The Politics of the Headscarf in the United States

Bozena C. Welborne, Aubrey L. Westfall, Özge Çelik Russell, Sarah A. Tobin

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781501715389
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Politics of the Headscarf in the United States investigates the social and political effects of the practice of Muslim-American women wearing the headscarf (hijab) in a non-Muslim state. The authors find the act of head covering is not politically motivated in the US setting, but rather it accentuates and engages Muslim identity in uniquely American ways.

Transcending contemporary political debates on the issue of Islamic head covering, The Politics of the Headscarf in the United States addresses concerns beyond the simple, particular phenomenon of wearing the headscarf itself, with the authors confronting broader issues of lasting import. These issues include the questions of safeguarding individual and collective identity in a diverse democracy, exploring the ways in which identities inform and shape political practices, and sourcing the meaning of citizenship and belonging in the United States through the voices of Muslim-American women themselves.

The Politics of the Headscarf in the United States superbly melds quantitative data with qualitative assessment, and the authors smoothly integrate the results of nearly two thousand survey responses from Muslim-American women across forty-nine states. Seventy-two in-depth interviews with Muslim women living in the United States bolster the arguments put forward by the authors to provide an incredibly well-rounded approach to this fascinating topic.

Ultimately, the authors argue, women's experiences with identity and boundary construction through their head-covering practices carry important political consequences that may well shed light on the future of the United States as a model of democratic pluralism.

CHAPTER 1

The Islamic Head Covering

[Prophet], tell believing men to lower their glances and guard their private parts: that is purer for them. God is well aware of everything they do. And tell believing women that they should lower their glances, guard their private parts, and not display their charms beyond what [it is acceptable] to reveal; they should draw their veils over their breasts and not reveal their charms except to their husbands, their fathers, their husbands’ fathers, their sons, their husbands’ sons, their brothers, their brothers’ sons, their sisters’ sons, their womenfolk, their slaves, such men as attend them who have no sexual desire, or children who are not yet aware of women’s nakedness; they should not stamp their feet so as to draw attention to any hidden charms. Believers, all of you, turn to God so that you may prosper.

—Surah 24: 30–31

This chapter explores the practice of head covering in the United States by unpacking generational and fashion trends and the demographics of those who cover and through investigating the reasons for adopting the practice as explained by our survey participants. We situate this analysis within a contemporary historical frame, highlighting women’s agency and choice in embracing the practice within the American setting. Since the 1970s, head covering has become increasingly popular among Muslim women across the globe. In consequence, there have been intense academic debates about the reasons for its increasing popularity and whether Muslim women exercise free agency in adopting the headscarf.¹ While it is impossible to do justice to this vast literature in one chapter, we observe that the contested nature of this topic is largely due to the complexity of choices and actions underlying the practice itself—especially in a quasi-secular, democratic country.

The iconic Surah al-Nur (the Chapter of Light), with which we begin this chapter, is the scriptural genesis of the Islamic head covering and most explicitly describes its function in enacting both symbolic and social boundaries related to piety and gender within Islam. While many other verses in the Qur’an speak to the necessity of “barriers” between men and women, the requirement of demure, conservative, and pious comportment is clearly stated in these verses for both genders. However, there appears to be a greater onus placed on women to facilitate and maintain this boundary through the practice of covering.

Head covering was not invented by Muslims, nor is the practice specific to Islam. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women have all practiced head covering during the past two millennia (Amer 2014). In fact, it has pre-Islamic roots and was often used to signal status rather than piety and even ethnic background across a variety of religious and ethnic communities who first adopted similar practices in the Middle East and the Mediterranean Basin (Lewis 2007). Covering the head with cloth was used as a symbol of women’s status and sexual availability as far back as the thirteenth century BCE in Assyrian society. Later it was both adopted and adapted in ancient Greek, Roman, Sassanid, and Byzantine societies (Amer 2014). The use of head covering as a marker of women’s status was partially due to its “contextually interactive” role, in which the covering transcended religion and added a spatial dimension to its function by enforcing gender separation and thereby governing “who can interact with whom … and the nature of those interactions” (Lewis 2007, 151).

