Burqa: Garment as Signifier - TapDancing Lizard Publications

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Burqa: Garment as Signifier
The significance of the signifier does not reside in the object beheld, but in the beholder.
Copyright © 2012 Catherine Cartwright-Jones
Cover Graphic by Alex Morgan
Published by Henna Page Publications, a division of TapDancing Lizard LLC
Stow, Ohio, 44224 USA
All rights Reserved.
Catherine Cartwright-Jones
Cultural Geography, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology
Burqa: Garment as Signifier Copyright © 2012 Catherine Cartwright-Jones TapDancing Lizard LLC
This book is provided free by hennapage.com and mehandi.com
Please purchase henna and body art supplies from http://www.mehandi.com
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7 yards of polyester as Honor, Protection, Purity, Prestige, Oppression, Resistance,
Violence, Poverty, and a Justification for Military invasion
“Burqa: Garment as Signifier” was a research paper originally written as part of
completion of the Masters of Liberal Studies degree at Kent State University, in Kent,
Ohio, USA, by Catherine Cartwright-Jones in 2004. The paper was edited, and a
foreword added in 2012.
In 2012, Catherine made a good faith effort to reconnect with the original websites and
contact image owners cited in the paper. Most of the original websites no longer are
online, and the contact emails were returned “Mail delivery failed: returning message to
sender.” In lieu of explicit permission, TapDancing Lizard LLC claims fair use of
material quoted for academic research and educational material, with full citations.
This paper was originally written in partial fulfillment for PhD, 2004, with notes and
introduction added 2012
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Contents:
Foreword …………………………………………………………………………………7
Part I: Burqa: Garment as Signifier …………………………………………………….17
Veiling within Islamic Geographies: Signifier and Discipline in Space ………………..21
The Burqa and Veils within Islamic Geographies: Law and Resistance ….….…………25
The Burqa as Signifier in Context: Islamic Pashtun Afghanistan ………………………27
The Burqa in the Shop …………………………………………………………………..28
The Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Ethnic Signifier ………………………...……31
The Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Signifier in Personal Expression …………….32
The Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Physical Environment of the Steppe ……...…34
The Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Physical Environment of the Marketplace …..35
The Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Public Spaces and Men’s Places……………..40
The Burqa in Afghani Geographies: Private Spaces ………………………….…………45
Part II: The Burqa and the Taliban: The Burqa and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan:
Boundaries Disrupted….…………………………………………….…….…………….48
The Burqa and the Taliban: Boundaries Re-Established…………………………….…..49
The Burqa and the Taliban: Boundaries Enforced ………………………………………52
Part III: The Politicization of the Burqa in the West: Images of the Burqa and Afghani
Women in West prior to 2001, and Sharbat Gula ….……...…………………………….57
The Burqa and RAWA………………………………………………….……………….61
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RAWA uses the Burqa as a Signifier to the West …………………...………………….62
RAWA creates the discourse of “Fundamentalism-Blighted” Afghanistan ……...……..63
The Burqa as Signifier Extracted from Indigenous Geography and offered to US News
Media Following 9/11……………………………………………………………………68
The Western Gaze and the Burqa ……………………………………………………….72
Burqa as Signifier used by Rand, AP, Reuters and the US Government ……….………80
Lifting the Burqa becomes a Signifier of Support for the West …………………...……84
Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………97
References ……………………………………………………………………………….98
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Figure 1: Cover image: Engraving of Persian woman in a Burqa. 1843. Librarie
Historique-Artisique. Author’s collection
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Foreword:
Figure 2: A chador, a form of burqa, worn by a Muslim woman in India, 1922. Author’s
collection.
I wrote “Burqa: Garment as Signifier” in 2004 as part of the preparatory work for my
PhD dissertation in cultural geography. I was focused on the geographies of henna, and
part of that focus included studying women’s body scripts in the cultures where henna is
an indigenous tradition. I searched and saved every news article from every media I could
access that had any mention of henna, as part of being a diligent researcher. After 2001, I
found increasingly frequent mentions of henna in Afghanistan, if for no other reason than
henna is worn by Afghani women, and the USA was involved in military action in
Afghanistan.
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Figure 3: “Jewish Women” L.C Page and Company, 1900
The media, viral emails, newsgroups, and news reports on television increasingly used
images of women in blue burqas as a signifier of oppression, and as a justification for
western allies to send military forces into Afghanistan. I had file cabinets and shelves
lined with books of the history and practice of women covering and secluding. As a
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henna artist, I had clients who covered and secluded. The news cycle implication that
‘the burqa equals oppression’ was simplistic and ill informed. The ubiquitous blue burqa
seemed to me to be a red herring for escalating western military presence in Afghanistan,
while the actual strategic objectives, political, economic, military, while a masked
vendetta following 9/11 was obscured.
Though it is always tempting to simply yell at the 6 o’clock news, social media, and
online news groups for purveying misinformation, such expressions are usually fairly
futile. I had an assignment in Geographic Thought to produce a research paper through
post-structural approaches to conflicts in cultural geographies, significance and signifiers,
the beholder and the beheld. I thought that the western perception of the burqa as
instrument of oppression, conflated with fears of conservative and vocal Islamists, had
interesting potential for analysis. I settled into researching and writing,” Burqa; Garment
as Signifier from the Umma to the USA: 7 yards of polyester as Honor, Protection,
Purity, Prestige, Oppression, Resistance, Violence, Poverty, and a Justification for
Military invasion.”
There are some points implicit in western misunderstanding of women’s covering that I
would like to review in this introduction.
Covering has been a fashion for women in semi-arid regions of this planet for thousands
of years. Women in these regions all cover to a greater or lesser extent, because a fine
fabric, drawn over the face and shoulders provides some shelter from the ever-present
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dust, bursts of wind carrying dust, and occasional simooms (dust storms). Dust is
irritating to the eyes and nose, and long exposure to dust can cause respiratory damage.
These regions also have high albedo (reflected sunlight) and exposure to sun weathers
skin and causes skin cancer. Where there are shopping areas with butcheries, vegetable
sellers, and restaurants without western-style plastic hygienic packaging, refrigeration,
antiseptics, and waste disposal systems, flies find attractive accommodations. Flies are a
nuisance and disease vector to any person who has the slightly damp and fly-attractive
spots of eyes, nose and ears. Covering the face with a fine gauze cloth is a simple,
sensible way for a woman to mitigate environmental hazards to her health in this
environment. The effects of sun, wind, and pestilence, among many other things, were
once culturally framed as ‘The Evil Eye.’ Women avoided the Evil Eye by covering
themselves, wearing amulets, and other behaviors which often coincidentally were
beneficial habits.
Much of the semi-arid zone happens to currently coincide with demographic prevalence
of the Muslim faith and culture, but covering is not limited to Muslim women. As you
can see from the images in this introduction, Coptic Christian, Jewish, and Muslim
women in this region all have worn variations of the burqa. Covering and secluding the
female body is not an exclusively Muslim concept, nor is covering an exclusively Muslim
response to environment. Sandstorms, sunburn, and flies inflict their annoyance upon
people without regard to culture or religion.
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Figure 4: Coptic Christian Woman in Egypt, Hodder and Stoughton, London, UK, 1918
(Author’s collection)
Western culture has had women’s covering traditions, and they are well tolerated within
the west. Female covering predates the separation among the monotheistic religion, and
the disporas of these religions have adapted the ordinances of modesty and covering to
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one extent or other. Some covering garments are private, and others are public. The
undergarments required of practicing Mormons1 is a form of devotional covering, but it is
invisible to other than the trained eye. Externally recognizable Amish women’s covering
is part of the tourist attraction to their markets. Catholic nuns are still challenged about
their piety when they wear clothing that they believe facilitates work and communication
with their parishioners. Bras mask the motions of breasts; girdles mask the motions of
buttocks, placing the same claim of modesty as required by mullahs who exhort that all
the female body be covered. The negotiation of areas to be covered often seems rather
arbitrary: Breast and buttock cleavage may be alternately permitted or abhorred. The
nape of the neck may be ordained extraordinarily sensual or totally irrelevant. Breastfeeding a child would seem a necessary function, but some places forbid the exposure of
a female breast in public, even for the purpose of succoring a hungry infant, while male
nipples are not considered indecent. Some times, law requires that toes be covered, other
times, toes are exposed and toenails painted. Navels, knees, and elbows come and go.
The coverage of a woman’s body is framed in regional and temporal style more than law
and function. Clothing laws are often passed as enforcement of local values,2 becoming
viewed as quaint, obsolete, or downright peculiar within decades.
