Excerpt from Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate by Leila Ahmed:
We must be aware of, and guard against, in my opinion, the dangers inherent in ethnocentric evaluations, and especially of those judgments which arise from deep within our own particular political leanings. If we are to truly be advocates for effective change in the world, we must understand the implications of that which we advocate through the eyes of those whom we think we wish to change.Essentially, the adoption of Islamic dress and the affiliation with Islamism express an affirmation of ethical and social customs—particularly with regard to mixing with the opposite sex—that those adopting the dress and affiliation are comfortable with and accustomed to. For women, Islamic dress also appears to bring a variety of distinct practical advantages. On the simplest, most material level, it is economical. Women adopting Islamic dress are saved the expense of acquiring fashionable clothes and having more than two or three outfits. The dress also protects them from male harassment. In responding to a questionnaire, women stated that wearing Islamic dress resulted in a marked difference in the way they were treated in public places.
These practical advantages partially explain why university and professional women in particular adopt Islamic dress—women who daily venture onto coeducational campuses and into sexually integrated work places on crowded public transport in cities in which, given the strong rural origin of much of the population, sexually integrated social space is still an alien, uncomfortable social reality for both women and men. Thus, the ritual invocation through dress of the notion of segregation places the integrated reality in a framework that defuses it of stress and impropriety. At the same time, it declares women’s presence in public space to be in no way a challenge to or a violation of the Islamic sociocultural ethic.
The dress has a number of decidedly practical advantages. For example, the fact that wearing it signals the wearer’s adherence to an Islamic moral and sexual code has the paradoxical effect, as some women have attested, of allowing them to strike up friendships with men and be seen with them without the fear that they will be dubbed immoral or their reputations damaged. Women declare that they avoided being seen in conversation with men before adopting Islamic dress, but now they feel free to study with men in their classes or even walk with them to the station without any cost to their reputation. In an age in which arranged marriages are disappearing and women need to find their own marriage partners, clothes that enable women to socialize with men to some degree and at the same time indicate their adherence to a strict moral code (which makes them attractive as wives) are advantageous in very tangible ways.
In adopting Islamic dress, then, women are in effect “carving out legitimate public space for themselves,” as one analyst of the phenomenon put it, and public space is by this means being redefined to accommodate women. The adoption of the dress does not declare women’s place to be in the home but, on the contrary, legitimizes their presence outside it. Consequently, it appears that the prevalence of the Islamic mode among women coming of age in the 1970s and 1980s—women of the second phase [of feminism]—cannot be seen as a retreat from the affirmations of female autonomy and subjectivity made by the generation of women who immediately preceded them. Although the voice of overt feminism and perhaps even feminist consciousness may be absent, the entry of women into the university, the professions, and public space in unprecedentedly large numbers and the availability of education and professional occupations to women from a far broader segment of the population than before cannot be construed as regressive, however apparently conservative the uniform they wear to accomplish these moves comfortably. … Far from indicating that the wearers remain fixed in a world of tradition and the past, then, Islamic dress is the uniform of arrival, signaling entrance into, and determination to move forward in, modernity.
-Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, pp 223-225
Notes on Leila Ahmed:
Leila Ahmed was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1940. She earned her PhD, MA, and BA at University of Cambridge. She currently holds a professorship at the Harvard Divinity School. In 1999, she became the first professor of women’s studies in religion at the Harvard Divinity School, and was appointed to fill the Victor S. Thomas chair in 2003. Prior to her appointment at the Harvard Divinity School, she was professor of women’s studies and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and while there, was director of the Near Eastern studies program from 1991 to 1993, and director of the women’s studies program from 1992 to 1995. She was also, in 1992, a distinguished visiting professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. In 1997, she was elected to a lifetime membership at Clare Hall in the University of Cambridge in England, and received a distinguished faculty fellowship award there for the 1996–97 academic year.
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