Is it possible to have Freedom and Equality?

 

The parable of John Rawls

Janan Ganesh in The FT

In the latest Pixar film, Soul, every human life starts out as a blank slate in a cosmic holding pen. Not until clerks ascribe personalities and vocations does the corporeal world open. As all souls are at their mercy, there is fairness of a kind. There is also chilling caprice. And so Pixar cuts the stakes by ensuring that each endowment is benign. No one ends up with dire impairments or unmarketable talents in the “Great Before”. 

Kind as he was (a wry Isaiah Berlin, it is said, likened him to Christ), John Rawls would have deplored the cop-out. This year is the 50th anniversary of the most important tract of political thought in the last century or so. To tweak the old line about Plato, much subsequent work in the field amounts to footnotes to A Theory of Justice. Only some of this has to do with its conclusions. The method that yielded them was nearly as vivid. 

Rawls asked us to picture the world we should like to enter if we had no warning of our talents. Nor, either, of our looks, sex, parents or even tastes. Don this “veil of ignorance”, he said, and we would maximise the lot of the worst-off, lest that turned out to be us. As we brave our birth into the unknown, it is not the average outcome that troubles us. 

From there, he drew principles. A person’s liberties, which should go as far as is consistent with those of others, can’t be infringed. This is true even if the general welfare demands it. As for material things, inequality is only allowed insofar as it lifts the absolute level of the poorest. Some extra reward for the hyper-productive: yes. Flash-trading or Lionel Messi’s leaked contract: a vast no. Each of these rules puts a floor — civic and economic — under all humans. 

True, the phrase-making helped (“the perspective of eternity”). So did the timing: 1971 was the Keynesian Eden, before Opec grew less obliging. But it was the depth and novelty of Rawls’s thought that brought him reluctant stardom. 

Even those who denied that he had “won” allowed that he dominated. Utilitarians, once-ascendant in their stress on the general, said he made a God of the individual. The right, sure that they would act differently under the veil, asked if this shy scholar had ever met a gambler. But he was their reference point. And others’ too. A Theory might be the densest book to have sold an alleged 300,000 copies in the US alone. It triumphed. 

And it failed. Soon after it was published, the course of the west turned right. The position of the worst-off receded as a test of the good society. Robert Nozick, Rawls’s libertarian Harvard peer, seemed the more relevant theorist. It was a neoliberal world that saw both men out in 2002. 

An un-public intellectual, Rawls never let on whether he cared. Revisions to his theory, and their forewords, suggest a man under siege, but from academic quibbles not earthly events. For a reader, the joy of the book is in tracking a first-class mind as it husbands a thought from conception to expression. Presumably that, not averting Reaganism, was the author’s aim too. 

And still the arc of his life captures a familiar theme. It is the ubiquity of disappointment — even, or especially, among the highest achievers. Precisely because they are capable of so much, some measure of frustration is their destiny. I think of Tony Blair, thrice-elected and still, post-Brexit, somehow defeated. (Sunset Boulevard, so good on faded actors, should be about ex-politicians.) Or of friends who have made fortunes but sense, and mind, that no one esteems or much cares about business. 

The writer Blake Bailey tells an arresting story about Gore Vidal. The Sage of Amalfi was successful across all literary forms save poetry. He was rich enough to command one of the grandest residential views on Earth. If he hadn’t convinced Americans to ditch their empire or elect him to office, these were hardly disgraces. On that Tyrrhenian terrace, though, when a friend asked what more he could want, he said he wanted “200 million people” to “change their minds”. At some level, however mild his soul, so must have Rawls.

Is the Veil (Burqa/Hijab) a sign of Islamic fundamentalism?

Dr. Farzana Hassan

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Also read

As a Muslim woman, I see the veil as a rejection of progressive values

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BBC Documentary 2015 - This World - Britain's Jihadi Brides

As a Muslim woman, I see the veil as a rejection of progressive values

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Guardian


 

 ‘In 1899 Qasim Amin warned that unless Muslims embraced modernity and equality, the future would be bleak. We are in that bleakness now.’ Illustration by Noma Bar

It could be a millenarian crisis or a delayed reaction to decades of bad history, but millions of Muslims seem to have turned inwards, hankering for an imagined golden age. They are contemptuous of modernity’s bendable, ductile values. Some are drawn to reactionary dogma, and preachers while a good number have thrown themselves into political Islam to resist and combat western hegemonies – or so the story goes.

As a practising (though flawed) Shia Muslim, I watch the new puritans with apprehension. So too other Muslims worldwide, the silent many, watch and tremble. From the eighth to the early 20th century, Muslims strove for a broad education (as commanded in the Qur’an), questioned doctrines, and were passionate about scientific advancements, political and social ideals and art. Not even humiliating colonial rule deterred them from the march forward. Now the marchers are walking backwards. The hijab, jilbab, burqa and niqab are visible signs of this retreat from progressive values.

