The Fall and Rise of the Veil:
Leila Ahmed
“When I wear this dress, people on the
street realize that I am a Muslim
woman, a good woman.”
(Sociology 156)
Islamism at the University
• Free education means enrollment skyrockets
– 1970: ~200,000 university students, 1977: ~500,000. Number of female
students rises almost twice as quickly as male
• Overcrowding results in mass transit & lecture halls, placing women, many from rural
areas, into uncomfortably close environments with men, subject to harassment (77)
– By 1975, Islamist groups gained control of important campus committees,
becoming able to distribute literature at low cost, soon come to dominate
student organizations
• The hijab begins to appear on university campuses, and is initially mostly
confined there
– An “internal transformation” as women separated themselves from
mainstream society via unique dress and strict observance of Islamic tenets
and rituals
– Goal to bring about governance based on Quran and Sunna, rejecting
intervening Islamic scholarship as deviance & encrustation of original message
• Oppose “Communism, Zionism, & Feminism”
• While the Brotherhood had advocated a domestic life for women, they
now operated “side by side” with male activists (77-82)
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Islamism at the University
• These organizations belonged to the broad mainstream of nonviolent
Islamists
– Hijab, language of “brother” and “sister”
– In addition to hijab, women adopt ziyy, or zia Islami forms of dress, worn in
limited array of fashions and somber colors
– Erases social and class distinctions, reinforces commitment to egalitarian
principles
– “Unmistakably modern Islamic dress, devised in styles and materials that
signaled at once the modernity of its wearers and their Islamic commitment.”
– Also signals a commitment to a different form of Islam & Islamic society from
that of surrounding culture
• Women so dressed “appeared to be ‘sitting in judgment’ on their society and ‘critical of
the way it appears to be going.’”
• Society, families initially respond with alarm: “It is not even Islamic.” The
veil “truly the greatest enemy of civilization and progress” (82-85)
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Islamism at the University
• Islamic dress adopted mostly be female students
intending to become professionals
– El Guindi: The woman who takes up the veil “‘is
liberating herself . . . . by choosing to veil and not to
be molested or stopped’ as she enters public space.”
– 19% say they wear hijab to avoid harassment, 20% say
it brings them new respect. (87)
• “In contrast to the Iranian regime, which imposed
veiling, the quiet revolution that the Sunni
Islamists were setting in motion in Egypt was
seemingly rather implanting in women the will
and desire to wear hijab.” (116)
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“A quiet conversion to a new way of
life”
• As many as 4,000 mosques built in Egypt by the 1980s
• Fashion on the street changes
– “Some men took to wearing beards as well as baggier,
looser clothes and long shirts, sometimes even djellabas.”
– Veil spreads from universities into the mainstream
• “For Islamists, the hijab’s growing presence was
doubtless an encouraging sign of their spreading
influence.”
• Why were women taking on the hijab?
• Driven forward by women due to their own desires, or
pressure from male leadership? (118-119)
– Macleod & Zuhur
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Macleod
• All of the women in Macleod’s study (1983-88) had begun to wear
hijab as adults
• “Some said that there was a ‘general sense that people in their
culture were turning back to a more authentic and culturally true
way of life.’ Others said that in the past people had been
‘thoughtless and misled’ and now realized that their behavior had
been wrong.”
– 60% said they “simply did not know” why the change was happening
• In initial interviews, Macleod finds some fine peace as a result of
wearing hijab
• Others did so to avoid harassment: “When I wear this dress, people
on the street realize that I am a Muslim woman, a good woman.
They leave me alone and respect me.” (120-121)
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Macleod
• No observable increase in religious observance among veiled women
– Most, veiled and unveiled, “seldom performed any religious actions or
indicated personal religious emotions” except at holiday & during Ramadan
– Nonetheless, commitment to Islam “strong and unquestioned . . . . [the]
foundation of their lives
• Decision to veil typically involved resolution of problems in personal lives
– Husband jealous of male attention
– Balance responsibilities at work & home
• “I want to quit my job but we need the money. When I wear this dress it says to
everyone that I am trying to be a good wife and mother. The higab is the dress of Muslim
women and it shows that I am a Muslim woman.”
• The hijab “had now become a ‘culturally available’ way by which women
could resolve tensions about their roles and make the statement that they
were ‘good Muslim women.’”
• Macleod rejects the notion that the hijab connotes anti-Western
sentiment or extremist agenda (121-123)
– Nonetheless, there was a heightened social concerns with religious matters.
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Macleod
• Veiling primarily a “voluntary movement” clearly
“initiated and perpetuated by women”
• But by 1988, growing social pressure to wear
hijab
– Women report they begin to wear it due to family
pressure & to avoid constant harassment in public
that accompanies Western dress
• Generation gap: hijab more common among younger
women
– Veil “less one option among many and more the right
thing to do,” possibly initiated by women but co-opted
by men ((124-25)
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Zuhur
• In 1988, Zuhur finds no difference between veiled & unveiled women on
roles of men & women
– Different but complimentary
– Equal opportunity & equal under law so long as sharia respected
– Saw Islamist critiques of the West as meaningful
• But non-veiled women did not see Islamist gov’t as desirable alternative,
while veiled women “emphatically did.”