1
The Temple Garment, a form of long underwear popular at the time of the codification of the Mormon
Church: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_garment
2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothing_laws_by_country
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Figure 5: “Moslem Women Attired in Mandels and Izzars”
E. P Dutton and Co., Boston, Mass., 1904
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A woman’s public body and private body are differently constructed in all cultures. Both
women and men have a different range of dress and undress within their homes or private
area than in public. Covering is adapted to the onlooker and situation. Covering and
privacy is associated with honor and piety in many religions; Christianity, Judaism, and
Islam being among those which regard public nakedness as inappropriate, dishonorable,
and lewd. When the western eye (or camera) focuses on a woman accustomed to
covering in front of people outside of her own family, she will often quickly cover for
privacy, or just out of habit. Viewers of these images such as Figure 6 may assume that
such women are always covered. They are covered the moments we see them. Similarly,
a western woman might tidy up a room, straighten her clothing, or comb her hair when
expecting visitors. Our homes are not always clean, our clothing may be rumpled, our
hair may often be in disarray, but we like to present ourselves well to others.
Privilege is a facet of covering. Before the industrial revolution, finely spun and woven
cloth required far more labor investment than coarse cloth, and large pieces of veil might
represent months of skilled labor. Wearing yards of delicate cloth was a conspicuous
display of wealth before cloth could be cheaply manufactured on industrial looms.
Privilege is also implied in the act of covering. In the cultures of semi-arid zone ecologies
where recourses are limited, precious things are covered, guarded, and kept secluded so
they will not be ruined by dirt, sun, sand, or theft. A woman’s beauty is considered
tempting and precious. If a woman secludes and covers herself, she communicates
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through this coverage that she is not only modest and pious; she is of worth and valued.
By extension, she communicates that her family is of worth and value.
Figure 6: “Turkish Women” L. C. Page and Co., Boston, Mass. 1900
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The assumptions that the burqa is unique to Afghanistan, that the burqa is inherently
oppressive or humiliating, that the burqa is unique to Muslim culture, or that the burqa is
a product of terrorism, are fictions constructed in the West. It is not unusual that the
West misunderstands the outward appearance of people in other cultures, and
occasionally embarrasses itself through actions based on these misinterpretations. I
believe misinformation has rarely been crafted with such cynical opportunism as was the
image of the burqa during the western military intervention into Afghanistan.
Figure 7: Woman with Allied soldiers, Philippeville Airfield, 12th Airforce Base of
Operations, Skikda, Airport, Algeria, 1943 Author’s collection
I honor the sacrifices made by service men of many countries made during Afghani
military action, and during the other military interventions in the Middle East. I do not
believe that they sent to liberate women from seven yards of polyester.
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Figure 8: Woman in Burqa, Afghanistan Gallery,
http://www.angelfire.com/va3/ultimate/mirror/burqa_afg.jpg, (accessed May 2004)
Part I: The Burqa; Garment as Signifier from the Umma to the
USA
"A burqa, you know, is something a person outside sees. You are inside it. You
don't see it, or think it strange. It is there to stop others from seeing you, not you
from watching them. You see everything. Inside it you feel free, all alone with
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yourself. You don't have any impertinent eyes coming in when you want to be left
alone..." (Molteno, 1987, p 90)
Anthropologists in the Malinowski tradition analyzed clothing as a function and indicator
of social transitions, cultural upheavals, and colonial situations. From this emerged a
discourse of clothing as a “universal and visible cultural element consisting of sets of
body symbols deliberately designed to convey messages at different social and
psychological levels. (Kuper 1973: 348) Simply put, people use clothing as a signifier to
inform other people of their status, character, and intentions.
Recently, the resurgence of face covering or veiling in Islamic countries, variously
known as hijab, niqab, and burqa, has received a great deal of attention in western
counties. Images of women with veiled faces and bodies are juxtaposed with images of
terrorism, oppression, and tragedy by news media, governmental bodies and NGO’s,
religious and secular groups. Analysts, both official and “armchair” then attempted to
link these garments to political explanations of social phenomena and popular
justifications. (Chatty, 1997, 127) The burqa, an indigenous Afghani female face and
body covering has been specifically employed as a signifier by both the western and
eastern media since the rise of the Taliban and the US invasion of Afghanistan following
the tragedy of September 11, 2001.
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Figure 9: Afghani women wearing Burqas
http://archives.theconnection.org/archive/2001/10/1011b.shtml (accessed May 1, 2004)
Regrettably, the western significance attached to veiling was largely formed in a vacuum
of information about Islam and Middle Eastern culture.
Muslim women do not cover up out of shame. Veiling is about modesty and
privacy. In fact, it can be empowering to see without being seen. Westerners often
feel a loss of control when they cannot see the women behind their veils. Perhaps
some prefer to believe that veiling oppressive so they do not have to acknowledge
that it is threatening to them. Yet if people let go of their preconceived notions
about the veil it would cease to be the unknown and come to be understood as a
part of dress and an expression of identity. (Barr, Clark, Marsh 2003)
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Figure 10: Afghani woman wearing a burqa
http://www.angelfire.com/va3/ultimate/mirror/afghan_burqa2.jpg (accessed May, 2004))
By improperly judging an alien religion, the veil becomes a symbol of oppression
and devastation, instead of a representation of pride and piety. Despite Western
images, the hijab is a daily revitalization and reminder of the Islamic societal and
religious ideals, thereby upholding the conduct and attitudes of the Muslim
community. Americans share these ideals yet fail to recognize them in the context
of a different culture. By sincerely exploring the custom of Islamic veiling, one
will realize the vital role the hijab plays in shaping Muslim culture by sheltering
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women, and consequently society, from the perils that erupt from indecency. The
principles implored in the Koran of modesty, honor, and stability construct a
unifying and moral view of the Islamic Middle Eastern society when properly
investigated. As it was transcribed from Allah, “Speak to them from behind a
curtain. This is purer for your hearts and their hearts” (Brooks 1995).
Veiling within Islamic Geographies: Signifier and Discipline in
Space
In Islamic space, umma is the public space occupied by male believers in a democratic
collectivity based on shared beliefs. The purdah or harem is the private domestic space,
the world of sexuality and the family, that is occupied by women. (Mernisi, 1987: 138-9).
These two spaces are strictly bounded. If a woman enters the umma, she is “out of
bounds”, and is an unwelcome anomaly. If a non-kin man enters the private domestic
space of purdah or harem, he is “out of bounds” and an unwelcome anomaly. Of course
men and women cannot completely live apart, so some sort of portable boundary, such as
the veil, can manage the intrusions of one gender into the other’s space. In the case of
Afghanistan, and many other areas through history, this portable boundary is the burqa.
The negotiation of these boundaries, and the reason for their existence are
discussed in the Quran:
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"O Prophet, tell your wives and daughters and the believing women
to draw their outer garments around them (when they go out or are
among men). That is better in order that they may be known (to be
Muslims) and not annoyed..." (Quran 33:59)
"Say to the believing man that they should lower their gaze and guard their
modesty; that will make for greater purity for them; and Allah is well acquainted
with all that they do. And say to the believing women that they should lower their
gaze and guard their modesty; and that they should not display their beauty and
ornaments except what must ordinarily appear thereof; that they should draw
their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their
husbands..." (Quran 24:30-31)
Figure 11: Afghani women wearing burqas, walking by a mosque with a child.
http://www.angelfire.com/va3/ultimate/mirror/afg2.jpg (accessed May 2004)
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The Quran does not mandate veiling, but simply speaks about modesty, respect, and not
selfishly drawing attention to oneself when a person crosses into another space. The
proxy boundaries are to soften the impact of breached space. This does not only apply to
women in the umma; male modesty is more frequently referred to in the Quran than
female modesty. The umma is an area of public activity and potential conflict, so men too
are encouraged to behave cooperatively rather than competitively. Boundaries, modesty,
and veiling are constructed as an act of social sensitivity meant to prevent aggression and
exhibitionism that can disrupt orderly society.
Cover your nakedness, do not play your with your femininity as a commodity. Be
proud and save your intimate best for the one who stands by you in good and bad.
Speak loud and clear; the game-and-promise bedroom voice does not belong on
the streets. Walk firm and tall; the swaying and jingling advertisement of the body
carries a “for sale” sign on it. (Surah 33:32)
Islamic gendered space and veiling discourse is framed as discipline, stability, and honor
as opposed to wantonness, instability, and dishonor. Veiling is in this context is a matter
of people showing respect for each other, and enabling respectful relationships with each
other. In most Muslim societies veiling is voluntary rather than legally enforced. Women
may choose whether or not to veil, though most defer to their family’s wishes regarding
covering, and through that compliance show respect for their kin and their beliefs.
