distressed.

The question about how we should define modesty is constantly plaguing the Muslim community. Neither men nor women can map out any consistency or meaning in the higgledy-piggledy implementation of the rules of modest behaviour. At work you can interact with the opposite gender but not at Islamic conferences. Muslim men can shake hands with non-Muslim women, but not vice-versa. Brides who normally wear hijab will uncover in front of men to be shown off. In some communities, men will push into the women’s section during weddings, but will enforce segregation at home. In others it is the opposite, with women not allowed to participate in mosque management due to the fitnah (division) this could cause, but happily socialising together.

The spirit and implementation of modesty is confused at best. Women and their clothing have become hijacked into being the symbol of how religious we are as a community. If women are properly covered, then everyone seems to think they can rest easy.

Her choice of dress is inextricably linked to a judgement about her spiritual status. At the sober end she is considered overly pious, not to mention excruciatingly dull. By contrast those women who choose not to wear a headscarf, are immediately judged to be irreligious, un-spiritual and not considered to be ‘properly’ practising. There has been a visible increase in the number of women wearing the hijab (head covering), the jilbab (loose fitting long dress) as well as the niqab (face covering).

Colours are subtle: greys, browns, blues, blacks. These women cite their dress as a freedom, an escape from the body-obsessed post-modern world, as well as a greater commitment to the values of Islam. At the other extreme is the rise of the Muhajababe. Her head covered, she probably wears skinny fit jeans and lycra t-shirts. For her, the headscarf itself has shown her commitment to her Muslim identity and faith.

We sighed simultaneously at the black cloak I was still wearing. “We all end up looking the same, I feel anonymous and unknown. I’m not me anymore,” I mourned to him. “Some people say that our voices should not be heard either. I’m part of a black silent mass at the back of the room. Surely individuality is important? Especially if Allah says that there are as many ways to know Him as there are human beings?”

He responded enigmatically: “Each flower that God has created is specifically a different colour, and design. Even when they are closed, they make an effort to show their personality, and individuality.”

I squinted dubiously at him. “Does this mean you think women don’t need to wear niqab, jilbab or even the hijab?”

“Defining what ‘modesty’ means isn’t easy, and we Muslims spend an awful lot of time on the outward signs like dress and physical separation. Where we need to focus more is on the complex relationships between modesty, personality and aesthetics.”

I draped the abaya playfully over his shoulders. “Modesty isn’t just for Muslim women to worry about,” I reminded him. “To build a strong community we all have to be concerned with inner spirituality as well as outer codes of conduct like dress.” Grinning cheesily, I pointed at the cloak: “Modesty is definitely not a black and white issue.”

This article was published in The Muslim News

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Readers of a sensitive disposition should be advised that this article contains words of a difficult nature. What you are about to read may cause a temporary shut down in common sense and a brief outburst of hysteria.

Shariah.

Are you still there? I have smelling salts if you need them. Beware, here are a few more: fatwa, hijab, apostasy, niqab, cousin-marriage, Imam, Muslim women.

We can take a short breather now, and collect ourselves. Phew. I apologise if my outburst has reduced some readers to gibbering ranting Alf Garnett type creatures.

When the Archbishop mentioned the scary S-word, all rational debate – even if it be to score a resounding knock-out in the first three minutes for the secular corner – was suspended. What on earth have we just experienced in the last few days? Rowan Williams barely mentioned the word ’shariah’ and the country was in an Armageddon-style-end-of-the-world frenzy. It wasn’t even possible to get a word in edgeways to say that he was not in fact advocating shariah law. Instead, the media was awash with images of floggings from Somalia to the rings of Saturn and all the way in between.

Now that we are in the post-MTV, post-spin sound-bite century, we have lost the ability for discussion and debate. Sophistication and subtlety are a thing of the past. What I rue most is the lost art of conversation. Mention a word, and its caricature will be whipped up in front of you. Muslim woman in hijab? Poor, oppressed woman, one of four wives forced into marriage to her cousin, barely speaks English, wishes she could wear a mini-skirt… Muslim Imam? Mad ranting mullah burning a flag… Fatwa? Sentence to death for parking on a double yellow line.

It is completely impossible to have any kind of conversation about these issues without tantrums and hysteria. If British culture, values and laws are robust, then they will stand the test of discussion about these concepts, and vanquish anything that turns out to be barbaric or medaeival, or simply just not suited to the stiff upper lip and rugged British constitution. The knee-jerk ranting that surrounds us belies a lack of confidence and an unfounded sense of mistrust in the historic institutions that have made this country great.

