Not-/Unveiling as An Ethical Practice (original) (raw)

Beyond the Garment: the Muslim Veil as a Demarcation Line

Monitor: Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Ljubljana: ISH XIII/1, 2011 (171-206)

This paper deals with the headscarf issue in Europe, which ‘flared up’ the public arenas of many European countries during the past two decades, provoking debates, massive media attention, policy measures, riots, violence, and xenophobic public speech. Herein it is argued that the Islamic head-covering garments have nowadays become, within the public arena, performative modes of social existence that question the dominant majoritarian social codes. The meanings and performatives of the headscarf go beyond Islam and enter the sphere of social communication between different world views and political stances. The logic of existence of this social communication reveals that Muslims living in Europe take up subcultural strategies to question hegemonic discourses and policies. Keywords: head-covering, Muslims, performative, subculture, secularity

Islam and the Veil : Theoretical and Regional Contexts

Islam and the Veil : Theoretical and Regional Contexts, 2011

Islam and the Veil: Theoretical and Regional Contexts Theodore Gabriel, Rabiha Hannan This volume is centred around the theme of veiling in Islam and provides multifarious aspects of the discussion regarding veiling of Muslim women, especially in the West. The issue of veiling has been intensively debated in Western society and has implications for religious liberty, inter-communal relationships and cultural interaction. Islam and the Veil seeks to generate open and objective discussion of this highly important, though controversial, subject, with contributions from distinguished scholars and academics, including female practitioners of Islam. This subject has inflamed passions and generated heated debate in the media in recent years, particularly in the West. This book aims to look at the historical background, theological and social factors underlying the veiling of women in Islam. Such discussion will provide the reader with a well-balanced and unbiased analysis of this important aspect of Islamic practice.

“A Short History of the (Muslim) Veil.” Implicit Religion, 16(4): 413–441.

The concept of implicit religion recognizes the many connections between the secular and the religious, unlike mainstream social narratives that continue to oppose them. Understanding that religious and non-religious worldviews both fulfil the human need for meaning and that they are equally capable of becoming intransigent ideologies, is ever more critical because of the instrumentalization of the religious-secular divide in present-day domestic and international politics. Modernity's dualism possesses global ramifications; by conflating Western identity and progress with secularism, it painted the rest of the world-particularly the Orient-with the brush of religion and backwardness. The Muslim veil has constituted a symbol to denote Muslim religious fanaticism and misogyny, in contrast to Western freedom, feminism and democracy. Its constitutive role in producing modern Western self-identity, through contradistinction, explains the continued debates on Muslim veiling practices, as well as the tenacity of the veil sign. This article traces the history of the veil with the aim of simultaneously charting and unpacking its reification in Western contexts.

“Muslim Veil – A Socio-Cultural Invention: Between Misogyny, Politics and Identity”.

Abstract The veil existed as a form of women’s dress prior to the advent of Islam. At the dawn of Islam, women did not immediately wear the veil or hijab . Gradually the veil acquired the position of a religious mode of dressing for women. The veil (niqab) and hijab in traditional Islam were coverings that differentiated Muslim women from other groups, but was later misjudged by patriarchal scholars to be her seclusion and protection from the opposite sex. While wearing the hijab was quite a common practice among Muslim women today, the idea of wearing the veil since the 1970’s have become more contested. Ironically, the veil on the one hand has explained women’s experience against misogyny, political resistance and on the other hand has curtailed her civic life and sexual identity . Ultimately, the veil is intimately connected with the notions of the self, the body and community as well as different socio-cultural constructions of identity, privacy and self-determination.

On not/unveiling as an ethical practice (2011)

The practice of Islamic veiling has over the last ten years emerged into a popular site of investigation. Different researchers have focused on the various significations of this bodily practice, both in its gendered dimensions, its identity components, its empowering potentials, as a satorial practice or as part of a broader economy of bodily practices which shape pious dispositions in accordance with the Islamic tradition. Lesser, however, has this been the case for the practice of not veiling or unveiling. If and when attention is accorded to the latter, it is often grasped as a product of integration or an effect secular governmentality, but only rarely as a bodily practice. Drawing on narratives of second generation secular and religious Maghrebi Muslims in Belgium, this paper pursues this second perspective by examining to which extent not-veiling can be understood as a technique of the self (Foucault) that is functional to shaping a liberal (Musilm) subject. While a first part of this article will unpack the ethical substance of such discursive interrogations and point to the ways in which they are intertwined with the enactment of a liberal self, the second part will examine the embodied contours of this problematization, which appeared through the labour upon one's affect and bodily dispositions that this refusal of the hijab, or the act of unveiling, implies.