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There is a risk of being overwhelmed by the thematic wealth of this book. It deals with the history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with the cultural revolution of the alphabet, the symbolic meanings of the cross and the veil, with honour killings and murder for love, the inextricability of the money economy and prostitution, with Theo van Gogh’s film Submission and pornography, the connection between bikini fashion, nuclear bombs and sex bombs, and even an organisation by the name of Beauty without Borders, which brings freedom to Afghanistan by initiating the women of Kabul in the benefits of the western ideal of beauty.
What holds this cornucopia together? At first sight, nothing but a sequence of puns which the authors Christina von Braun and Bettina Mathes constantly scatter over the course of their study: ex oriente lux, ex oriente crux, ex oriente looks, ex oriente lex, ex oriente tricks, ex oriente facts, ex oriente DAX, ex oriente nix. Looking more closely, it becomes clear that all the themes can be understood as different facets of a single object: the veil. The focus of the book is a piece of cloth that has long since ceased to be merely an item of clothing, but has provided new material for a seemingly never-ending political and cultural debate, while at the same time retaining its remarkable elasticity: thousands of years old, it is manifold in its appearance, function and meaning, an “empty signifier,” as the authors call it. Just how far this material can be stretched is reflected in the book’s title: Veiled Reality. Woman, Islam and the West.
In Germany the debate on the headscarf – or on women and Islam – has been decisively shaped by authors such as Necla Kelek, Seyran Ates and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. All three of them criticise Islam with the apparently unquestionable authority bestowed by their own Muslim past: who can argue when a woman who grew up in Somalia, wore a burka and was maltreated in her youth now claims that the religion of Mohammed represents a danger to life and limb? Yet not infrequently, the impact of personal suffering overpowers the arguments in the debate: opinions about Islam or multiculturalism get in the way of an analysis of the situation. The merit of the culture theorists Christina von Braun (Berlin) and Bettina Mathes (Pennsylvania) lies in the objective analysis, the historical background knowledge and the original theories they provide. Yet Veiled Reality is no political debate book, but a fluently written study in cultural history which incorporates vast amounts of material. Anyone who reads it will be wiser for doing so, and will encounter not a few blind spots in the headscarf-debate as it appears in politics and the media.
To take just one line of their argument, the authors describe how the veil found its way into Islam in the first place. For in fact it was no invention of Islam, but a standard item of clothing in the seventh century in the Christian areas of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The Christians for their part had adopted the veil from Syrians, Jews and Greeks. It was only from the ninth century onwards that Muslim women wore it, and this was not as sacred attire but as a sign of social distinction for the upper classes. “If we nowadays regard the veil as alien,” von Braun and Mathes infer, “this is not because it actually is alien to western culture but because we have ‘made it alien’ to ourselves.” Is it not indeed strange that the “western” head coverings worn by peasants or nuns are viewed with familiarity even though outwardly they hardly differ from “Muslim” headgear?
This is not to deny that the veil has taken on different or even opposite functions in East and West. One result of the authors’ historical investigations is “that it is not primarily the veiling of women that calls for explanation, but rather their unveiling.” Beyond question is that this unveiling comes to light first and foremost in the West. Among the book’s most fascinating passages is one in which von Braun and Mathes trace the theory and practice of this revelation back to its roots in Christianity. At one end of the chain of associations we find a theological idea: the Christian God (unlike the God of Judaism or Islam) reveals Himself to man as a man; He discloses Himself in physical form. At the other end is everyday culture: Christian culture, at the outset of which Paul would only allow women to pray if they were veiled, gradually put the project of unveiling into practice. These days it is no longer merely the hair that goes uncovered: the bikini is just one of the West’s “great projects of unclothing.” The underlying assumption is that only an uncovered woman is a free one. Yet how far does this freedom go if the uncovered female body remains structurally passive, exposed to the active male gaze?
At no point do Christina von Braun and Bettina Mathes dispute that the oppression of women exists within Islam. Yet they make a stand against generalizations. Time and again they take a cultural phenomenon, open up the repressed history behind it, and thus unearth how East and West have been in constant interaction with one another. In this way “the Islamic” ceases to seem as alien as before – and “the western” ceases to seem as innocent. Veiled Reality is, one might say, the continuation of Edward Said’s book Orientalism by feminist means: the East, or rather the veil covering the woman’s body, becomes the white canvas or screen on which the West projects its own yearnings, the lustful and the destructive alike.
At the end lies the hope that this proliferation of analyses and associations might help us “to recognize the wealth that characterizes societies that are capable of incorporating diverse cultural traditions.” Is this the programme of multiculturalism? The authors’ position might also be described using a fine, old word whose euphonic repute has suffered at the hands of deregulation and oil wars: it is liberal.
René Aguigah
October 2007
[Translated by Rupert Glasgow]
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