In the modern era, Muslim head covering has become a particularly powerful symbol of religious identity, women’s piety, modesty, and—depending on the audience—their subordination and submissiveness. Because of this powerful symbolic role, Muslim head-covering practices have provoked heated and emotional debates in both Muslim majority and Muslim minority states (Amer 2014). Most clothing styles have the potential to “create boundaries between people and shape collective identities” as a result of their symbolic, religious, and contextually interactive roles. However, Islamic head coverings have become a particularly powerful symbolic boundary marker in the last few decades (Shaheed 2008, 294).

Symbolic boundaries are conceptual constructs that allow social actors to create categorical and meaningful distinctions between objects, people, practices, space, and time (Epstein 1995; Lamont and Molnár 2002). Our social lives are influenced by the way these symbolic boundaries shape notions of membership, identity, similarity, and difference as well as societal inclusion and exclusion. These symbolic boundaries also emerge as mediums within which people can overcome stereotypes and gain social status, depending on an individual’s group affiliation and identity. The strategies informing this type of symbolic identity production are often referred to as “boundary work.” In the case of Muslim women in the United States these strategies represent opportunities for them to use religious and social resources to “craft distinctive identities that selectively appropriate values from the American cultural mainstream” while still projecting and safeguarding a personal Muslim identity (Bartkowski and Read 2003, 86). The symbolic boundaries associated with head covering are thus often contingent on the interplay between the religious, social, and political meanings attributed to the practice by a variety of social actors. These symbolic boundaries represent crosscutting individual and collective identities demarcating boundaries between non-Muslims and Muslims; differences across race, ethnicity, and generation within Muslim communities themselves; and most explicitly the gender differences between men and women. Ultimately, the iterative and interactive processes underlying the meanings, functions, and motivations associated with the headscarf reflect a complex set of choices and behaviors on the part of those women who choose to adopt it.

In the United States, Muslim women can best be understood as citizens embodying religious norms who enact, claim, and negotiate their religious but also social and even political identities through the practice of head covering. Most important, our research participants perceive head covering as a choice and express their agency by connecting it to their social and political lives. We explore the religious, social, and political motivations informing the practice of head covering through our survey and focus group data. While our research shows piety to be a primary reason for covering among our research participants, we distinguish it from other social and political motives for the practice among our respondents.

Modern Trajectories of Head Covering

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the significance of Islamic head covering came to the front and center of religious, social, and political discourse as a result of a global increase in the practice and in the global reach of Islam (Mahmood 2004). Several studies suggest that a growing number of Muslim women are covering, in both majority Muslim and Western societies.² This is a surprising development considering the Arab historian Albert Hourani’s prediction in the 1950s that the hijab would disappear by the end of the twentieth century,³ which he based on personal observations of the trend of “de-veiling” across Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq.⁴ Despite these predictions, head covering has doubled since the 1960s and 1970s (Carvalho 2009, 2013).⁵ Wearing the headscarf became an important symbol in the pro-Islamist movements in Egypt, Morocco, and Iran in the late twentieth century, while shedding the headscarf increasingly came to be identified with Westernization and imperialism (Hirschmann 2002). The latter interpretation is most often attributed to the ascendance and rhetoric of political Islam in the 1970s.⁶

It is important to note that head covering signals different political commitments depending on the context. For example, during the Iranian revolution, women donned the hijab as a sign of defiance against the shah’s regime (Nashat 1983), while during the headscarf affairs in France (1989–2003) it symbolized a complex act of identification with and defiance against the French secular state (Benhabib 2004), showcasing a determination to be both French and Muslim (Wing and Smith 2005). There are also veiling regimes or the “spatially realized sets of hegemonic rules and norms … produced by specific constellations of power” related to women’s head covering in both Muslim and non-Muslim settings (Secor 2002, 8). In these regimes, women experience varying possibilities for choice within a given space and thereby exercise “a series of cultural and subcultural competencies in their adherences to and destabilizations of veiling regimes, often moving between different regimes in the space of a single day and over the course of their lives” (Lewis 2007, 427–28). Adopting and shedding the headscarf both symbolize the varying political struggles reflected in women’s political agency across different national contexts (Golley 2004). Consequently, there are significant differences between adopting the headscarf in a liberal democracy where women are legally autonomous and wearing it in contexts of legal obligation, such as in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Over the past few decades the revival in head-covering practices has become the symbol of a “return to traditional values” (Winter 2008, 28) and “resistance to the perceived loss of cultural purity resulting from Western power and influence” (Hirschmann 2002, 179).