This concept of orderly gendered relations within public space gave rise to the Islamic
urban spatial ideal where women are rarely seen, and if they are seen, they are veiled.
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This signifies that the ideal Muslim society is so honorable, prosperous, and perfectly
maintained that all women are so completely cared for and protected that they not need to
labor outside the home. This ideal is set in opposition to spaces where women frequently
leave the house to earn an income, get an education, do agricultural labor, obtain goods,
and may choose not to veil out of out of necessity, or it’s hindrance to mobility and
vision.
Each Muslim woman, when choosing whether or not to veil, responds to Quran, her
family’s influence, her economic necessities and opportunities, her country’s laws, the
world at large, and these decisions change from one occasion to the next.
The Koran to some is a divine guide for just living. To others, it's an archaic code
whose spirit, more than the letter, should be applied today. Stories of young
women donning veils their mothers and even grandmothers fought to take off are
abundant.
Nadia Tewfiq, an Egyptian journalist studying Islamic political thought in
London, was devastated to find on her last trip home that her 15-year-old niece,
Nihal, had started wearing hijab. "In the beginning of the 20th century, women
took off the veil in Egypt, because it was seen as a veil on the mind itself," says
Ms. Tewfiq. "It was a symbol that you're a piece of meat, a sex object. But today
women are putting it back on, voluntarily."
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"A woman's body is like honey," Nihal told her aunt, "and you have to keep the
flies away."
For some, the act of rebellion is a family affair: choosing to cover in a household
of women who don't, or refusing to veil in a family of women who do. At one
Kuwaiti suburban home, for example, Nura el-Enezi's daughters differ. She and
her two older teenage girls wear hijab. But 14-year-old May refuses to wear the
veil, even though most girls her age do. "It's too hot," says May al-Enezi, smirking
at her sisters, who tell her God will punish her for disobeying.
Ilene R. Prusher, Staff Writer of The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/08/11/fp8s1-csm.shtml
2000-08-16 18:08:03 PST (accessed May 2004)
Burqa and Veils within Islamic Geographies: Law and Resistance
Laws regarding veiling vary among Islamic countries. Presently, strict laws about
women's dress are often used to emphasize the religious orientation of a particular
government, as in Iran or Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, Turkey has banned the veil in
public offices and universities because the Turkish state is committed to a more secular
identity. Young women are excluded from classes and from receiving their degrees if
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they appear in headscarves3. Turkey’s courts rationalize these anti-veiling laws by
quoting the country’s constitutionally mandated secularism, which Kemal Ataturk
imposed when he created modern Turkey. Because some interpret this anti-veiling
legislation as an infringement on basic human rights to freedoms of association and
expression, these restrictions on veiling are now, paradoxically, imperiling one of secular
Turkey’s great ambitions: joining the European Union.
There are similar legal prohibitions on veils through the region, for the same political
reason – to assert that the state is to be based on rational law rather than divine law. In
Egypt, for example, as in Tunisia and Uzbekistan, there are laws in place banning the full
veil, yet women resist the laws.
By choosing to veil when otherwise prohibited, such as is the case in Egypt, a woman
visibly signifies that she lays claim to Islamic modesty, and is critical of adopting foreign
styles, often associated with immorality. Veiling signifies the rejection of western
colonialism and continued hegemony. This resurgence of veiling since the 1970s has
grown in popularity among students and white-collar workers. (Guindi, 1999) By the
1990s, it had spread to the lower classes aspiring to be elite, rural areas aspiring to be
urban, and has been adopted by African and some Filipino immigrants in Cairo so that
they would avoid harassment in the streets.
3
Elements of this ban were lifted in 2008, and 2010, after this paper was initially written. The banning or
permitting of headscarves in Turkey is a regular part of political platforms in elections. The constitutional
court tends to support the ban on the basis of the founding principles of the Turkish constitution, but
informal permissions to wear headscarves are not presently prosecuted.
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"In Gaza they wear scarves they didn't have to 10 years ago because they don't
want to be harassed by thugs," says Karma Nabulsi, a politics fellow at England's
Oxford University.
"In Syria, the veil became a way of showing displeasure with the regime," Dr.
Nabulsi says. "It was the only thing you could do to show opposition."
Ilene R. Prusher, Staff Writer of The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/08/11/fp8s1-csm.shtml
2000-08-16 18:08:03 PST (accessed May 2004)
The Burqa as Signifier in Context: Islamic Pashtun Afghanistan
In Afghanistan the burqa, the local expression of the veil, is related to the aforementioned
concepts of Islamic concepts of honor and space and to Pashtun ideals of honor and
purity. However, unless a man was so wealthy that he could provide for all of his wives’
needs within his home, a woman would have to leave purdah and go into the umma from
time to time. If she left the house, she could cover herself with the veil as a portable
purdah, so she would still be secluded from men’s gaze, and not cause disorder in the
umma. Veiling and seclusion became the twin instruments with which social stability and
family honor was defended.
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Before 1994, most women in rural Afghanistan areas wore a burqa when outside the
home, because the burqa was their ethnic interpretation of veiling and was their
customary garment, particularly in Pashtun communities. In urban areas, women made a
personal choice to veil or not, or to wear a burqa, though they deferred their choice to
accommodate the wishes of their husbands and extended family.
The Burqa in the Shop
Figure 12: A burqa offered for sale in an online store in 2004
Afghanistan Online: Burqa $45. http://www.afghan-web.com/shop/nproducts/ (accessed
May 2004)
The color, cloth, extent of embroidery and shape of the burqa has varied through time,
geographic area, clan, status and personal taste. The most common form of the burqa as
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of spring 2004 is an ankle length garment with an open work mesh-embroidered area
over eyes. A burqa has a very tight fitting cap section, necessary to keep the burqa from
sliding out of place. The open work area has to stay directly over the woman’s eyes so
she can see. The full length of cloth is pleated to the cap, and women are critical of pleats
that are too large or are uneven. Fine pleating is admired, as is delicate embroidery at the
face, cap, and hem.
Figure 13: Women shopping, examining the quality of a burqa
http://www.suprmchaos.com/burqa_051103.jpg (accessed May 2004)
Though silk burqas of imported Japanese georgette are most desired, most of those in
shops are made of 7 yards of affordable cotton or polyester cloth. In 2002 through 2004,
high quality blue polyester from Korea was popular, though often unavailable because of
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the war and economic disruption. A woman purchasing a burqa hopes to get about 5
years of wear out of it, so fashions in burqas evolve slowly. On http://www.afghanweb.com/shop/nproducts/ blue burqas sell for $45 (accessed May, 2004). As of April 12,
2004 on Ebay, there were 11 listings for burqas in blue, gray, black and purple, selling for
about $20 each.4
Figure 14: Afghani women wearing burqas, with children hiding under their mother's
burqas.
http://www.angelfire.com/va3/ultimate/mirror/aghan_outdoor.jpg (accessed May 2004)
The current form of burqa is described disdainfully in “Shuttle Cork Burqas” by Nina
Martyris in The Times of India, March 20, 2004:
4
In September, 2012, the average price of burqas on Ebay was $35.
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The Pathan dress code for women is the burqa which is also used in Afghanistan
and which was imposed strictly during the Taliban reign. In Pakistan, these
burqas begin with a cap-like head cover that billows into a pleated tent-like veil
with a tiny net opening in the front for the eyes to look out, have a special name.
They're called Shuttle Cork burqas because their shape remind one of the shuttle
used in badminton and the people of Karachi and Lahore are inclined to laugh at
this practice. In Peshawar, Shuttle Cork burqas come in many colors — blue is
the favorite, but saffron and beige can also be spotted. A burqa costs between Rs
200 to Rs 400 a piece and is available in cotton and synthetic, which works well
for the permanent pleated look.
Times of India, April 3, 2004:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/572242.cms (accessed
mayM)
Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Ethnic Signifier
Afghanistan has many ethnic groups. The largest group is Pashtun, followed by Tajik,
Uzbeck and Hazara who have differing head covering practices. The burqa, then, is not
only a statement of personal values, but of membership in the dominant ethnic group.
When a Pashtun woman wears a burqa outside of her house she signifies that she aspires
to ideal Pashtun female behavior, and that her family has honorable social standing.
