Veil of Fears: Why they veil; why we should leave it alone - Afghan women

Last month's dramatic pictures of Afghan women shyly peeking out from beneath freshly lifted veils set off a torrent of commentary on the meaning and aims of the war. Although Afghanistan's new rulers quickly abolished the Taliban's draconian codes of womanly conduct, some Americans called for a government-imposed program of feminist reform. Feminists, like Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler, even tried to spin the war as a crusade against a global "patriarchy."

Meanwhile, the mainstream press was busy detailing the horrors of the Taliban's treatment of women, focusing on the veil. "It was like being in jail," said one Afghan woman of her years under the veil. But now, proclaimed the New York Times, "the prisoners have been set free." In a cover story on Muslim women, Time magazine dubbed the Afghan burka "a body bag for the living."

But the "veil as body bag" notion is both mistaken and dangerous. There is no surer way to drive the Islamic world into the arms of the fundamentalists than to force Western feminism on a newly conquered Muslim country. It is no coincidence that the two Muslim fundamentalist regimes of our day-Iran and Afghanistan-arose in nations that had systematically attempted to root out traditional Islamic practices regarding women. (Those efforts were sponsored by the shah in Iran and the Soviets in Afghanistan.) Instead of being damned as a senseless outrage, veiling deserves a qualified defense. The practice has undoubtedly slowed the Muslim world's path to modernity, and that is a serious problem. But that difficulty would never have arisen in the first place if veiling hadn't accomplished something important. Veiling is embraced by millions of Muslim men and women as one of the keys to their way of life. They are not mistaken.

The conflict between modernity and the traditional Muslim view of women is one of the most important causes of this war. The tiresome claim of the leftist academy that poverty causes terrorism misses the point. So far from being poor, Muslim fundamentalists tend to come from a relatively wealthy modernizing class. The terrorists and their supporters are generally newly urbanized, college-educated professionals from intact families with rural backgrounds. They are a rising but frustrated cohort, shut out of power by a more entrenched and Westernized elite. True, the new fundamentalists often find themselves stymied by the weak economies of Muslim countries, but as a class they are relatively well off. Like many revolutions, the Muslim fundamentalist movement has been spurred by increased income, education, and expectations. But it is the clash between traditional Middle Eastern family life and modernity that has decisively pushed so many toward fundamentalism. And women are at the center of the problem.

Although the puzzle of "modernity and the Muslim woman" is one of several keys to this war, the feminist sensibility of the American press has rendered the connection between terrorism and the Islamic sexual system all but invisible. The press has been obsessed with the relatively small number of modernized women in Afghan cities who were indeed viciously oppressed by the Taliban's infamous policies. Women who had once been accustomed to Western skirts were not only forced to cover themselves entirely and forbidden to leave home without a male relative, they were banned even from making noises with their shoes as they walked through the streets of the city.

The world has justly condemned these policies, but this picture of government-imposed veiling does not accurately describe the situation of most Afghan women under the Taliban, much less the lives of the many educated women throughout the Middle East who have enlisted in the Muslim fundamentalist movement through their decision to don the veil.

The Taliban's code of womanly behavior was intentionally directed toward the cities. The aim was to "purify" those areas of Afghanistan that had been "corrupted" by modernization. But the Taliban never bothered to enforce its rules in traditional areas. Actually, in most Afghan villages, women rarely wear the burka. That's because villages in Afghanistan are organized into kin-oriented areas, and the veil needs wearing only when a woman is among men from outside of her kin group. A rural woman puts on a burka for travel, especially to cities. Yet just by exiting her home, a woman in a modern city inevitably mixes with men who are not her kin. That's why the Taliban prohibited the modernized women of Kabul from so much as stepping onto the street without a male relative. So the real problem with the veil in Afghanistan was the Taliban's attempt to impose the traditional system of veiling on a modernizing city. Yet, remarkable as it may seem, many modernizing urban women throughout the Middle East have freely accepted at least a portion of the Taliban's reasoning. These educated women have actually taken up the veil-and along with it, Muslim fundamentalism. To see why, it is necessary to understand what makes traditional Muslim women veil in the first place.