The increasingly pervasive practice of veiling among Muslim women has stimulated a great deal of scholarly investigation and debate. This study brings empirical evidence to bear on current debates about the meaning of the veil in Islam. This article first examines the conflicting meanings of the veil among Muslim religious elites and Islamic feminists. Although the dominant gender discourse among Muslim elites strongly favors this cultural practice, an antiveiling discourse promulgated by Islamic feminists has gained ground within recent years. This study then examines how these discursive disputes affect gender identity negotiation among veiled and unveiled Muslim women living in Austin, Texas. Interviews with these women highlight how their gender identities reproduce and reformulate existing Muslim gender discourses. Special attention is paid to the subjective disparities and points of congruence between both groups of respondents. This study concludes by suggesting avenues for future research on the i...

TO VEIL OR NOT TO VEIL? A Case Study of Identity Negotiation among Muslim Women in Austin, Texas

Synopsis This article illustrates the ways in which immigrant Muslim women in Canada perceive the hijab and associate it with diverse meanings. The article reveals a gap between dominant understandings of the hijab as a symbol of Muslim women's oppression, and the self-expressed sense of women participating in the study that the wearing of the hijab is a positive experience in their lives. Through focus groups, the participants stated that the hijab confirms their Muslim identities, provides them a chance to take control of their lives, and offers them the status of “respectable person.” The meaning of the hijab, nonetheless in this study, is not limited to attire and most participants described modesty as being an important dimension of the hijab. The concept and deeper meanings of the hijab as expressed by the participants of the study, however, are not woven into larger Canadian society, and this article argues that the hijab in the form of Muslim woman's clothing emerges as a device to negotiate spaces within the Muslim community, as well as in the dominant western culture.

http://bahrol.persiangig.com/ebooks/sdart.pdf

Listening to the voices of hijab

Drawing from a rich array of visual and literary material from nineteenth-century Iran, this groundbreaking book rereads and rewrites the history of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and sexuality. Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of the centrality of gender and sexuality to the shaping of modern culture and politics in Iran and of how changes in ideas about gender and sexuality affected conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, marriage, education, and citizenship. She concludes with a provocative discussion of Iranian feminism and its role in that country's current culture wars. In addition to providing an important new perspective on Iranian history, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates how using gender as an analytic category can provide insight into structures of hierarchy and power and thus into the organization of politics and social life

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Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards

This paper examines the politics of knowledge production as it relates to Muslim women in western literary traditions and con­temporary feminist writing, with a view to understanding the political, ideological, and economic mediations that have histor­ically framed these representations. The meta-narrative of the Muslim woman has shifted from the bold queens of medieval lit­erature to colonial images of the seraglio's veiled, secluded, and oppressed women. Contemporary feminist writing and popular culture have reproduced the colonial motifs of Muslim women, and these have regained currency in the aftermath of9/1 l. Drawing upon the work of Mohja Kahf, this paper begins by mapping the evolution of the Muslim woman archetype in western literary traditions. The paper then examines how some contemporary feminist literature has reproduced in new ways the discursive tropes that have had historical currency in Muslim women's textual representation. The analysis is atten­tive to the ways in which the cultural production of knowledge about Muslim women has been implicated historically by the relations of power between the Muslim world and the West ...

Muslim Women and the Politics of Representation

Although rape is a cross-cultural crime stemming primarily from patriarchal ideologies and gender power, the analysis of its effect on victims from various cultural groups remains to be unveiled. This study analyzes dilemmas that face mental health workers when dealing with rape victims within a specific cultural context—namely, Palestinian society. It demonstrates the multidimensionality of the crime and the intricacy of social reactions to rape, the rape victim, and abuse of women, deriving from a sociocultural need to protect and/or control victims. The in-depth analysis suggests that sociocultural determinants, such as the need to silence the occurrence of the rape, preserve female virginity, and privatize the crime in order to safeguard family honor and reputation, revictimizes and weakens the victim. This article argues that there is no universal method of dealing with rape victims and that professionals who are assisting victims of rape need to anchor their efforts within the cultural context, while at the same time treating each victim as a world unto herself. This calls for rethinking at both the sociopolitical and individual levels.

Barbara D. Metcalf

Papers

Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate