Wearing the Niqab

Muslim Women in the UK and the US

Anna Piela

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350166059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Bringing niqab wearers' voices to the fore, discussing their narratives on religious agency, identity, social interaction, community, and urban spaces, Anna Piela situates women's accounts firmly within UK and US socio-political contexts as well as within media discourses on Islam. The niqab has recently emerged as one of the most ubiquitous symbols of everything that is perceived to be wrong with Islam: barbarity, backwardness, exploitation of women, and political radicalization. Yet all these notions are assigned to women who wear the niqab without their consultation; "niqab debates" are held without their voices being heard, and, when they do speak, their views are dismissed. However, the picture painted by the stories told here demonstrates that, for these women, religious symbols such as the niqab are deeply personal, freely chosen, multilayered, and socially situated. Wearing the Niqab gives voice to these women and their stories, and sets the record straight, enhancing understanding of the complex picture around niqab and religious identity and agency.

Chapter 1

Erasing Niqabi Women’s Voices

Mainstream Media Representations

Media representations of women who wear the niqab were a direct trigger for this research project in 2013. Several incidents pertaining to the niqab between July and September 2013 in the United Kingdom (including a ban proposal, a judicial ruling in a court case, and a reversal of a niqab ban instituted by a college in Birmingham) prompted the usual flurry of news, op-eds, columns, and letters to the editor offering multiple views on the niqab and whether it has a place in modern-day Britain, how the writers understand the niqab, how it is used to oppress women in other countries, and what the feminist response to the niqab ought to be. A sober question posed by Kira Cochrane in an editorial in The Guardian (2013: np): “Is the veil the biggest issue we face in the UK?” went unheard. Everyone had a view, and it seemed that they were at pains to express it. What was missing from that echo chamber were the voices of women who wear the niqab.

Traditional mainstream broadcast and print media take a variety of positions on the niqab, but it appears that many outlets, especially the conservative ones, promote hard-line solutions to the “problem” of the niqab in British and American streets: they do give a considerable platform to individuals and groups (such as the UK Independence Party) who openly wish to control what Muslim women may or may not wear. Unfortunately, the principle of journalistic balance rarely applies in this case—few niqabi women over the years have been given space to present their views in mass media. Where their voices were included, it was usually in a TV studio setting where they had been invited to defend their choices in a hostile atmosphere whipped up by co-discussants (see Channel 4 2013). These interrogations seemed more like trials rather than debates. One of the American participants whom I interviewed and who had appeared in a few of those programs, said that she had to start turning such invitations down as she felt that her lifestyle choices were presented as deviant, and she had experienced psychological distress as a result of these engagements.

Having keenly observed media reporting and fueling these controversies in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, Canada, and the United States, I have noticed how the approach to the topic has changed during the last twelve years. While in the past, media content producers engaged niqabis’ own accounts only rarely, these days there is more pretence of including them, but as I have shown earlier, this is not necessarily helpful for creating culturally sensitive representations of women who wear the niqab. Truly committed journalism on the topic is rare, but it exists. There are several media frames to discuss the niqab. It is this qualitative change in reporting rather than an exhaustive chronological record of “niqab controversies” that this chapter is structured around. That said, most opinion pieces about the niqab do appear in response to wider controversies, as it is when the interest in the topic spikes in the West.

