Spirit21

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

Share on Facebook

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.

Share on Facebook

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

Share on Facebook

As a wearer of the headscarf, I’m always on the lookout for new ones to update my collection. Out in Marrakech I kept my eye out to see what I could pick up. I was amazed. When I first started wearing the headscarf, you had two choices: a square scarf that you folded into a triangle, or one that was already a triangle. Now, I stood in awe at the scarf stand in the Djemaa al Fna at the enormous range and cleverness of the new styles.

There were still the square ones and triangular ones. But also long ones in all manner of fabrics – silk, cotton, chiffon, crinkled variants, with sparkles and without, made of lycra and in any colour you like. Dulux colour matching would be put to shame. You also have ones which are a cross between a triangle and a long one, with the bit that goes round your face already made up, and a long floating trailing bit to make it look elegant.

Then there is a choice of what, if anything, to wear under the scarf. You can wear a sort of alice band thing for both practicality (covers those wispy bits that float out from under the front of the scarf) and aesthetics (matching or contrasting with the scarf itself and your clothes). Or go for a sort of French maid’s lycra hat type of thing that you slip over your head and it covers your hair from forehead down to the nape of your neck. The scarf then goes over the top to cover your ears, neck and chest and provide some elegance. Or a sort band that is a cross between an alice band and the hat i.e. the bottom of the hat has a whole, presumably to allow your head to ‘breathe’.

Most striking to me in Marrakech was the fact that the women wore extremely colourful headscarves and niqabs. Unlike the ubiquitous black in the UK and other regions like the Gulf, the long jilbabs (long cloaks) and the headscarves and even the niqabs were of light shades and often quite colourful. Certainly we saw creams, whites, bright greens and cute pinks. Whilst retaining the modesty and tradition of the style of dress, the Marrakshi ladies injected colour, style and personality into their dress. Even the niqabs came in all sorts of (quite surprising) colours.

All these women in their choices of colours seemed very much at ease with their dress. They weren’t hiding, they weren’t shy and they weren’t separating themselves. They looked me and my husband in the eye, were quite happy to jostle in the busy streets, and they certainly engaged in conversation with the shopkeepers and those they met. They felt easy and comfortable in their dress. There certainly wasn’t any sense of anger or aggression. And it felt easy to move around with them.

And then there was the whole hoodie thing. Both the men and women wore “jallabas”, sort of long cloaks that have a hood on the back, and in the evenings as the temperature dropped, these hoods were whipped forward to cover the heads of their wearers. They struck me as ‘hoodies’, but they were just a bit longer, that’s all. Nobody made a fuss about them, nobody ran screaming from the hoodie wearers.

All these forms of dress exist in the UK, but somehow the way the Marrakshis were wearing them showed a sense of ease and peace from those who wore them, and all the people round them.

Perhaps we need to ask, why do these same forms of dress cause such consternation in the UK? It’s clear that hijabs, niqabs and hoodies can be a form of grace, elegance and ease, as well as a context of social interaction.

Share on Facebook