We must ditch the cartoon (pun entirely intended) responses to any Muslim-sounding word that decorate our front pages week in week out. If we could get away from the unhelpful and misleading stereotypes that have lodged themselves into the public psyche, then maybe we could work our way through these minefields that seem to explode every few weeks. We might find our national debate engaging in that elusive thing – progress. Instead, the conversations that we need to have are being de-railed by the inability to communicate on the same wavelength. How can Muslims be part of the national conversation, if their terminology is at best unheard and misunderstood, or worse is misrepresented and the object of scaremongering?

P.S. To reduce the burden on some ‘opinionated’ readers, I have prepared some comments in advance that you might like to make. If you still feel het up, you can register your vote for your preferred tantrum. (1) What on earth is this Muslim complaining about? If she doesn’t like it here she can go home (2) Stop blowing us up if you don’t want us to react with hysteria every time you mention a foreign word (3) All Muslim women are oppressed. This is a fact. Thus Muslims are wrong on every possible count and we are right about everything (4) The sooner Muslims get it into their thick heads that this is Britain and we do things the British way, the happier we will all be

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Christian and secular art have at least one thing in common – they like to have people in them. Christian religious art is brought to life with representations of the personalities that populate Christian history. From high art produced by the great masters, to local churches, the artistic interpretation of Christ and other figures opens the door to discussion about the spirituality conveyed. Body, whether through direct representation or iconography, is the gateway to the spiritual meaning of these works, and it feeds from the Christian idea that the incarnation of Christ connects human beings to the Divine through the body of Christ.

Islamic aesthetic principles find the body an alien impostor to spiritual aspiration. God has no incarnation, cannot be defined in bodily terms, nor has location, size, shape or gender. The Divine is found in the abstract and undepictable territories of the inner heart, and is manifested in the geometric perfections and multiplicities of both art and nature.

From a Christian European perspective, the body is uncomfortably absent from public Muslim life. Calligraphy and geometric art are used to transcend into the domain of the spiritual – human beings are not usually depicted. Even people seem to lack bodies in the public arena, with women tucked neatly under headscarves and men in looser shirts and full length trousers. Muslim heritage rejects the body being a public billboard. Instead, it is to be celebrated and shared only in private, retained for personal and family interactions and for the pleasures of intimacy. This is one of the fundamental reasons Muslim women wear the hijab: to be valued for who you are, not what you look like. Muslims, in this sense, are simply exercising their very modern right to privacy.

Today’s secular gods of consumerism and self indulgent gluttony, of beauty, youth and immortality, have their roots in the same Greco-Roman heritage that Christian art draws upon. Secular art, which is offered up to its own gods show us sculpted bodies that meet our contemporary ideals of bodily perfection. It idolises the oxymoron of super-slim yet ultra-curvy women, the sparkling white of pristine teeth that have gorged on chocolate – a modern day food for the gods – or the tough muscular six-pack man in the age of longer working hours and high alcohol consumption. Image is the ultimate altar to worship at. One men’s clothing chain ran an advertising campaign last year using simply the words: “Looks aren’t important. They are everything.” Body is the ultimate god, and fashion designers are its disciples.

The body is thus the fulcrum for public debate, expression and attitudes. What happens when the body is not available as the yardstick? Is the response to see women who wear the hijab as ‘withholding’ themselves from the public space, and to consider that inflammatory? The privacy of the body for Muslims means it is entirely natural for Muslim women not to shake hands with a man, but the role of body in social interaction through a European lens means it is highly unnatural not to. There is no quick fix to resolving these different perspectives, because they stem from deeply ingrained attitudes and perspectives. Intensive communication and understanding hold the only keys.

We are told that the body is public, but faith should be private. But if faith is about aligning your entire being towards a better way of being, then the body is de facto part of that. In the religious domain we focus on the body of Christ, in the secular it is the flesh of supermodels. In both cases, the body is a public canvas, a forum for discussion. The personal is public, and the public is political except, ironically, when it comes to using our own bodies to express faith. Faith, as an exception to everything else, is a private matter, we are told, separated from public life and to be left at home. It seems we are at cross purposes. Modernity protects our right to privacy, but this privacy does not seem to extend to the body.

This article was published in The Muslim News

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How do I combine my value of modest dress with my human desire to be fashionable? A little voice in my head pipes up and says “I want to be fashionable!” I don’t want to be eyed up for my vital statistics, but I do want to be noticed for my style. Are faith and fashion compatible?

Picture a Muslim and you probably imagine a rather stern looking long-bearded uncle with a dour expression, or a jilbab-swathed niqab-covered woman. Their clothes will sway modestly in a range of whites or blacks that the colour-naming people at Dulux would be proud of: Unnoticeable Noir or Inconspicuous Ebony for the dark ladies’ attire, Nearly New White or Pious Purity for the men’s dazzling jalabiyas.

