The Muslim Woman And The Headscarf: A Study Of Catherine Bullock’s Work
By
Grace Mubashir, New Age Islam
16 January
2023
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Catherine Bullock Gives Us An Overview Of The
Debates About The Hijab In Europe And America By Discussing In Detail The Hijab
Experiences And Discrimination Heard From Muslim Friends And The News. This Article
Is About The Book 'Muslim Woman And Face: Rethinking Public Consciousness'.
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Catherine
Bullock's ‘Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical and
Modern Stereotypes’ is a book that has given a new dimension to the media
debate and academic discourse on hijab and Niqab through the voice of a Muslim
woman. She is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and
Canada's first female chair of the Islamic Society of North America. The book
was published in 2002 by The International Institute of Islamic Thought in
America.
Born into a
Christian Anglican family in Australia, Bullock converted to Islam in 1994
while studying in Canada. Bullock's study of different religions led to this
change. During that period, converting to Islam and starting to wear hijab
caused her to face some special experiences.
Personal
experiences and stereotypes about the hijab led Bullock to choose a topic
related to the hijab for her PhD research. This research, which was completed
in 1999, was later published in book form. This work discusses in detail
methodological issues common to studies of Muslim women.
In five
chapters, Bullock analyses the hijab's colonial history, experiences and
perspectives, multiple dimensions, Islamic feminist perspectives including
Fatima Mernissi's, and different theories about the hijab.
Colonial
Politics
The first
chapter, titled ‘Hijab in the Colonial Age’, provides a history of Europe's
establishment of political and cultural hegemony over Middle Eastern countries.
By doing so, Bullock brings out through historical facts how the European
discourse that the hijab is anti-feminist has been included in mainstream
discussions and how the same Western-liberal ideas are reproduced by thinkers
including feminists in the post-colonial period. "The suffering of women
is the creation of the Qur'an, and as long as the Qur'an is accepted as a book
of faith, there is no way but to accept this tragic life," this Western
argument was used not only by Christian missionaries, but also by colonial
powers to exercise political dominance in the Middle East. The veil became a
symbol of a country's backwardness as the indigenous elites adopted this
European argument as well and propagated the notion that the status of their
caste women could only be elevated to the European model.
Moreover,
this dispute caused internal division among the people of the Muslim lands.
Thus, the author observes that two social hierarchies were formed, the elite
class who were the consumers of colonialism and the lower class and traditional
Muslims who did not conform to the Western models. Bullock points out in this
chapter that the Western intolerance of the mask is because it obstructs the
male gaze and subverts the European system of authority of 'seeing others
rather than oneself'. The veiled beauty of the Orient was envisioned as
imprisoned and awaiting a saviour, the European male. Posing as the saviours of
Muslim women, they saw the veil as a design of a jealous husband who forbids
him from seeing the woman created for the pleasure of mankind.
In this book,
Bullock explains the cultural fraud perpetrated by the French in Algeria. Upset
that veiled Algerian women were not yielding to them, they selected models from
sex workers, covered their faces or wore Niqabs but exposed their
breasts, put them inside iron bars, took dark-coloured photos, painted
portraits, made postcards, and widely circulated in the Western world. The book
discusses how the West has stripped away the veil of women in many Muslim
countries to apply Lord Cromer's idea of “civilization by force if necessary”
and how post-colonial modernizing rulers have implemented the same principle.
Bullock
accuses mainstream feminist-neo-liberal-left, neo-orientalist discourses of
reproducing and expanding this colonial paradigm, including Fatima Mernissi,
who is cited as an authority in all discussions.
They charge
that liberals and feminists who defend many of the impositions of contemporary
conditions not only fail to see the discriminatory regulations adopted by many
governments at face value, but also support them. Bullock supports Laila
Ahmed's argument that anti-mask views were not initiated by women by linking
different state machineries and male-centric interventions.
New Discrimination
Experiences
Catherine
Bullock describes the changes in her environment and colleagues and the
questions she faced from them since she started wearing the hijab in Toronto.