This article will divide people. Women I respect and like wear hijabs and jilbabs to articulate their faith and identity. Others do so to follow their dreams, to go into higher education or jobs. And an increasing number are making a political statement. I am not assuming that the coverings all represent simple oppression. What I am saying is that many women who take up the veil, in any of its forms, do so without delving fully into its implications, significance or history. Their choice, even if independently made, may not be fully examined.

Muslim feminists of the past critiqued and repudiated the veil. One of them was a man, Qasim Amin, an Egyptian judge and philosopher, who in 1899 wrote The Liberation of Women.He was the John Stuart Mill of the Arab world. Huda Shaarawi set up the Egyptian women’s union in the early 1920s. One day in 1923, as she disembarked from a train in Cairo, she threw off her veil and claimed her right to be visible. Educated Iranian women started feminist magazines and campaigned against the veil around the same time. These pioneers have been written out of history or are dismissed as western stooges by some contemporary Muslim intellectuals.

After the transformative 60s, Muslim feminists resumed the fight for equality. European rule was over. It was time. The Moroccan academic Fatema Mernissi, Egypt’s Nawal El Saadawi and the Pakistani scholar Riffat Hassan all argued for female emancipation. They rightly saw the veil as a a tool and symbol of oppression and subservience. Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil ( 1975) is a classic text. So too El Saadawi’s The Hidden Face of Eve (1975). But more conservative Islamic tenets have taken over lands, communities, families, heads and hearts.

The promise of this version is a return to certainties and “purity” of belief, a mission backed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Deobandi revivalists, funded by Arab money, now run more mosques in Britain than any other Muslim subgroup. Women are told not to travel without male relatives, not to work, to be subservient, to veil. This movement began as a reaction against the Indian raj and mutated into a fundamentalist creed. Today their pushback against “cultural imperialism” appeals to many alienated young Muslims. And, in part, it explains the growing popularity of the hijab, jilbab and full veil .

But in the Qur’an, the veil is mostly used metaphorically to describe barriers between good and bad, believers and nonbelievers. In two verses, women are told to lower their gaze, and to cover their private parts and bosoms. Men are also instructed to lower their gaze, and to dress modestly. One verse commands the women in the prophet’s family to fully veil, partly to protect them from enemies and supplicants.

Sahar Amer, associate professor at the University of North Carolina, has studied these sacred injunctions: “[Nowhere] is the hijab used to describe, let alone prescribe, the necessity for Muslim women to wear a headscarf or any other pieces of clothing often seen covering women in Islamic countries today. Even after reading those passages dealing with the female dress code, one continues to wonder what exactly the hijab is: is it a simple scarf? A purdah? A chador? Or something else? Which parts of the body exactly is it supposed to cover? Just the hair? The hair and neck? The arms? Hands? Feet? Face? Eyes?”

Veils, in truth, predate Islam. Zoroastrian and Byzantine upper-class ladies wore them to keep aloof from the hoi polloi. When Islam’s armies first reached Persia, they were shocked at this snobbery; then they adopted the custom they loathed; the control of women was hard-wired into their psyches.

All religions cast women as sinners and temptresses. Conservative Islam has revived the slander for our times. Women have to be sequestered or contained lest they raise male lust and cause public disorder. Some young Muslim women argue that veils liberate them from a modern culture that objectifies and sexualises females. That argument is appealing; but if credible, why would so many hijabis dress in tight jeans and clinging tops, and why would so many Muslim women flock to have liposuction or breast enhancements?

It is complicated: veils for me represent both religious arrogance and subjugation; they both desexualise and fervidly sexualise. Women are primarily seen as sexual creatures whose hair and bodies incite desire and disorder in the public space. The claim that veils protect women from lasciviousness and disrespect carries an element of self-deception. I have been at graduation ceremonies where shrouded female students have refused to shake the hand of the chancellor. Veiled women have provoked confrontations over their right to wear veils, in courts, at schools and in colleges and workplaces. But I regard their victories as a rejection of social compromise.

Of even more concern are young Muslim lives. Little girls are being asked to don hijabs and jilbabs, turned into sexual beings long before puberty. You can even buy stretchy baby hijabs with fake Calvin Klein and Versace logos.

Like a half-naked woman, a veiled female to me represents an affront to female dignity, autonomy and potential. Both are marionettes, and have internalised messages about femaleness. A woman in a full black cloak, her face and eyes masked walked near to where I was sitting in a park recently, but we could not speak. Behind fabric, she was more unapproachable than a fort. She had a baby girl in a pushchair. Her young son was running around. Will the girl be put into a hijab, then a jilbab? Will the son expect that of his sister and wife one day? To never have the sun warm your face, the breeze through your hair – is that what God wants? Whatever happened to sisterhood?