The global increase in head covering from the 1970s onward has also affected the Muslim population in the United States. Head covering became much more commonplace after the 1990s, especially among the second- and third-generation immigrant populations (Carvalho 2013). The increase in covering among younger, American-born Muslim women, sometimes against their parents’ will, also challenges the view of religious socialization as a linear “transmission [of values] from one generation to the next” (Kühle 2012, 114). Further, the revival of head covering among second-generation immigrant women coincided with the debates on the integration and cultural adaptation of immigrant populations in Western societies. As a result, questions about Muslim women’s agency and choice in adopting the head covering have been common in both academic and policy circles.

Agency and Choice in Head Covering

The increase in the popularity of covering has sparked intense debates about women’s agency and choice in adopting the practice. In Western academic debates, covered Muslim women have often been portrayed as victims of patriarchal religious norms, and in the 1990s liberal feminists expressed concerns about covered women’s access to and enjoyment of their individual rights in both non-Muslim and Muslim countries. These debates mainly centered on questions of whether the head covering symbolizes and maintains patriarchal gender inequalities and relatedly, whether cultural group rights can therefore be antithetical to the individual rights of women (Okin and Cohen 1999). Even Muslim women who actively invoked their personal autonomy and choice in adopting the practice were often perceived as suffering from cognitive dissonance—essentially, while they may have thought their choices were “free,” they were seen to be in denial of the paternalism behind head covering. This argument challenged the authenticity and questioned the autonomy of their agency (Sheth 2006). The conception of head covering as a falsely desired choice is driven by narrow understandings of individual agency as limited to active resistance against what are deemed to be oppressive norms. However, such assumptions about the headscarf often invalidate Muslim Americans’ sense of their own personal and especially moral autonomy.

Furthermore, in the aftermath of September eleventh and more recent US terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims, covered Muslim women are paradoxically portrayed as religiously fundamentalist and potentially dangerous while simultaneously cast as subjugated and oppressed (Aziz 2012). Paradoxically perceived as both victims and threats, Muslim women are turned into an “allegory of undesirable cultural difference” (Bilge 2010, 10). This paradox drives the continuum of “othering” behaviors toward Muslim-American women discussed in chapter 3.

Head covering can symbolize both resistance and subversion—an interpretation that moves beyond the binary of oppression and/or false consciousness but remains squarely within the bounds of liberal notions of agency as being authentic only when arising in response to externally imposed norms, acts, or institutions. Some have argued that head covering may constitute a strategic way to facilitate freedom of movement and employment and enable social interactions outside the private domain. It may also be a resistance to sexual objectification or Western hegemony.⁷ The headscarf can be “both a part of the material being and have an independent character from it,” effectively containing the seeds of both regulation and subversion within itself, depending on the wearer’s opportunities within a given veiling regime (Tanir 2009, 6). This notion of the head covering as a means for subverting hegemonic norms certainly attributes a form of agency to Muslim women. However, the view of head covering as a subversive act has also been criticized for excluding the possibility of an agency situated beyond resistance to externally imposed norms (Mahmood 2004).

More recently, the head covering has been analyzed as an embodied religious practice through which the agency of Muslim women emerges.⁸ This scholarship draws on poststructuralist understandings of agency and the role of embodiment in agency formation. Poststructuralist approaches challenge the idea that agency necessarily requires autonomy from external norms and power structures and instead views agency as created within systems of power (Butler 1990). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s understanding of power as both repressive and productive, Laborde suggests that agency does not exist prior to social forces but is rather developed within and constituted by those same forces (2006, 364). Thus embodiment—the expression of norms and values in physical forms—has become an important analytical tool for exploring how women’s agency is constituted within patriarchal systems of power.⁹

From this perspective, Muslim women’s embodied submission to religious authority through head covering could be a condition enabling their agency. The act of wearing the head covering enables the development of specific moral dispositions and virtues that are associated with being a “good Muslim.” This embodied practice in which the wearer voluntarily submits herself to religious norms and her subjectivity (her conscious experience of head covering) is premised on a chosen docility, which reflects her religious agency (Mahmood 2005). Thu...

Table of contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Author Contributions
• Introduction
• 1. The Islamic Head Covering
• 2. Unity amid Diversity?
• 3. Visibly Different
• 4. Islamic Ethics and Practices of Head Covering in American Political Life
• 5. Head Covering and Political Participation
• 6. Citizenship without Representation
• Conclusions and Implications
• Appendixes
• Glossary of Foreign Words
• References
• Index