The climax of this style of dress is in Makkah, during the hajj season. I am mesmerised during this period when I watch the swirls of black and white circulate around the Ka’bah, the House of God and the focus of Muslim prayer. There is an elegance to the complementary balance of the two colours, the yin and yang of the male and female. I myself have stood admiring the unfussy clothing of men and women in such mosques, clothing which is equally loose and modest for both genders. I revel there in the simplicity of the fashion which has poise and grace and lends itself to furthering the spiritual quest.

Back in the mundane world, visiting friends and family, going out to work, participating in community affairs, there is a little voice in my head pipes up and says “I want to wear colour!” or, more surprisingly, “I want to be fashionable!” I don’t want to look ugly, I want to be aesthetic. I don’t want to be eyed up for my vital statistics, but I do want to be noticed for my style. How do I combine my value of modest dress with my human desire to be fashionable? Are faith and fashion incompatible?

The hijab is certainly not immune to trends. There are square headscarves, long ones and circular ones to name but a few. They come in all colours and fabrics. There is even fashion to be observed in black scarves. They come in two-tone, with embroidery, tassels, diamonds, lace. Selecting the right black scarf for the right occasion from the enormous noir collections of some Muslim women is an art form. Long cloaks are the same: they come in different textiles, different cuts, buttoned, sleeved, sheer with lining.

Watching women comparing their latest modest cloaks and scarves is an endearing revelation of the glory of humanity. Even the strict unemotional guidelines of black jilbabs, hijabs and niqabs are joyously brought to life by the most modest and particular of women under the God-given healthy desire of human beings to be individuals.

There is a simple human joy in taking pride in what you wear. Human beings were designed to be clothed. In the Islamic tradition, one of God’s names is Jamaal, beauty, and He loves beauty. Why would He then not love beautiful (modest) dress? Ali ibn Abi Talib, the son-in-law of the Prophet, takes his young servant to the market one day insisting that the servant buys a nice shirt. Young people should be nicely dressed, he explains. Out in the Middle East, dashing young men buy their tailored jalabiyas, from Armani.

I flick through some fashion magazines looking for ideas of how I can fuse the parameters of modest dress with style. I take a promenade round the shops, enjoying my window-shopping as much as the next British woman. This summer looks promising, lots of knee-length floaty dresses that I can team up with a pair of trousers, and a long sleeve t-shirt underneath if required. Some of the prints are big and loud – will they attract too much attention? Some of the dresses look a bit clingy, perhaps making my curves a bit too obvious? Where lies the happy fusion between my spiritual search for modesty and my human desire for aesthetics and individuality?

The fashion industry wants to expose every insulting bump of my cellulite and every delicious curve with its post-modern lycra look. “The bumps and curves are mine all mine!” I cry. Neither should be up for public scrutiny. They are for me to know and you to mind your own business. I want to reclaim the mystery of being a woman, I want to assert the feminine glamour and grace that are my God-given due.

The little voice in my head tells me that the fashion industry sucks. A pox upon the limited choice it offers me and its bittersweet style dictatorship! Fashion as fascism? I’m too hooked to the idea of being fashionable to think such a heretical thought. Nonetheless, I sigh helplessly at the black and white choices I’m offered: stylish and skimpy; modest and frumpy; androgynous and depressed. Black jilbab or black mini-skirt? It is a false dichotomy this black or black choice.

The glossy women’s magazines are the soft gentle face of the fashion police. They create the rules on how to dress and then enforce compliance. The Tehran police in Iran was less subtle. It recently commissioned local designers to come up with ‘trendy’ outer wear for women. The aim was to give women choices of Islamic dress while remaining within the letter of the law.

The rule-makers are missing the point. They may be able to govern clothing with their laws. But fashion, like faith, is an expression of the spirit.

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Terror and the Veil are two recurrent symbols that appear in Western discourse about Islam and Muslims. But these were just myths created to serve one political view. Why do these potent historical symbols still haunt us today?

The Occidental view of Islam has been characterised by two vivid symbols – the sword and the veil. The West built up an image of an Islam that was “spread by the sword”, that forced violent conversion on non-Muslims as the Muslim dominion spread outwards from its origins in Mecca and Medina. The Muslim empire grew quickly geographically and politically as its armies spread both east and westward. Instead of using the sword, the faith of Islam grew more organically, through marriage and trade.

The West’s Myth of the Sword crystallised into its definition of the Muslim world, and it was hailed as the rallying cry against what was demonised as a violent and barbaric religion. The myth was nothing but political smoke and mirrors, as early as the time of the Crusades.

The Church and the kingdoms of Europe cleverly counterpoised the newly created idea of the ’sword’ against the “love thy neighbour” and “turn the other cheek” proclaimed ethos of Christianity, failing to notice the irony of the Crusader hordes that rushed towards the Muslim heartlands to recapture the Holy Land. The conquests and counter-conquests of Christian Europe were not for religious or humanitarian reasons, we should note, but to secure trade and control through the Middle East and to the Far East as well. The irony is not lost till today when the last 500 years have been dominated by ‘Western conquest’ and massive military superiority. Today, the ’sword’ is wielded by the military hyperpower of the Western United States that uses it to spread and enforce its notions of democracy and enlightenment values.