But do those who choose to veil think of women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and even the west, who are prosecuted, flogged, tortured or killed for not complying? This is not a freestanding choice – it can’t be. Although we hear from vocal British hijabis and niqabis, those who are forced cannot speak out. A fully burqaed woman once turned up at my house, a graduate, covered in cuts, burns, bruises and bites. Do we know how many wounded, veiled women walk around hidden among us? Sexual violence in Saudi Arabia and Iran is appallingly high, as is body dysmorphia.

Liberalism is being tested by the new Islamic ardency. A French-style ban would be unwise and unjust. But institutions can apply dress codes. A bank worker cannot dress like a stripper; a child cannot wear a boob tube to school. Have rules and stick to them, within reason. In 1899, Qasim Amin warned that unless Muslims embraced modernity and equality, the future would be bleak. We are in that bleakness now, and few dare to speak up for its values.

Hair is the western woman's veil

The west is fixated on Muslim veils, but all women's hair is bound in ideals of femininity, and a source of male judgment

• 
• • Arwa Mahdawi
  • theguardian.com, Friday 10 January 2014 15.23 GMT

'The time and money women spend on their hair isn’t just the free exercise of personal preferences, it’s part of a broader cultural performance.' Photograph: Ruslan Kudrin/Alamy

Packing for a winter holiday in The Muslim World can be tricky. Is the same outfit that dazzled a Shia fundamentalist in Iran going to be considered passé in Afghanistan? Does a classic black niqab work across all regions, or should you occasionally flash a little face?

These are all difficult questions. Luckily, however, the Pew Research Center has combined data visualisation with clip-art Orientalism to create a one-glance guide to female fashions in Muslim-majority countries. Pew has managed the impressive feat of reducing millions of women across markedly different regions down to just six stock "Muslim woman" cartoons. I don't want to oversimplify, but the overall conclusion from the visual is that some Muslims find faces acceptable, but most Muslims hate hair.

The Pew illustration is based on data from a wide-ranging survey conducted by the University of Michigan across seven predominately Muslim countries. While the survey looked at a number of topics, it is veiling that has been most seized upon by the press. As an article in Foreign Policy says: "Researchers investigated public perception of several hot-button issues … [but] one of their more interesting findings had to do with veiling."

Really? I mean, are veils really that interesting? As far as I can see the most interesting finding from the study is that it is yet another demonstration of the west's bizarre fixation on what Muslim women wear and how they cover their hair.

In part, this obsession seems to stem from the importance hair holds as a social and sexual signifier in non-Islamic countries. Back in 2001, Hillary Clinton gravely told the Yale College graduating class: "Your hair will send significant messages to those around you: what hopes and dreams you have for the world, but more, what hopes and dreams you have for your hair. Pay attention to your hair, because everyone else will.'' Clinton was being sarcastic. But in vitriol veritas: hair matters. Particularly if you're a woman.

Studies have found that the average woman in the UK spends £26,500 on her hair over her lifetime, with 25% of respondents saying they would rather spend money on their hair than food. And women don't just spend serious money on their hair, they spend serious time on it. On average, British women spend just under two years of their lives styling their hair at home or in salons.

Whether it's covered by a veil or coloured by Vidal Sassoon, hair is a feminist issue. Indeed, hair is so bound up with ideals of femininity that, to some degree, the measure of a woman is found in the length of her hair. In the semiotics of female sexuality, long hair is (hetero)sexual, short hair is non-sexual or homosexual, and no hair means you're either a victim or a freak. When Natalie Portman shaved her head for a film role she summed up these stereotypes with the observation that: "Some people will think I'm a neo-Nazi or that I have cancer or I'm a lesbian." But Portman also added: "It's quite liberating to have no hair."

Involuntarily losing your hair is an incredibly traumatic thing. When I was anorexic it was the fear of going bald that prompted me to get better, rather than, you know, the possibility of osteoporosis or infertility or death. Pulling out clumps of your hair is like pulling out clumps of your identity. But isn't it a little worrying that a bunch of dead cells on your head holds this much power? And isn't it odd that we should talk about chopping off our locks as "liberating?"

In a sense, women's hair in the west functions as it's own sort of veil, one which most of us are unconsciously donning. The time and money women spend on their hair isn't just the free exercise of personal preferences, it's part of a broader cultural performance of what it means to be a woman; one that has largely been directed by men. Rather than fixating on what the veil means for Muslim women, then, we should probably spend a little more time thinking about our own homegrown veils. Because it's still an unfortunate fact that, across the Muslim and non-Muslim world, women are often judged more by what is covering their head that what is in it.