– Implication that hijab worn not only to resolve personal conflicts, but also to
signal support for Islamism
– Attracted to “its association with cultural authenticity, nationalism, and pursuit
of ‘adala, or social justice.”
• Both groups equally pious, but unveiled have an emphasis on “inner”
qualities of religion, veiled emphasize “outward,” visible qualities
– “Since I veil, I am religious.”
– Are unveiled women secular? (126-128)
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The Veil
• “Islamist male leaders conceived of veiling as strategically
important to their movement.”
– Gender segregated lecture halls & transport helped to spread
“Islamist notions and practices of correct dress and norms of
gender segregation.”
– al-Aryan: “When the number of women students wearing the
veil rises, that is a sign of resistance to Western civilization and
the beginning of iltizam [pious commitment] towards Islam.”
• The veil, like mass gatherings, made “visible to the
dominant society the presence of people committed to an
ethos and vision that was different from and seemingly
implicitly oppositional to mainstream society and the
reigning political order.” (132-135)
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Islamist views of women
• From survey of literature
– Before the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood did not seek to involve or
recruit women
• Muslim Sisterhood mostly charitable concern
– In the ‘70s & after, an increased concern with women
– Women qualify for armed jihad, but disagreements over when it is an
obligation for them
– Activism acceptable if it does not disrupt the household or interfere
with women’s domestic responsibilities
• May hold any position other than head of state or Grand Imam
– Families must be headed by men, women devoted to childbirth and
rearing due their “special nature”
• Realizing the advantages of having female activists for promoting
Islamism, Islamists look to mobilize women (136-38)
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Flipping the Narrative
• Female activists part of a vanguard, exempt from “many of
the rules of Islamic feminine orthodox behavior” until
ultimate Islamist goals achieved (136-38)
• “Women were ‘reminded of the degradation heaped upon
them as a result of the economic imperialism of the West’
and were cast at once as ‘heroines and defenders of the
fabric of Islamic society,’ and as at the center of a
‘regenerative effort to restore’ the Muslim world.”
– Turning orientalist stereotypes against the West, saying
opposition to the veil was part of the West’s effort to humilate
& dominate the Muslim world
– Paints Egyptian feminists as un-Islamic, Western (138-39)
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Rising Violence
• Through the 1980s & ‘90s, Egyptian Islamists come to control
influential professional associations
– Gov’t, to compete w/Islamists, emphasizes religion more and more
• Returning mujahedeen from Afghanistan leads to spike in violence
– Assassinations, church burnings
– Farah Foda, Muslim supporter of secular gov’t, murdered
– Islamist theorist al-Ghazali, who had previously been against violence,
argues for the defense at trial of killer, saying that “anyone who
resisted the full imposition of Islamic law was an apostate who should
be be killed either by the government or by devout individuals.”
• Islamist lawyers harass non-Islamists
• Islamic Jihad (led by al-Zawahiri) massacres 60 tourists at Luxor in
1997 (142-144)
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Spread of Islamism
• Islamist militants become deeply unpopular
• Legitimates high levels of gov’t repression
• Gov’t bans hijab for girls grades 1-5, allows on middle
school girls w/written consent from parents
– Terribly unpopular, showing that “for girls and women, the
hijab and the teachings of conservative forms of Islam
(that is, the practices of Islamism) had become the
normative, expected, and even desired practices for
many.”
• What 20 years before had been the practices and
beliefs of fringe groups “had pervasively become, by
the mid-1990s, the ordinary, normal practices of the
majority of Egyptians.” (146-47)
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State Repression
• Across the 1990s, gov’t antiterrorism campaign
“degenerated into indiscriminate state
repression. More than 20,000 Islamists were
imprisoned . . . many of them had been detained
without charges and subjected to torture.”
– Restrictions on press, military courts
– Threat of imprisonment for association with any
Islamist group, even if nonviolent
• Especially the Brotherhood (151)
• High levels of chronic coercion signals weak state
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Why does Islamism grow in popularity
in the face of repression?
• Unlike militant Islamism, not just against status quo but for a better
alternative
• Valuable social networks
• “Embodies many of the same hopes and aspirations –for freedom
from dictatorship and for social justice and public accountability”
that have inspired other movements
• A form of empowerment for young people, who can critique their
elders from a religious standpoint
• Powerful forces of peer pressure & powerful social coercion
– “Isn’t it proper, following the path of the Prophet?”
• A demand for social & political activism, political optimism
– Contrasted with a politically quietist pessimism common among nonIslamists (150-156)
– Weber’s active asceticism: the believer as God’s tool
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