When asked why a Pashtun woman wears the burqa, she typically responds, ”We do
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these things out of love and respect for our husband and family.” (Daly, 1999: 157) A
woman’s choice to wear a burqa signifies that she supports the ideals, values and beliefs
of the Pashtun people and of Islamic culture. This is very different from western
observers who surmise that women cover themselves because ideal female behavior was
“passive, modest and obedient” (Dupree, 1978: 10-15).
Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Signifier in Personal
Expression
Figure 15: An Afghani seamstress selling burqas from her home workshop, negotiating a
price with her customers.
Afghan Women’s Association International http://www.awai.org/parwaz0603.html
accessed May 2004
Though burqas are so similar as to be indistinguishable to the untrained eye, as western
men’s suits are very similar, a woman makes personal choices in her burqa, and takes
pride in her choices, just as a man does when ordering a tailored suit. These choices are a
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mark of her socio-economic status, age, and clan affiliation. Younger women wear
machine-embroidered burqas, with brighter colors. Older women wear darker colors, and
may have costly hand embroidery. Some burqa are heirlooms, brought out for important
occasions (Daly, 1999: 158).
Figure 16: Silver embroidered black lace burqa over a dress featured in a fashion show
http://www.ragistan.com/feb02/ (accessed May 2004)
The burqa is a valued fashion item, and fine ones are much coveted. Adolescent
unmarried girls in Kandahar, Afghanistan, may wear a burqa for holiday celebrations, as
a sort of “practice” for being a real grownup woman, as 13 year-old girls in Cleveland,
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Ohio, USA, may wear a fashionable black mini-dress, stockings and heels at a Bat
Mitzvah. Women who don’t want to have “just another burqa off the rack” purchase
cloth as fine as they can afford, then take it to a seamstress to have their burqa custom
sewn, and fuss over how much to pay the seamstress. In 1988, a very fine hand made
burqa cost about 600 Afghanis, compared to a prayer scarf that was about 20 Afghanis
(Doubleday, 1988: 63).
The Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Physical Environment
Afghanistan has an arid steppe ecology. The Sistan basin has blizzards and subarctic
cold in the winters, and the southern plateau has intense heat in the summer. In the
western and southern regions a northerly wind, known as the "wind of 120 days," blows
during the summer months bringing dust storms and whirlwinds between June and
September. These "dust winds" generate at midday and often advance at 97 to 177
kilometers per hour, raising high clouds of dust. This intense heat, drought, and sand
storms that accompany these winds make life very difficult for the people living in this
area. (The Library of Congress - Country Studies, 2004) A woman is well served by her
burqa when she is outdoors, as it offers her eyes, mouth and lungs some protection from
the dust storm. The length keeps her clothing from being soiled, and the tight cap keeps
the garment in place. A veil would offer less protection from the dust clouds, and would
be more likely to be lost in the high winds.
35
Figure 17: Woman walking in a burqa on a windy day
“Kabul calling: British Museum set for Afghanistan exhibition”
July 01, 2010, © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited (accessed September 2012)
The Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Physical Environment and
the Marketplace
Seclusion in the home, in the harem, is regarded as a privilege, and women whose
husbands can afford to seclude them express pride in this seclusion because it proves that
their husbands are rich men. (Belghiti, 1970:58) A closely secluded and veiled Pashtun
woman’s husband may do all the shopping for her. If a husband rarely gives his wife
permission to go out, someone else has to bring her what she requires for the maintenance
of herself and the household: housekeeping tools and supplies, health and sanitation
necessities, children’s goods and toys, clothing, food and drink, items for leisure and
adornment.
36
There the wealthiest families employ servants to carry water from the well and to
work in the fields alongside family males. Mature women of these families may
make rare appearances in the fields to bring lunch to the family males working
there and sometimes to supervise laborers. Thus elitism is expressed in women's
exclusive domesticity, with men providing economic necessities for the family.
Only women of poor and low-ranking groups engage in heavy manual labor
outside the home, especially for pay. Such women work long hours in the fields,
on construction gangs, and at many other tasks, often veiling their faces as they
work.
http://countrystudies.us/ Source: U.S. Library of Congress: “Veiling and Seclusion”
(accessed May 2004)
A woman who does go out to do the shopping may often be accosted by men who
presume that if she is out in the marketplace, she must be a must be a woman with neither
honor nor protection, a low class woman or maid. Women who do venture into the
market wear a burqa, hoping they will suffer less harassment. An unveiled woman
wandering in public would be regarded as a prostitute, or at least tolerant of, or inviting
the advances of men. (Mernissi, 1987: 142)
Other Afghani women shop for themselves out of necessity. They often complain about
their husband’s poor choices in clothing, especially that the slippers they purchase for
their wives are the wrong size.
37
Figure 18: Afghani women shopping in the market
http://www.angelfire.com/va3/ultimate/mirror/kabul_street.jpg (accessed September
2004)
" Women who were banned by their husbands from shopping or were too embarrassed to
deal with male storekeepers, would have had to ask their spouses, brothers or sons to
make purchases for them, For instance when they go to the street bazaar the men tease
38
them. They want to buy Kotex (sanitary pads) or they want to buy bras and the men tease
them. They say bad words to them”. (Kabul shopping By AFP/Madeleine Coorey,
http://www.thingsasian.com/goto_article/article.2749.html (accessed May 2004)
Figure 19: Women shopping, pulling their burqas back to more clearly see items for
purchase.
http://www.angelfire.com/va3/ultimate/mirror/Kakul_shopping3.jpg (accessed may 2004)
When women wish to see something more clearly in the market place, they can quickly
tuck back their burqa. The burqa is a malleable boundary, being quickly gathered up to
shelter from an intrusive gaze, pulled firmly to the face to allow better vision, flung out to
39
make a gesture, and raised back to greet family. Young children duck underneath their
mother’s burqas when they feel shy. Women who wish to have a private conversation in
public will “double up” under burqas, making it one large tent. The garment is not
simply a spatial boundary, but one that permits considerable and emotional expression.
Figure 20: Women shopping in a village market in Afghanistan
The Afghani village market area usually includes live animals being brought through the
streets, butcheries filled with uncovered, unrefrigerated fresh slaughter, vegetables and
plant waste. The pathways are generally unpaved, and dusty, dirty, occasionally muddy.
40
Good clothing would be soiled walking through the market, so the burqa protects
women’s clothing, and may also shield them from flies and odors as well as the gaze nonkin males.
Recently, a “Women Only” modern shopping center has opened in Kabul, so that women
may cross into a secluded women’s space, tuck back their burqas, and shop for
fashionable clothing, lingerie, cosmetics, and jewelry away from the gaze of men and out
of the filth of the traditional village marketplaces.
Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Public Spaces - Men’s Places
Figure 21: Women in burqa conversing in a village street
Secluded women in Afghanistan are permitted to visit cemeteries twice a year, and go to
the baths twice a month. When women are outdoors on these occasions, or celebrating
Noruz in a public park, they retain their private gendered space and their honor by
keeping their burqas on, creating a female zone within the outdoor male area.
41
Some women are educated, have jobs and leave the home to work. When women do
choose to work outside of the home, from necessity or desire, men often make snearing
remarks, “Look at them, they are working like foreigners.” (CBS evening news,
Afghanistan, CBS News Correspondent Allen Pizzey, Oct. 7, 2002) The burqa guards
women from men’s eyes, but a woman can come home aching from constant “body
slams” as men “accidentally” make full body contact with a woman, or pinch and grope
her when he does make contact.
Figure 22: Women walking to work.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/central/03/11/kabul.6months/ (accessed May
2004)
Sarah Kamal, an unmarried young woman still wearing a veil rather than the full burqa,
wrote in her online diary about Iranian men’s behavior similar to the “burqa body slams”
in Afghanistan.
“You see, I was walking in the streets a few days ago when a guy started
following me and asking for my phone number etc, etc, ad nauseum. I didn't give
him the time of day. Then another guy began trying to arrange a date with me,
42
and I told him to get lost. By the time a third guy began hounding me, I was pretty
annoyed. Men in Tehran can be pests, but this was ridiculous! It was only a
bloody fifteen-minute walk, and I seemed to have chosen the street full of idiots.
So I just ignored this third guy - he wasn’t even worth the bother of speech.
But he was persistent. He followed me for a good half-kilometer or so, muttering
things at me the entire way despite the fact that I was almost sprinting to get away
from him. Then he fell behind, and with a sigh of relief I began walking across a
small park towards a shopping complex.
But of course, since I no longer had an idiot, I had to find me another idiot. And
this idiot was in the form of a tall bearded man who told me to put my headscarf
on properly. So I whipped around and said "what business is it of yours?!!", gave
him the finger, and walked on, taking my headscarf off my head completely and
flipping my hair in his direction. I was now fuming.
