Men should unveil in Syria
Feb 18, 2006
Sami Moubayed
“Men should unveil before women.” This is the title of an article I came across recently in a 1930 edition of the Syrian daily newspaper, al-Shaab.
Back then, women were being encouraged to remove the veil, as a symbol of their emancipation from men’s control. The first do so was Naziq al-Abid, who courageously removed the veil in public (before Huda Shaarawi did so in Egypt in 1923) to fight alongside General Yusuf al-Azma, the Minister of War, at the battle of Maysaloun in 1920.
Here was a young woman from the notability of Damascus, the daughter of a Pasha, unveiling in public to take part in the most sacred of tasks usually reserved for men: warfare. This shook Damascus out of its stuffy Puritanism, which had been inherited from the Ottoman Era, showing that gender roles were changing quickly in Syria.
Eight years later, in April 1928, a 20-year old girl called Nazira Zayn al-Din wrote a book called "Unveiling and Veiling," saying that she had read, understood, and interpreted the Holy Quran. Therefore, she had the authority and analytical skills to challenge the teachings of Islam’s clerics, men who were by far older and wiser than her.
Her interpretation of Islam, she boldly said, was that the veil was un-Islamic. If a woman was forced to wear the veil by her father, husband or brother, Zayn al-Din argued, then she should take him to court.
Other ideas presented by her were that men and woman should mix socially because this develops moral progress, and that both sexes should be educated in the same classrooms. Men and women, she said, should equally be able to hold public office and vote in government elections.
They must be free to study the Quran themselves, and it should not be dictated on them by an oppressive older generation of clerics. Finally, Zayn al-Din compared the “veiled” Muslim World to the “unveiled” one, saying the unveiled one was better because reason reigned, rather than religion.
Her book caused a thunderstorm in Syria and Lebanon. It was the most outrageous assault on traditional Islam, coming from Zayn al-Din, who was a Druze. The book went into a second edition within two months, and was translated into several languages.
Great men from Islam, including the muftis of Beirut and Damascus, wrote against her, arguing that she did not have the authority to speak on Islam and dismiss the veil as un-Islamic. Nobody, however, accused her of treason or blasphemy. They accused her of bad vision resulting from bad Islamic education.
Some clerics banned her book. Some, however, like the Syrian scholar Mohammad Kurd Ali actually embraced it, buying 20-copies for the Arab Language Assembly and writing a favorable review.
But despite the uproar, which lasted for two years, the Syrians and the Muslim establishments, did not let the issue get out of hand. They did not lead street demonstrations for weeks, as if the Muslim World had no other concern than Nazira Zayn al-Din.
Zayn al-Din was still free to roam the streets of Syria and Lebanon, without being harassed or killed by those who hated her views. The leaders of Islam in 1927-1930, were by far too busy to occupy themselves and the Muslim community at large, with the ideas of a 20-year old girl. They had to attend to their mosques, run their charity organizations, answer theological questions, cater to Muslim education, lead political issues, fight the French, etc.
Why then, have the leaders of today’s world abandoned every problem in the Muslim World, to concentrate on the silly cartoons published in the Danish newspapers? Yes, the cartoons were very wrong and very insulting, and yes, the Danish government could have avoided a crisis by apologizing for their publication.
But yes, the Muslims should have shown solidarity on other issues, such as Israel’s digging beneath the al-Aqsa Mosque, invading Beirut in 1982, bombing Ramallah, massacring innocents in Jenin and Rafah, and building the Separation Barrier.
The death of Palestinians is certainly more important to the Muslims (or at least should be) than what an obscure Danish newspaper publishes, or the views of an until-then unknown Indian-British writer named Salman Rushdi. I am not saying that one should ignore the cartoons, but rather, one should only give them the attention they deserve, with no exaggerations, and concentrate on more concrete issues relating to the Arab and Muslim World. The Prophet is one of the greatest names in history. He is too great to be affected by these ugly cartoons.
A proper means of combating the cartoon insult would have been continuation of the boycott of Danish goods, and stunts such as the very smart one done in Iran, to pay a prize for whomever draws the best cartoon on the Holocaust, to see how tolerant and democratic the West is when it comes to freedom of expression.
The Arab and Muslim community leaders have quite unintentionally made the ugly cartoons famous—more famous than any cartoonist would have ever dreamed. They gave them free publicity. They reversed the equation. Rather than being rightful defenders of a case, they became culprits after thugs torched the Danish and Norwegian Embassies in Syria, and others vandalized the Christian Ashrafiyyieh district in Beirut.
This is why the statement of 1930 still applies to today. The Syrian men should unveil. A woman’s veil is a physical garment that covers her head and sometimes her face. It is a matter of personal choice and freedom. It does not prevent her from being a good citizen and a highly professional or prolific woman.
Modern examples of veiled woman who are very active in their careers are Khadija Bint Ganna, the anchorwoman on the Doha-based al-Jazeera, Maha al-Gunaidi, the founder and CEO of Islamic Networks Group, and Zaynab al-Ghazali, the veteran Egyptian activist who founded and headed the Muslim Women’s Association in Egypt in 1936 and was close to Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Other examples are Ingrid Mattson, the veiled Canadian professor of Islamic Studies and current Vice-President of the Islamic Society of North America, and Benazir Bhutto, the veiled prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-1990, and 1993-1996 who was the first woman in modern times to lead a Muslim country (her veil differed from the one worn in the Middle East). Most men in our societies are more veiled than any of these women. A man’s veil is an abstract one, created by him at will and not imposed by God. It is a veil against freedom and education. It is a veil against new ideas and dialogue.
It is this veil that makes him walk up to the Danish embassy and set it ablaze, thinking that he is doing the Prophet Mohammad a favor and that this will lead him directly to Heaven. It is this veil that accounts today for so much ignorance in Syria. It is this veil that produces men who cannot accept women as equals. It is this veil that lets a man tell his children that prayer is more important than education. It is this veil that dwarfs Islam from a great religion discussing grand ideas to a mob movement against a bunch of silly cartoons. It is this veil that lets men fear and hate the West. It is this veil that lets so many miserable souls in Syria argue that democracy cannot be applied to the Syrian people because they are “un-democratic by nature.” It is this veil that has let men tolerate bad government for over 40-years. It is that veil that has produced men who value and have nourished on violence—at will, and contributed nothing to civilization for the past 500-years. Yes, men should unveil in Syria—and throughout the Arab World. The women of the East have progressed tremendously over the past 50-years, both with and without the veil. Some men, sadly, stand firmly in place.
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst. He is the author of "Steel & Silk: Men and Women Who Shaped Syria 1900-2000" (Cune Press, 2005).
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