My analysis in this chapter is informed by principles formulated by critical discourse analysis (CDA) theorists. Van Dijk (1993: 28) defines CDA as a “systematic discourse analysis of the genres or communicative events that play a role in the reproduction of racism, such as everyday conversations, novels, films, textbooks, lessons, laws . . . or any other discourse genre that may be about ethnic groups and ethnic relations.” Further, “critical targets [of the analysis] are the power elites that enact, sustain, legitimate, condone or ignore social inequality and injustice” (Van Dijk 1993: 252). By identifying discontinuities and fissures in hegemonic discourse, CDA makes space for minority voices. Van Dijk(1993: 253) states that “if immigrants, refugees, and (other) minorities suffer from prejudice, discrimination, and racism, and if women continue to be subjected to male dominance, violence, or sexual harassment, it will be essential to examine and evaluate such events and their consequences essentially from their point of view. That is, such events will be called ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ if knowledgeable Blacks or women say so, despite white or male denials.” The CDA approach is then particularly fitting for the following discussion because while critiquing discursive reproduction of inequality, it compels scholars to privilege insiders’ perspectives. These form the backbone of the last section of this chapter, where I consider niqab wearers’ responses to media representations of the niqab, and, indeed, the rest of this book. For the purpose of this chapter, I thematically analyzed ninety-seven articles about the niqab/burka (news reports, “long reads,” and opinion pieces), published in the British and American press across the political spectrum between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2018. The articles discussed here through the CDA lens were chosen as particularly illustrative examples of discursive themes which emerged from the analysis. This selection is not offered as representative or typical of media portrayals of Muslims and Islam; rather, they encapsulate the mainstream discourses about the niqab.

Negative Framing of the Niqab

In order to provide context for the remainder of the book, I first focus on the negative framing of the niqab in mainstream media through three distinct yet intertwined hegemonic discourses about the niqab. These include a “values discourse” which casts the niqab as incompatible with a secular, undefined “national culture,” a “paternalistic feminist” discourse which reinvents the old Orientalist argument that the niqab is a sign of patriarchal oppression, and the security discourse which portrays the niqab as an “Islamist” security threat.

Values/Identity Discourse

The niqab is by no means opposed only by non-Muslims. It has many opponents among Muslims, including Muslim women. Pieces by a handful of Muslim-identifying female journalists appear to be staple fare as far as opining on the niqab is concerned. The values/identity discourse opposed to the niqab is ostensibly meant to produce an alternative “progressive Muslimness” palatable to the West, including its relative invisibility (but of course, “Muslimness” can rarely be entirely invisible, as it is routinely racialized in both the United Kingdom and the United States (Franks 2000; Moosavi 2015; Galonnier 2015; Selod 2015), a fixed idea of what is Islamic, and conflation of con demnation of political regimes that force Islamic clothing on women with the condemnation of women who wear the niqab by choice.

In this section, I analyze three articles, each of them mounting a slightly different critque of the niqab, but with the same implication—that there is no place for the niqab in the West. While all three pieces discursively overlap in that they agree that the niqab should not be worn, they differ in the severity of their preferred solution. Eltahawy opts for a nationwide legal ban; the two others recognize that a ban constitutes violence to women’s bodies. I find that these articles are illustrative of arguments mobilized in this context, especially as they are all written by Muslim female journalists, each of whom proposes a particular vision of what constitutes an appropriate Muslim femininity in the West. All three media platforms where these articles were published—The Guardian, The New York Times, and The HuffPost—are generally considered left-wing-leaning and respectable as far as journalistic standards are concerned.

The Veil as a Rejection of Progressive Values

In her piece, titled “As a Muslim woman, I see the veil as a rejection of progressive values” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (2015), a secular, liberal British Muslim feminist of Pakistani background (2011), lumps together women who wear the niqab with “new puritans.” At the same time, she represents herself as a member of the silent Muslim majority who “tremble” watching their covered sisters. In just a few discursive strokes, she mobilizes the neat divide between the “liberals” and the “puritans,” castigating the latter as unaware of the veil’s darker symbolism, uneducated, and lacking in agency. Alibhai-Brown described an episode when she was sitting on a park bench while a face-veiled woman and her children walked past. There could be no conversation, because, as she complained, “Behind fabric, she was more unapproachable than a fort.” Of course, while she blamed the other woman for her own perception, Alibhai-Brown appears to equate readiness for conversation with her specifically with progressive values at large. Following that logic, everyone with headphones or browsing through their phones could be denounced as anti-progressive, because they do not signal an interest in interaction with strangers. Alibhai-Brown seemed unable to recognize that the interaction was possibly hindered more by her own prejudice rather than the other woman’s clothing. At the end of that paragraph, rather haphazardly, she demanded: “Whatever happened to sisterhood?”, not noticing the obvious irony of the statement appearing in a column where she castigates other women for their choices. Sisterhood does not operate on terrain where some women claim the right to silence others.