As I walked into the shopping complex, I replaced my headscarf loosely, hackles
still raised. And it was at this unfortunate moment that idiot number three decided
to catch up to me and whisper sweet nothings in my ear. I don’t remember much,
other than him saying something like "I've found you now" and then my sensing a
hand touch my waist, and then KAPOW!! My fist shot out into his kidney. When
he turned a completely shocked face to me, I pointed my finger in his face, said,
43
"don’t touch me" in a quiet and intense voice, then marched on. He disappeared.”
(http://afghanistan.unitycode.org/welcome/afg2.html (accessed May 2004)
Of course, the burqa can also be used in flirting and seduction, by swirling and swaying,
lifting it to fan oneself, and as a disguise when going through the streets to meet a lover.
A woman can waft the sent of her perfume or her body by fluttering her burqa, or allow
the cloth to slide across a desirable male. The folds of the burqa extend gesture, extend
line, exend scent. The folds of the burqa can reveal, obscure, emphasize, enfold, entice.
The burqa is an expressive extension of the woman and her personal space within public
space.
In a burqa, a woman can go places without her husband, or anyone else, recognizing her.
Omar S. Pound lamented in a poem that when he looked down the street, he couldn’t
recognize his wife, in her burqa,
“Pet onion!
In your layers of veil and gown;
All beauty in one mirror, or
A turnip in a sack?
No matter where I look:
Up or down
You’re not my pet or sweet
44
Or even a human beanWrapped in that black and purple skin
You are an aubergine.” (Pound, 1976)
Figure 23: Women walking and talking to each other.
http://www.taparts.org/PictoralPop.cfm?ImageID=125 (accessed May 2004)
45
The Burqa in Afghani Geographies: Private Spaces
The burqa permits a woman to carry her gendered boundary with her when she passes
from the purdah area in her home through the umma into another gendered space such
occurs when a woman goes to a hospital. Through these transitions, such as come with
contacting physicians, nurses, kin and non-related women, she can choose whom to
permit inside that boundary, and that boundary is flexible. Within the burqa’s boundary,
women wear any clothing that their budget and taste allow, as they would in their own
homes.
Figure 24: Mother, grandmother, triplets and siblings in a hospital in Afghanistan
Cavanaugh, E., Afghanistan: http://afghan.smugmug.com/ (accessed May 2004)
When secluded women are in their homes, with related women, in an entirely female
geography, they dress as colorfully, as fashionably, and as beautifully as is their taste and
means, expressing themselves through their choices at family occasions, such as at the
wedding shown in figure 21.
46
Figure 25: Afghani women at a wedding party.
http://www.ciriello.com/site/pix/46/460225.jpg (accessed May 2004)
Women and their families did not generally see this landscape with its gendered areas as
oppressive; it was simply a way of life.
“I'm 53, and when I was growing up in Kabul, Afghanistan was a world of
villages and walled compounds with virtually no technology, no factories and no
industries -- a society of tribal peasants who eked out their subsistence as farmers
and herders. In this world, life was divided, not exactly between men and women,
but between a public realm and a private one. The public realm belonged, indeed,
to men. Women rarely left the shelter of their compound walls without male
escorts and then they wore chadris, that body-bag veil now known as the burqa.
The roles of men and women were firmly divided: Women were in charge of
home, household, food, domestic animals, marriage, children and the
fundamentals of early religious instruction. Men were in charge of farming,
fighting, commerce and government. This wasn’t Afghanistan in medieval times.
This was Afghanistan when Elvis was king.
47
What’s more, although Afghanistan represented an extreme, this concept of a
divided world prevailed down through south Asia. It didn't just spring out of
Islam; it came out of a deep soil of local traditions. And here is what outsiders
didn't realize: The private realm, at least in old Afghanistan, was a universe unto
itself -- big, rich and complex. In that hidden universe, women had authentic
power. You want proof? The first three female heads of state in the modern world
emerged not in France, Italy or the United States, but in Pakistan, India and Sri
Lanka. Clearly, in that hidden universe, women were somehow growing up
trained for leadership.”
(soc.culture.Malaysia, Tamsin Ansary, 12/7/2002) (accessed May 2004)
48
Part II: The Burqa and the Taliban
The Burqa and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: Boundaries
Disrupted
Figure 26: Woman holding her child.
http://www.angelfire.com/va3/ultimate/mirror/afghan_yellowburqa.jpg (accessed May
2004)
49
In the late 20th century, Afghanistan was in a region where religion, countries, and ethnic
traditions supported veiling as a normal and necessary part of social spatial behavior, and
the choice to veil often implied an antipathy for colonialism and western hegemony.
There was great variation of interpretation of veiling among the sects of Islam, the laws
of different Islamic states, and people within those states.
The USSR invaded Afghanistan from1979 to 1989, aided by Afghan communist military
and civilian collaborators who were hoping to secularize and modernize the country.
This conflict brought genocide, slaughter, torture, disappearance, the largest recorded
refugee outflow in history, and a scourge of landmines. The collapse of this invasion and
the following Soviet puppet regime in 1992 spawned a power vacuum. The subsequent
civil war was fueled by support from neighboring countries and other regional powers,
hoping to gain control of this corridor between South Asia, the Middle East and the
USSR. In this anarchy, Kabul was virtually destroyed by rocket shelling, mortar fire, and
aerial bombing. Afghanistan was completely disrupted by this collapse in authority, and
the population was decimated and impoverished, with much of its population fleeing into
Pakistan to refugee camps.
Burqa and the Taliban: Boundaries Re-Established
In November 1994, a new group named "Taliban" emerged as a military and political
force. Talib means "students of Islamic religious studies.” The Talib were mostly rural
Pashtun youths, recruited from refugee camps, educated in religious schools (madrasas)
50
in neighboring Pakistan. Madrasas are traditional schools associated with mosques,
established for the preservation and transmission of the Islamic religious tradition, and
Islamic scholarship.
In the late 20th century, one of the madrasas’ focuses was the teaching of fiqh or Islamic
jurisprudence. Much discussion of fiqh was applied to western hegemony, and the
destruction of Afghanistan and other Muslim countries in post-colonial collapse. The
talibs’ discussions spawned ideas of creating perfect Islamic states, which would exist
entirely within their concepts of ideal Islamic society. These people, influenced by postcolonial thinkers such as Said and Fanon, cultivated radical thinking and the masdrasas
became centers for “freedom fighters”, the Taliban, known to the West as “terrorists”.
The Taliban movement, led by Mullah Mohammed Omar, a 31-year-old religious leader,
claimed to be restoring peace and security through the imposition of a strict Islamic
order. With no functioning judicial system, many municipal and provincial authorities
use the Taliban's interpretation of Shari'a (Islamic law) and traditional tribal codes of
justice.
The Taliban laid claim to Afghanistan. After taking control of the capital city of Kabul
on September 26, 1996, the Taliban reestablished gender boundaries based on their
understanding of fiqh, Pashtun tradition, and the intrusion of western concepts of
gendered space and boundaries. The Taliban interpreted the Islamic law and Pashtun
preference that men support and seclude women in the home by criminalizing any
women who left her home unaccompanied by a husband, father, brother, or son. The
umma gender boundary was legislated as a requirement for women to be covered from
51
head to toe in a burqa when in public. Houses and buildings enclosing females were to
have their windows painted black, so the women within could not be observed. The
Taliban restored order, and gender boundaries, to Afghanistan. The laws regarding
women instated by the Taliban were in accordance with a narrow interpretation of
Quranic law and Pashtun tradition. Taliban restrictions on women focused on gendered
space and the boundaries of those spaces, and included the restrictions on women of a:
1. Complete ban on women's work outside the home, though a few female doctors
and nurses were allowed to work in some hospitals in Kabul.
2. Complete ban on women's activity outside the home unless accompanied by a
mahram (close male relative such as a father, brother or husband).
3. Ban on women dealing with male shopkeepers.
4. Ban on women being treated by male doctors.
5. Ban on women studying at schools, universities or any other educational
institution.
6. Requirement that adult women wear a long veil (burqa).
7. Whipping, beating and verbal abuse of women not clothed in accordance with
Taliban rules, or of women unaccompanied by a mahram.
8. Whipping of women in public for having uncovered ankles.
9. Public stoning of women accused of having sex outside marriage.
10. Ban on the use of cosmetics.
11. Ban on women talking or shaking hands with non-mahram males.
12. Ban on women laughing loudly.
52
13. Ban on women wearing high heel shoes, which would produce sound while
walking.
