You’d Be Surprised What the Veil Can Hide

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This is part of a dialogue between Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi, and Iranian author Janet Afary. El Saadawi is famous in the Arab world for her outspokenness, particularly on the issue of women’s rights. (Double X interviews her here.) Afary is a professor of religious studies and feminist studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara and the author of Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, the book being discussed in this dialogue.

Dear Janet,

I am glad to see you’ve been reading my work since you were a graduate student. Did you read my work in English or Persian? (I write in Arabic.) I very much enjoyed your book: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. Egypt, my country, and Iran have many things in common, both in the past and the present.

Today in both countries, opposition groups are gaining more power against local regimes. Like you, I am optimistic that we will soon be free of both religious, patriarchal, and neo-colonial domination.

You speak in your book about what you called “sexual revolution,” which began in Iran seven decades ago and is still going today. Is it really a sexual revolution? And what do you mean by that? Are you referring to actual relations between men and women, inside and outside marriage? I wonder if sexual liberation can really happen in Iran, or any country, without political, economic, and educational liberation happening first, or at least happening together.

I agree with you that sexual and marriage customs and laws are changing radically in Iran, thanks to the growing number of educated and economically independent women. This is happening also in Egypt, in spite of the increasing numbers of veiled women. But many veiled women in Iran and Egypt (and other countries) use the veil to gain more social and sexual freedom.

A married Egyptian woman I know used to meet her male lover in her bedroom under the cover of a veil. She and her women friends were veiled, so he would wear one, too, and her husband would let him in, thinking he was one of her women friends.

Algerian women hid weapons under the veil during the revolution against French occupation. Iraqi women today use the veil to fight against American occupation. They feel free to protest on the street as long as they are veiled. I would like to discuss with you some of the points of the history of the veil. You know already that the philosophy of veiling women did not start in Islam. The same is true of many other traditions: honor killings, the stoning of sinful women, checking virginity through an intact hymen that bleeds on the wedding night, polygamy for men only, moral and sexual double standards, circumcision for boys and girls, chastity. All these unjust traditions got carried over from the slave system into the feudal into the capitalist present.

In most countries in the East and West, people honor the name of only the father and make the name of the mother shameful. The mother’s name is ignored and dies in history. In the U.S. and Europe, many women carry the name of their husbands, which is worse than carrying their father’s name, since they have to change their names if they change husbands.

I agree with what you say in your book about paradoxes in Iran today. The current political system and sexual social norms are clashing with the capitalist colonial values the society tries to adopt. In Egypt we have similar paradoxes. Young Egyptian women today are torn between two different political powers: Islamization and Americanization of Egypt. You can see young women in the streets covering their heads with the veil and uncovering their bellies in American blue jeans.

Do you see that in Iran today?

Nawal

Read Janet Afary's response here.