“Debunking the Burqa”

Mona Eltahawy, an American Egyptian journalist (“a secular, radical feminist Muslim” [El Rashidi 2013: np]) wrote in a New York Times column (2009), “The best way to debunk the burqa as an expression of Muslim faith is to listen to Muslims who oppose it.” While on the face of it, it is a commonsensical statement—if you wish to ignore a positive aspect of the burqa, listen to its opponents who will supply a negative narrative instead—its logic is faulty. The opponents cannot debunk its quality as other people’s expression of faith—it is those other people’s expression, and theirs alone. It is simply not in their sphere of experience to be able to question other people’s beliefs and their expression. The fact that the journalist may nominally share the faith with the women who face-veil, but interprets its central texts differently, does not put her in a position that would allow her to exercise power over them.

Critics of the niqab and burka often argue in the media that they are not “Islamic” but, instead, “cultural,” implying that they belong in the areas where they have been traditionally worn (and, at times, forced on women by political regimes and patriarchal cultures). However, the narrative casting the niqab as un-Islamic relies on a very fixed, doctrinal understanding of religion and religious practice that does not allow for personal religious agency. Both Alibhai-Brown (2015) and Eltahawy (2009) deploy such an understanding in their pieces. The former seemingly describes the veil as a metaphor offered by the Qur’an. In the same piece, she also quotes a scholar of Islam, Sahar Amer, who states that the Qur’an does not prescribe the covering of head or face, instead requiring believers of both genders to dress modestly.¹

Simultaneously “Hating the Burqa” and Wearing One

Sabria Jawhar (2011) speaks from a different perspective in her Huffington Post article. Jawhar is a Saudi journalist and columnist who, by her own admission, wears the niqab when she is in Saudi Arabia, but not in the United Kingdom. She has a doctorate in applied linguistics from Newcastle Univ ersity and her piece is a reflection on an incident involving a woman in a niqab in Newcastle that she witnessed and similar incidents elsewhere. She demonstrates a degree of compassion toward her fellow niqabi sisters and criticizes the argumentation used to advocate for a ban: “There is no argument that can persuade me that laws designed to bully women into abandoning their cultural traditions because it makes people uncomfortable are essential in a free society. If a woman chooses to wear the niqab who are we to pass judgment? Lawmakers who argue that banning the burqa is a blow against extremism are naïve and lazy. Band-Aid approaches to fighting extremism are rarely successful” (Jawhar 2011: np). Elsewhere in her article, she refers to an attack on a niqabi in Glasgow where a man ripped a niqab off from a woman’s face, and comments: “To her, the attack was an act of rape” (Jawhar 2011: np). And yet, as she explains her position signaled in the title of her article—Why I hate the burqa, and yes, I wear one—she simultaneously propagates a host of stereotypes about the niqab, for example, that many women wear it to pander to their husbands’ jealousy (“I’m guessing that more than a few Saudi girls wear the niqab because their husbands insist on it.”), or that women who wear the niqab must be foreign, and they should either “reconsider [their] religious and cultural values, or go home.” The fact that many women who wear the niqab in the United Kingdom were born in that country² and they do not have another home to go to seems to escape her. She advises them that “it doesn’t take much to compromise and adapt at some level to a new environment.” It is necessary, because “non-Muslims will continue to fear Muslims wearing traditional clothing and hijabs because it represents beliefs alien to them.”

Jawhar, even though she tries to empathize, ends up judging women who wear the niqab in the West through her specific Saudi experience of the niqab. This perspective stems from the cultural expectation and performance of modesty in that context as well as its state-regulated parameters, in particular the predominant interpretation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Erasing Niqabi Women’s Voices: Mainstream Media Representations
• 2 Reclaiming Niqabi Voices: Reflective Engagement with the Media
• 3 Religious Framing of the Niqab
• 4 Translating the Niqab for Secular Audiences
• 5 Intersections of Islamophobia, Racism and Sexism, and Coping Strategies
• Conclusions
• Glossary
• References
• Index
• Copyright