14. Ban on women riding in a taxi without a mahram.
15. Ban on women's presence in radio, television or public gatherings of any kind.
16. Ban on women playing sports or entering a sports center or club.
Western observers, when they had access or interest, were horrified.
The Burqa and the Taliban: Boundaries Enforced
Taliban gender boundaries were enforced with vigor to rebuild the anarchy of a destroyed
society. The "religious police" (Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the
Suppression of Vice) often brutally and arbitrarily enforced these laws with immediate
public beatings. Foreigners were expelled, and In Afghan staff members of international
organizations were threatened, harassed and beaten. The establishment of Islamic
gendered boundaries was coupled with a rejection of western signifiers, as the Taliban
regarded western influence as being a largely responsible for Afghanistan’s collapse into
anarchy.
Taliban’s Religious Police Edict:
"Women, you should not step outside your residence. If you go outside the house
you should not be like the women who used to go with fashionable clothes
wearing much cosmetics and appearing in front of every men before the coming
of Islam."
53
Figure 27: Afghani women during the 1980's
http://www.ciriello.com/site/pix/46/460219.jpg (accessed May 2004)
Prior to the enactment of these laws, many relatively affluent and educated Afghanis had
adopted western dress, according to their means, taste, peer group, and family
permissions. Though many Afghani women had worn burqas all their lives, others had
not, and found the transition difficult.
Torpikai, a 65-year-old widow with snowy hair and striking green eyes,
remembers a scene from her girlhood: her grandmother putting on a burqa to go
out. It was the 1960s, and burqa-wearing was dying out, especially among
educated women in the capital.
"I remember it seeming to me to be this very old-fashioned thing, and I was glad I
had been born after it was no longer necessary," she said. Five years ago, when
the Taliban took over, she found herself wearing a burqa for the first time. "I felt
that time was going backward," she said.
54
She felt bad for herself, she said, but worse for her granddaughters, who had been
brought up to believe they would go to the university and have jobs. She found
herself keeping more and more to home. When she ventured out on a sultry
summer's day, she felt faint from lack of air inside the burqa.
Newsgroups: alt.religion.islam Date: 2001-12-31 11:21:30 PST
From: MIRSE (mirse@aol.com )Subject: Fox News Article on Burqawearing (accessed May 2004)
Figure 28: Woman wearing a white burqa.
http://www.repubblica.it/gallerie/online/cultura_scienze/afgani/5.html (accessed
May 2004)
55
Certainly, the Taliban’s ferocity in enforcing the gender boundaries of women in the
umma was startling, and often violent. Also, the Burqa requires some getting used to,
and is more suitable for rural and village landscapes than to urban situations with rapidly
moving vehicles. Women unaccustomed to wearing burqas found their usual means of
situating themselves in their contexts disrupted.
Bibi Amina, a 45-year-old tailor, has always been clever with her hands.
Bustling about her small house to make tea for a visitor, her movements are deft
and graceful.
The burqa, though, transformed her into someone clumsy and unsure.
"The first time I wore it, I was dizzy from not being able to see well -- I got
a terrible headache," she said. "I would trip all the time, and nearly fall."
The worst day, she said, was when she stepped into the path of an oncoming bus,
her peripheral vision obscured by the close-knit mesh covering her face.
She never even saw the bus until it was almost on top of her, only hearing the
cries of passers-by and the shriek of brakes, sickeningly close.
"I thought of my five children and what would have happened to them if it hit me,"
she said. "And I thought, 'what a stupid reason that would have been to die.' "
56
Shopping trips became time-consuming because she could only carry a small
parcel or two at a time. If she carried more, she said, she was afraid of not being
able to hold her burqa closed.
Once, she thought she saw a childhood friend coming out of a relative's house a
short distance away.
But she did not greet her friend, whom she recognized only by her movements.
She was afraid to call out -- women were not to raise their voices -- and she was
afraid of attracting attention by rushing after her.
MIRSE (mirse@aol.com) Subject: Fox News Article on Burqa-wearing (accessed
May 2004)
At the same time, Men were required to wear beards, turbans, loose tunics and trousers.
These were male signifiers of boundaries and respect, comparable to the burqa. Men
were also punished for failure to comply with these clothing restrictions. The west made
much of the requirement that women wear burqas, though there was little comment on
the requirement that men wear tunics and loose trousers, beards and turbans.
57
Part III: The Burqa Becomes Politicized in the West:
Images of the Burqa and Afghani women in West prior to 2001,
and Sharbat Gula
Figure 29: National Geographic Image of Sharbat Gula
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/afghangirl/ By Cathy Newman
Photographs by Steve McCurry (accessed May 2004)
The west saw few images of Afghani women prior to the 1984 image of an Afghani girl,
Sharbat Gula, photographed by Steve McCurry, and featured on the cover of National
Geographic.
McCurry's photo of the girl was selected as one of National Geographic’s
100 Best Pictures.
58
Names have power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is
Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. It is the ongoing tragedy of
Afghanistan. Invasion. Resistance. Invasion. Will it ever end? “Each change of
government brings hope,” said Yusufzai. “Each time, the Afghan people have
found themselves betrayed by their leaders and by outsiders professing to be their
friends and saviors.” National Geographic Magazine, April, 2002
The presentation of Sharbat Gula, and the search for her after 2001, cast her and her
country into the western discourse as “victims”, something to be “rescued” by the west.
This image of Sharbat Gula was so firmly fixed in western consciousness, that a burqa
advertised for sale on Ebay was listed as being, “ “identical to the NatGeo Burqa” in
April of 2002.
People on western internet discussion forums, including National Geographic’s forum,
linked from http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/afghangirl/, responded
immediately, strongly, emotionally, from a western Orientalist discourse, and with some
amazing ignorance to these images: (texts unedited, left as they were posted)
“The pain in her beautiful eyes makes people realize how they should stop the
nonsens in the world!! Help these people out with the millions of money you have
... Don’t be selfish!!”
59
(Posted by: Violet from 65.94.21.79 on December 12, 2003 04:29 AM
http://www.stefangeens.com/000133.html (accessed May 2004)
“Her eyes are the demonstration of the fear in the world...but in the same time is
the personification of wild.
(Posted by: Maura from 62.11.211.143 on March 4, 2004 02:42 PM
http://www.stefangeens.com/000133.html (accessed May 2004)
My dad had that picture on a cork bulletin board by his desk (and still does) when
I was much younger, though. I always loved to stare at her eyes. I thought they
looked animalistic and spiritually possessed with some sort of magnificent quality
that not everyone was born with. S
(Newsgroups: alt.fashion Date: 2002-03-14 00:03:35 PST (accessed
May 2004)
If that's the same girl 14 years later, when did she have the time and money to go
get a nose job? Am I the only one who doesn't think it looks even remotely like her?
(From: Ripley7173 (ripley7173@aol.com)Subject: Re: Stunning photos of Afghan
girl
Newsgroups: alt.fashion Date: 2002-03-14 08:56:11 PST, (accessed May
2004)
60
Did this woman receive any money for doing this show?
joe cousins: joe_cousins@hotmail.com; National Geographic Forum on
Sharbat Gula, March 10, 2003 3:00 AM,( accessed May 2004)
The western lack of awareness regarding Afghani women, their social relationships, their
spiritual relationships, and their geographies as expressed through their burqas became a
convenient vacuum into which policies, polemics, and propaganda could be poured as the
Afghani situation became politically explosive.
Figure 30: Image of Afghani women displaced by war published by Rawa
RAWA.org (accessed May 2004)
61
The Burqa and RAWA i
RAWA, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a secularist Maoist
group, was established in 1977, and agitated for women’s rights and democracy. Afghani
women had had the vote since 1920, but RAWA was a group of university educated
socially elite women who wanted a more secular, democratic style government. During
the Russian/Afghani war, they began to appeal to the west for humanitarian aid. Their
resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in December 1979 made them
attractive to American aid organizations, and they were able to get aid and access to
promote their cause. From a base at Wellesley College, the largest center for feminist
and women’s studies, RAWA made use of the western discourse of “aiding helpless
victims” and “freeing the oppressed” to get awards from humanitarian organizations,
funding, and attention to their cause. Their photographs of suffering women always
included a burqa-clad woman, as any Afghani woman would be if she were out in public
space. The connection between “suffering woman” and “woman in a burqa” became
indelible and automatic.
During the period of Soviet invasion, the Pentagon backed and armed groups such as
those under Gulbaddin Hekmatyar. These groups, often Pashtun, opposed the secular
intrusion of communism, and particularly opposed the Uzbeck Soviet troupes, as the
Pashtuns and Uzbecks were traditional rivals. The long and bloody warfare widowed
women, who having with no other means of support and protection, turned to begging.
