For an item of clothing that virtually no Australian Muslims wear, the burqa sure gets plenty of airtime. I've never seen the (usually blue) all-enveloping cloak with the small material grill for sale in any of the bricks-and-mortar Islamic clothing stores I've visited. Short of travelling to Afghanistan, the only place I can think where an anti-Islam protester might get one is by searching Halloween costume listings on eBay or Etsy.
That’s what the Afghan burqa, or chadri, has become—a fetishised symbol to mock Muslims. Imagine a politician walking into the Australian parliament dressed up in a nun’s habit, or wearing sidelocks and a felt hat, or in blackface wearing a loincloth and tribal body paint. When these items of religious and cultural dress—almost inevitably cheap, counterfeit versions—are donned by non-adherent members of the dominant racial group their meanings are spoiled and transformed into stigma symbols. Stripped of their natural context, they become emblems that mark a minority group as being worthy of ostracism, disgust, pity, and ridicule.
Muslim veiling practices have long been the subject of Western fascination and loathing even before colonialists dominated Oriental lands. Nineteenth-century French photographers in Algeria hired women, most likely prostitutes, to attend their studios and dress up in traditional face-veils, jewellery and dresses, but with their breasts exposed.
The postcards were then sold to other Westerners in what was a very lucrative business. They were an artificial construction reflecting the imagination of the colonialists, as were the harem paintings of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, who never even set foot in the Middle East, or Hollywood’s chiffon-veiled belly-dancers of the studio era.
Ironically, vast numbers of Muslims were initially keen to embrace Westernisation in the first half of the twentieth century. As a growing middle-class emerged, women and men adopted the French and British modes of dressing. Men put away their turbans and cloaks, shaved their beards, and put on suits. Women took off their headcovers and face-veils and wore skirts and blouses along with fashionable hairstyles.
People in black and white photographs of mid-twentieth-century Cairo, Tehran, Kabul or Istanbul wouldn’t be out of place in London, Paris, New York or Sydney. Iran and Turkey even banned traditional dress for both men and women, with Iran’s Reza Shah proclaiming: 'Westerners now wouldn’t laugh at us' and ordered men to wear bowler hats.
But as disenchantment grew with forced Westernisation and secularisation, both at the hands of dictatorial Muslim rulers, as well as meddling by foreign powers, a re-veiling movement emerged in protest. The growth of religious fundamentalism spurred re-adoption of headcovers and face-veils, particularly as women became the contested battleground.
Veiling was no longer simply a traditional religious practice that varied in style from culture to culture, but a symbol of resistance.
"There are many different types of Muslim female dress just as there are many different types of Christian religious items of clothing, that all carry different meanings and symbols for their wearers."
Whether the black Iranian chador, the blue Afghan chadri, or the Egyptian hijab and niqab, female veiling was re-adopted by growing numbers of the children of the middle-class un-veilers. (Rural and lower-class women had often maintained traditional clothing, whilst the small number of elite, upper-class women had the resources and power to wear whatever the situation required: scarves at mosques and ballroom gowns at parties.)
But fundamentalism is a sterile spirituality, unsatisfactory to the majority who are not fueled by anger and angst. Today, many Muslims wish neither to reject their religious heritage, nor are they bound up in a myopic, apocalyptic vision of hate as spewed out by ISIS. They seek a middle way between respecting the basic requirements of their faith—including modest dress for women and men, however individually interpreted—and living in the twenty-first century with all the challenges and opportunities that brings.
They are the ones who will turn up to an interfaith dinner wearing a long dress and headscarf and sit next to a Jewish female rabbi and share stories about balancing work and family life. Or, they are the ones who will outperform their male peers in engineering exams, whilst looking forward to marrying an arranged mate chosen by their families. They are even the ones that hold down jobs as doctors, physical therapists, computer programmers and pharmacists whilst covering their faces in front of unrelated men.
So, there is not just one Muslim veil, the fetishised and feared burqa. There are many different types of Muslim female dress just as there are many different types of Christian religious items of clothing, that all carry different meanings and symbols for their wearers.
Just as Christian women might wear a full habit if they are cloistered nuns, simple baptismal crosses if they are Baptist laywomen, or white kerchiefs and long dresses if they belong to a plain church, Australian Muslim women likewise run the gamut from bare-headed to fully-veiled. What they all expect and deserve is the freedom to peacefully practice their religion—and basic decency and respect from their political representatives.
Dr Rachel Woodlock is an expat Australian academic and writer living in Ireland.