The sword was a simple yet powerful symbol that Christian Europe projected from its own lexicon onto a Muslim world that it did not try to understand, and could not fathom from within the prism of its own ideology.

When Orientalists spoke of the ‘exotic’ lands of the Middle East, they conjured up evocative images of harems and mysterious women with dark eyes hidden behind translucent black veils. The Occident was enthralled by the paradox of how women were covered, often hidden in women’s quarters, or at least behind their modest dress. But what was once a healthy, Islamic yet palpable sexuality of the Muslim world was an incomprehensible contrast to the prudish values first of Puritanism and then of the Victorian Age.

Again, by interpreting through its own prism of understanding, the Occident turned the veil into a symbolic issue that defined a ‘barbaric’ and ‘oppressive’ personality of Islam. Again, it was the simplicity of the symbol of the veil that raised it to define everything that the West saw as wrong with Islam and the Muslim world.

These two symbols have come back to haunt us today and still define the West’s view of the Muslim world. Today’s sword has been replaced by its modern counterpart – terrorist attacks. The veil, the small simple piece of cloth that is so rarely worn, still holds its own.

If the veil did not hold such symbolic and historic weight, why has it ignited such a whirlwind? Muslims reacted passionately not because most Muslim women wish to wear the veil – quite the contrary, only about five per cent of Muslim women in the UK wear a veil – but because where ‘veil’ was written, there was a caveat which said “for veil, read Islam”.

The same applies to the rhetoric about terrorist attacks, and foreign policies that take Western forces into Muslim countries to ‘help’, but end up creating more strife and destruction to meet their own ends. Indeed, we all agree that there are terrorists out there and their actions are vehemently rejected by Muslims round the world. But Western terminology around terror attacks and the War on Terror, has the same resonance to it as the Myth of the Veil. The same caveat applied “for terror (or sword), read Islam”.

The Sword and the Veil are once again at the centre of polemics. They uncover the simplistic view that the West holds buried deep inside itself of Islam’s supposedly inherent violence, oppression and barbarism. But they are myths created from icons that have been misrepresented and conveniently fitted to meet a political narrative.

The Sword and the Veil are symbols that lie deep within the European narrative, and are therefore easy to hook onto. They were myths on which to build a political vision when they were first created. But the power they hold over Europe is only because they draw on Europe’s own heritage. The myth of the sword can only be meaningful in Europe because Europe understands what it means to use force and violence to further its cause. The majority of Muslims are confused by this myth of expansion of faith through violence. ‘Jihad’ for them is simply a spiritual struggle, military force is for defence. “There is no compulsion in religion” is the clear Islamic edict, so faith cannot be induced by bloody means.

The veil too is only potent because of Europe’s uneasy history of social values regarding women and their status. The issues of oppression and sexuality of women that the Muslim world is accused of, are simply a mirror of the schizophrenic nature of western society with regards to the rights of women and how they should be treated. The West at first could not understand these mysterious women of the Orient who supposedly came from a heritage of liberation, passion and social participation. But this was all hidden behind a veil, behind modest coverings. And this seemingly paradoxical combination, and its contrast with the status quo in Europe where women had no rights till the 20th century, created fear and misunderstanding. The Myth of the Veil was embodied with this recoiling and incomprehension and came to symbolise oppression and mediaeval values.

Alas, where once the Muslim world led the world in providing a blueprint for the equality of women through the statements of the Qur’an, the Muslim world today also has little to be proud of with regards to the status of women. The veil was clearly a myth because Islam offered a framework that worked towards rights, status and equality. But now it has become paralysed by the same gender relations and sexual guilt, and the oppression of women that it claims to reject and which it accuses the West of. More worrying, is the fact that the Muslim world is in denial. The Myth of the Veil in the West has created a Counter-Myth in the Muslim world – that because the basic laws of Islam liberate woman, give her rights and status – then it follows that the Muslim world is de facto implementing these values. The sad fact is that Muslims have a long way to go before the rights they trumpet about Islam with regards to women become social reality.

If you watch the media and political rhetoric unfold, you will see the discussions about Muslims and Islam punctuated by the leitmotifs of the Sword and the Veil. It seems that the West can only understand Islam and Muslims through these very simplistic and mythical symbols that evoke such deep-seated and irrational emotion. Talking about “markers of separation” and ‘wars’ only entrenches these myths in an historical and irrelevant narrative, instead of allowing new connections to be built and instead of shattering misconceptions and building an honest and open reality.

This article was recently published in The Muslim News

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