62
RAWA Uses the Burqa as a Signifier to the West
The Russian/Afghani War devastated Afghanistan. RAWA used images of women in
burqas begging in the streets to present a picture of disruption, poverty and despair to the
west, to solicit funds and support from western countries.
RAWA was successful in “marketing” their images and messages to the west, while
obscuring their Maoist ideology, and gained press coverage and contributions. At the end
of the Soviet invasion, the Taliban came to power, and RAWA’s message changed from
simply requesting humanitarian assistance for women displaced by the war, to protesting
the policies of the Taliban. Their images of suffering women in burqas gradually evolved
to signify the evils of Islam, patriarchy and religious fundamentalism, very effective in
soliciting funds and support from the west.
.
Figure 31: An Afghani woman begging with her children, published by RAWA
RAWA.org, (accessed may 2004)
63
RAWA creates the discourse of “Fundamentalism-Blighted”
Afghanistan
RAWA seized the opportunity to the images of Afghani women in burqas to press their
message that the Taliban was cruel, inhumane, and oppressing women by their insistence
that women should not be in the umma spatial zone without full covering. Many Muslim
countries expressed admiration for the Taliban’s creation of “The Perfect Islamic State”,
and felt that Afghani women were being treated with the greatest respect by being
sheltered in their homes, covered and accompanied by men when out of their homes.
Figure 32: Afghani woman begging in the street, published by RAWA
64
Since the western countries were ignorant of the gendered spatial discourse of the umma,
RAWA could present these photographs as evidence of oppression to the west, in absence
of any other interpretation.
Figure 33: Women being disciplined by a member of the Taliban, published by RAWA
RAWA coined the term “Fundamentalism-Blighted” Afghanistan, which USA readers
interpreted within their understanding of “fundamentalist Christianity”. Fundamentalist
Christianity in the USA is often regarded as being in opposition to “liberal discourse”,
and particularly liberal feminist viewpoints. Therefore, in absence of any understanding
of the nature of Islam and Islamic geographies, the RAWA was able to extract the image
of the burqa from its indigenous discourse and place it into liberal feminist western
discourse. RAWA’s insertion of the burqa into western discourse as a signifier of
oppression met with little criticism or resistance in the West. RAWA increasingly used
65
the burqa as an effective signifier of oppression to gain political support and financial
contributions.
RAWA filmed the Taliban enforcing their spatial laws on umma and sent them out as
press releases. The wording of “dared to remove her burqa” in this press release that was
accompanied the image above implies oppression and resistance, whether or not either
may have been operative. Western consumers of this press release read it uncritically,
and were as outraged as RAWA intended for them to be. In this photograph, the woman
is clearly wearing her burqa, so the discipline in this case may be related to some other
civil infraction.
These photos are caught from a video film that has been filmed by RAWA on
August 26, 2001 in Kabul using a hidden camera. It shows two Taliban from
department of Amro bil mahroof (Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,
Taliban religious police) beating a woman in public because she has dared to
remove her burqa in public.
Certainly, there were cases where women were reprimanded for not wearing burqas in
public, and the ferocity and arbitrary enforcement of spatial boundaries was violent and
frightening. Fox News played the following story in the west to encourage rage against
what would appear to be the unwarranted beating of an innocent child. However, the
discourse of umma presents a difficulty of determining the moment at which a female
must begin to cover herself: a pre-pubescent female who could go with only a head scarf
66
was perceived by the police as a post pubescent female who would have to wear a burqa,
and was punished for the infraction, whereas she and her family perceived her as still a
“baby” and had not yet secluded her.
In the early days of Taliban rule, Spoghmai was slowly becoming accustomed to
the sight of women hurrying about the capital in their long, shroudlike burqa,
mandated by the new rulers.
But she was only 14, skinny and small. Everyone in the family still thought of her
as a baby. She didn't think anything of leaving the house that winter day clad in a
long, loose smock and a tightly knotted headscarf.
Walking alone in a neighborhood where she had an errand to run, she suddenly
heard angry shouts. She had been spotted by a pickup truck full of turbaned
young men who leaped out and ran toward her.
"The Taliban surrounded me and began beating me with cables," she recounted
softly. "No one had ever hit me in my life. I cried, and turned this way and that,
trying to get away from them, but they kept hitting me and hitting me."
She finally broke away and ran to the home of a family friend who sent word to
one of her brothers. He came with a burqa for her, and they walked home
together, her breath still ragged with sobs.
67
From: MIRSE (mirse@aol.com) Subject: Fox News Article on Burqa-wearing
(accessed May 2004)
After 9/11, Press releases from RAWA were picked up increasingly and uncritically by
western media, and the implementation of Taliban law was cast in lurid negative
description, and show minimal understanding of Afghani politics and its background.
Znet.com, Los Angeles Times, Sydney Morning Herald, December 29, 2003
by Meena Nanji
The 'actions' she was referring to took place largely during the reign of the
Jehadis (most religiously conservative mujahideen) from 1992-6. The Jehadis,
notorious for throwing acid in the faces of women, slicing off their breasts and
other atrocious acts, gained power during the 1980's when the U.S saw fit to fund,
arm and train them in the fight against Soviet occupation. During their rule, they
terrorized the civilian population with blanket rocket shellings, rape, torture and
killing, to such a degree that when the Taliban emerged in 1996, they were
initially welcomed.
68
Figure 34: RAWA marked International Human Rights Day by staging a demonstration
in front of the UN headquarter in Islamabad.
RAWA.org http://rawa.false.net/murder-w.htm (accessed May 2004)
Photographs of demonstrations clearly organized and posed for western cameras went
unquestioned. One example is shown in Figure 30, staged in Islamabad in front of the UN
headquarters, with banners largely in English, and clearly aimed at western
photojournalists and western readers.
The Burqa as Signifier Extracted from Indigenous Geography and
offered to US News Media Following 9/11
RAWA sent out press releases following 9//11 to news agencies hungry for material on
the Taliban, and were translated into reasons to support the US invasion of Afghanistan,
ostensibly to “liberate women in “Fundamentalist-Blighted Afghanistan”. RAWA hoped
69
to lobby for the following image and release was played in heavy rotation on CNN and
other news media.
Figure 35: Image of a woman being executed for a crime, published by RAWA.
RAWA.org, (accessed May 2004)
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Thousands of people watched as a woman, cowering
beneath a pale blue all-enveloping burqa, was shot and killed today in the first
public execution of a woman in Kabul since the Taliban religious army took
control three years ago.
The woman, identified only as Zarmeena, a mother of seven children, was found
guilty of beating her husband to death with a steel hammer as he slept. The
reason for the killing two years ago was a family dispute," according to a Taliban
soldier, who didn't give his name.
The Taliban have imposed their harsh brand of Islamic law in the 90 percent of
Afghanistan under their control. The Taliban say their version of Islam is a pure
one that follows a literal interpretation of the Muslim holy book, The Koran.
70
Under Taliban laws, murderers are publicly executed by the relatives of their
victims. Adulterers are stoned to death and the limbs of thieves are amputated.
Lesser crimes are punished by public beatings.
However, when this was repeated by the news media, it was presented not as a legal
execution of a convicted murderess, enacted within a sovereign nation’s boundaries and
within a country’s laws, but as an “atrocity”, “the most shocking film ever seen on
television”, and the one woman convicted of murder and sentenced to be executed
become three women cowering. The story, scripted by RAWA casts themselves as brave,
death defying heroines and freedom fighters, carrying on revolutionary activities beneath
their burqas. Their stories were used as a powerful incentive to get western donations for
their cause, and to support the US invasion as an act of mercy and freedom.
The Taliban's bravest opponents By Janelle Brown October 02, 2001
The film footage is wobbly and blurry but stunning: A soccer stadium in
Afghanistan is packed with people, but there is no match today. Instead, a pickup
truck drives into the stadium with three women, shrouded in burqas, cowering in
the back.
Armed men in turbans force a woman from the truck, and make her kneel at the
penalty line on the field. Confused and unable to see, the woman tries to look
behind just as a rifle is pointed against the back of her head. With no fanfare
whatsoever, she is shot dead. The shaky video camera captures the cheering
71
crowd as people rise to their feet, hoping to get a better view of the corpse on the
ground. The blue folds of the burqa begin to stain red with blood.