By discussing in detail, the experiences of hijab from Muslim friends,
discrimination and dismissal from work and educational institutions, it gives
us an overview of the active debates about the hijab in Europe and the United
States that continue today. What differentiates this chapter from the book is
that it gives voice to Muslim women's opinions and self-analyses about their
own existence, role and representation, most importantly excluded from these
discussions.
Catherine
Bullock matured into this endeavour in the absence of purely academic
approaches, as opposed to writing stories in which Muslim women express
emotional responses to the discrimination they faced.
Western
liberal narratives and anxieties about hijab and niqab are Islamophobic
discourses, centres on the Muslim woman, and the narrow-mindedness and denial
of freedom of choice espoused even by feminists are as relevant today as they
were twenty years ago when the author conducted interviews for this book. In a
detailed report codified by interviewing sixteen women of different professions
and age groups living in Canada, she argued that each woman has different
reasons for choosing the hijab and that easy generalizations are not possible.
This chapter discusses the positive aspects of hijab, non-repressive dimensions
of socialization, equality and freedom that hijab determines, and attitudes
towards hijab in different societies. Catherine Bullock explains that her
mission is to present for analysis the perspectives of Muslim women within the
veil in a way that is palatable to Western audiences.
Criticism
of Fatima Mernissi
Another
feature of this book is that Fatima Mernissi’s writings are widely criticized.
Bullock critiques Mernissi's both works, ‘Beyond the Veil’, ‘Veil and
Masculinity’, and the entire argument, including methodology, in light of the
works and social contexts Mernissi himself used to discuss the veil. Acknowledging
the tragedies Mernissi faced during her childhood in Moroccan society with the
veil and hijab, Bullock questions the generalization of general theories by
generalizing discriminations that exist as part of a particular society's
customs or state interests.
Finally,
Bullock posits an alternative theory of masking that draws on an
anthropological and sociological approach. Bullock argues that the hijab
functions as a sign of resistance against the consumerist capitalist culture of
the twenty-first century. This puts forward a different reading from the
stereotypes about the hijab. Bullock develops the multiple dimensions
associated with the hijab, including revolutionary resistance, political
protest, religious, means of entering the public sphere, statement of identity,
ritual, and state law.
In her
inquiry into the source of the Western discourse that the veil is oppressive,
Catherine openly writes that while hijab wearers in Toronto and the West argue
that it is liberating, the colonial state interest has always sought to make
the hijab oppressive and a flag of disenfranchisement. Contrary to the
perception that the Muslim woman is not part of the public and confined within
the home, the right of the hijab to the woman points to the fact that the woman
has to fulfil her role in the public and the mainstream. Catherine supports the
feminist’s argument that to accept the natural difference between men and women
is to accept male supremacy by citing the Islamic teachings of equality between
men and women and the freedom of worship that does not differentiate between
men and women. Catherine Bullock argues that the hijab is a safe weapon of
resistance in a 21st century consumer capitalist culture that reifies and
commodifies the female body, does not deflate femininity and is not a sign of
social disenfranchisement.
The final
sections address the broader conceptual dimensions of the hijab and its wearer,
including the hijab, sexuality, masculinity, the beauty industry, and
religiosity. The author argues that the hijab acts as an empowering weapon of
resistance against beauty competition in the twenty-first century consumerist
capitalist culture, which has disastrous effects on women's self-esteem and
physical health.
The book
'Muslim Women and the Veil: Rethinking Public Consciousness' is a precise
response to those interested parties who attack the religion rather than
embracing the religious, revolutionary, political and aesthetic dimensions of
the hijab in its broadest sense. In this book of about three hundred pages, the
author has discussed many scholarly sayings and other narrators' references
about the subject in this context.
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A regular columnist for NewAgeIslam.com, Mubashir
V.P is a PhD scholar in Islamic Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia and freelance
journalist.
URL: https://newageislam.com/books-documents/muslim-woman-headscarf-catherine-bullock-/d/128881
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