Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical & Modern Stereotypes

Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil by Katherine Bullock is a valuable addition to the voices of Muslim women writing about the issue most immediate and peculiar to their life: Veil. Broadly, we can divide the recent literature in English about Islam and women into two categories: first, that produced by Muslim activists and scholars in the West who defend or present the Islamic position, and read primarily by the activist or traditional Muslims; second, that produced by the Western academicians, intellectuals and feminists or Muslims who are thoroughly Westernized. The two types of literature remain almost mutually exclusive and isolated. The first kind of literature only marginally or very generally addresses the challenges, threats and questions posed by the second kind of literature to the Islamic position about women. Some of it is apologetic, compromising and adaptationist, but largely it is straightforward and simple, and at times, even simplistic.

While innumerable books about Islam and women have mushroomed in the contemporary Western as well as Islamic world, lately, a new tradition of Western Muslim women writers has emerged that attempts to combine the two traditions. Some of these works could be regarded as academic and scholarly from the Western viewpoint, and Dr. Bullock's present work is one such work. According to her self-description, she writes "as a practicing Muslim woman," who embraces a certain kind of "feminism" (p. xvii). Her aim is to defend Hijab in the Western intellectual world and "to break the equation: `modernity equals unveil'"(p.xxi).

The book first presents and analyzes different views about Hijab among the Muslim women from different backgrounds, all of whom are in one way or other concerned about women's rights and want to transcend the traditional house-bound image of women. On one hand, in order to present the real inside story of Hijab, she interviews several Muslim women in the West, most of whom practice Islam and wear Hijab. On the other, she presents an in-depth critique of the infamous books of Moroccan secular feminist Fatima Mernissi whose pernicious condemnation of Hijab as well as the Islamic tradition is hailed and quoted widely in the West as an authority. In the end, the author synthesized these viewpoints and concludes with an alternative theory of Hijab that challenges the unfair stereotypes in the West as well as what she calls the "oppressive tradition" in the Muslim world.

In an insightful classification of the Western views about the Muslim women, she divides them into three types: the pop culture view of oppressed Muslim women perpetrated by the Western politicians and demagogues for the consumption of popular ignorant culture and that serves to justify interventionist and imperialist policies every now and then. The second is the dominant trend of "liberal feminism" prevalent in the liberal academia and among the feminists. The third trend within the academia is a fresh approach embraced by some historians and anthropologists who emphasize understanding the Muslim culture in its own terms and seek to avoid the Western Orientalist prejudices and labels. The author calls this third approach the "contextual approach" and claims to belong to it (p. xvii).

The author hails a new Hijab movement among the Muslim women across the Muslim world that is growing and resisting against the backdrop of both oppressions of modernity as well as tradition. On one hand, the Muslim women are withstanding the bans of Hijab and violations of basic rights in Muslim countries like Tunisia and Turkey and in the West like in France, and on the other they are seeking to eliminate the erosion of women's rights in the Muslim world at the hands of rigid tradition, extremist clerics and the ignorant masses. "There are those, including myself," she says, "who see the Quran and the Sunnah, and the first community as equality and justice for women and men" but she laments "the way of life distorted by the cultural accretions over the last 1400 years." She sees the kind of complete seclusion of women that keeps them from participating in the society, workforce, politics and education as an "oppressive tradition of the past."