This public execution is some of the most shocking film ever seen on television; it
is perhaps the best document that the West has of atrocities committed by the
Taliban. It is just one part of an astonishing hour-long documentary called
"Beneath the Veil," currently in heavy rotation on CNN. Filmed by the halfAfghan British reporter Saira Shah, who traveled undercover to Afghanistan last
year, "Beneath the Veil" neatly captures the horror of life under the Taliban -- the
public executions for infractions as minor as prostitution or adultery, the brutality
of fundamentalist police, the slaughter of civilians unlucky enough to live on the
front line of the civil war with the Northern Alliance.
RAWA, the most prominent Afghan-run organization to oppose the Taliban, has
become one of the fundamentalists' greatest enemies. Perhaps the aspect of the
group most infuriating to its opponents -- and a surprising key to its effectiveness
-- is that it consists entirely of women, nearly 2,000 in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
who use the cover of their burqas and the seeming powerlessness of their status to
strategic advantage.
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/10/02/fatima/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/women/story/0,3604,565002,00.html (accessed
May 2004)
72
The Western Gaze and the Burqa
In 2001 and 2002, RAWA and other press photographers offered pictures of the burqa,
and other images of suffering in Afghanistan to western eyes, to be assimilated within the
context of western discourse. These were manipulated to gather support for US invasion
and presence in Afghanistan, particularly from women and liberal groups who are
commonly against invading soverign countries without provocation.
The discourse escalated quickly after 9/11, with comparisons to wearing the burqa to
death and loss of agency.
CBS News Correspondent Thalia Assuras: Nov. 14, 2001 Under Taliban rule,
women have been banned from work and education and forbidden to appear in
public except under the suffocating shroud of the burqa.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/11/14/world/main318091.shtml
In the review for the ostensibly documentary film “Kandahar” The adjectives
“dehumanizing”, “vile”, “fascism”, “torture”, and the gratuitously applied
“pornographic”, cast the burqa in the most vivid negative terms possible.
As the money changes hands, Nafar is handed the garment whose presence will
function as the moral center of the film from here on out: the vile burqa. We soon
lose the family; when their little cart is plundered by roadside bandits (as the
docile husband prays fearfully to Allah), they ditch Nafar and flee back to the
73
relative safety of Iran (!). But Nafar remains, trapped inside the pornographic
cloth for the remainder of her quest.
It's one thing to know that female victims of Islamic fascism are forced, under
pain of torture, to cover the entirety of their bodies with heavy fabric at all times;
it's quite another, particularly for those of us who have never left the West, to see-or notice--the dehumanizing reality of that fabric for the first time. A woman
doesn't wear a burqa, she is confined within one. Much of the film's power lies in
the mounting discomfort of sharing that confinement: seeing through the tiny
eyeholes, hearing the labored breathing within. Once the burqa is introduced, it's
fair to say that Kandahar becomes a horror film whose primary subject and
symbol is the burqa itself.
SHARING THE CONFINEMENT: The Confusing, Sinister Beauty of
Kandahar
by Sean Nelson Kandahar dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf Opens Fri Jan 11,
2002 at Broadway Market.
One of the most common comparisons of the requirement to wear a burqa was that of
wearing a bra in the west. Women found this an immediate and persuasive argument for
casting the burqa as “oppressive” because they saw it as related to the “bra burnings” of
the feminist movement of the early 70’s.
74
Wearing a burqa is a matter of survival; wearing a bra is a matter of choice. I
rarely subject myself to the discomfort of the latter; I'm 53 years old, a 38 C+,
and I only wear a bra when I go to work and HAVE to. At home, in public, in teeshirts or loose casual shirts or comfy dresses, forget it. I don't have to look
"perky" any more. But no one is going to stone me to death in the soccer stadium
for not confining my breasts in a spandex basket.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 11:43:41 EST
To: SpiderWomen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [SW] Women retain their burqas in Afghanistan?
All of these were woven into an explicit platform for “benign intervention and liberation”
of Afghanistan to “free women from the burqa”, espoused by liberal sources normally
opposed war and invasion. The image of the burqa became synonymous with repression
by December, 2001, particularly in the western summation provided by NPR, the woman
with no face is deprived of her personhood, and is extended to “The burqa sets up all the
other violations suffered by the women of Afghanistan”.
Tuesday, December 4, 2001
De-faced, de-valued, de-humanized
Marion Winik
75
THE IMAGE of an Afghan woman swathed head to toe has become a symbol
of the repression of women under the Taliban. Why, I wonder? Is it because we in
the West are so focused on clothes, on expressing our personality and our
sexuality through our appearance that we obsess on what people are wearing
rather than the fact that they are deprived of all basic freedoms and kept in line
by constant brutal punishments?
I don't think so. I think the burqa is a symbol of -- and in fact the key to -- the
other abuses of Afghan women.
Clearly, the burqa represses individuality. Americans don't like that. And it is
based on the idea that women's bodies are so sexual that even their outlines are
dangerous, or that a woman cannot be adequately faithful to either God or her
husband unless her female form is well hidden. A lot of us don't agree with that
either.
But in these regards, the burqa is no different than garments worn by Orthodox
Jewish women, Amish women, or indeed, Islamic women who wear a chador.
The difference is choice, right? As long as women choose traditional robes of
some sort, we have no reason to object, even if we disagree with the principles
underlying that choice.
76
That is true, but it is only part of the problem. The problem is that women who are
forced to wear a burqa have no faces. They cannot be seen. They cannot be
recognized on the street. And in this they are deprived of not just individuality, but
identity. They are not citizens. They have no public existence and no rights. Just
as the executioner wears a hood so that his killing is done not by that person, but
by the state, the woman with no face is deprived of her personhood. Imagine men
wearing burqas. It's immediately obvious that what they have lost is their
identities.
When we lose our faces, we lose our names, we lose our dignity, we lose our basic
purchase on humanity. The burqa sets up all the other violations suffered by the
women of Afghanistan.
Marion Winik is a commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things
Considered." ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page A - 21
Figure 36: “Women Denied Basic Rights in Afghanistan”
Dawn Corbett, Internet/Communications Intern http://www.now.org/nnt/fall98/global.html (accessed May 2004)
77
Western women’s groups assimilated the RAWA interpretation of Burqa into feminist
discourse: “symbol of the total oppression of women”, and not only supported US/British
military intervention into Afghanistan, but also demanded such as an act of mercy,
liberation and humanity.
\
"Women around the globe are living under oppressive conditions most of us can
only imagine in our worst nightmares," said Vice President Membership Karen
Johnson. "It is the duty of women's rights and human rights groups to make the
public aware of these atrocities and to pressure the U.S. government and U.S.
companies to stand up to those who abuse women's rights and bodies." NOW, 2001
Feminist leaders, celebrities, and organizations lent support to “consciousness raising”
experiences, handing out burqas to women so they could put them on and “experience
oppression and feel solidarity with their Afghani sisters.”
Feminist campaigns raised public awareness in many cases by making the burqa-and American repulsion to it--the emotional center of their projects. Oprah
Winfrey's critically acclaimed reading of Eve Ensler s "Under the Burqa,"
to 18,000 people at New York City s Madison Square Garden told the story of
an Afghan woman under Taleban rule, ending with the appearance of a
burqa-clad Afghan woman. Audience members, who afterward signed petitions
against the Taleban in the thousands, pinned bits of fabric from burqas on
78
their lapels in remembrance.
The burqa is a "symbol of the total oppression of women," says Feminist
Majority Campaign's Norma Gattsek. Thus, the centerpiece of the Feminist
Majority's Campaign to End Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan, launched in
1997 as the group's first foray into international politics, is a project
that distributes burqas to schoolchildren across the country. Over 600
groups participate in the Feminist Majority's "Back-to-School" campaign.
The campaign draws attention to the fact that the Taleban outlawed female
education and employment (today, they allow girls' religious education up
till the age of 8). In addition to viewing a wrenching Marlo-Thomas-narrated
video, hearing lectures, and donating money to Afghan girls’ home schools and
NGO-run schools, participants are lent burqas to try on. Thousands of others buy
the group's "symbol of remembrance," a small swatch of mesh material
representing the burqa.
79
,
Figure 37: Dec. 6, 2001 Mrs. Smith's grade 8 class reflect on being an Afghan woman
under Taliban rule. .
http://riverside.ednet.ns.ca/news/burqa.htm (accessed May 2004)
"It is the most smothering experience to put one on," says Gattsek. "Anytime a
group has used one, they have told us that that moment of putting that on was
overwhelming. Because it really made them feel, how could I live like this, totally
cut off from the world?"
misc.activism.progressive “Unveiling the Taleban Dress Codes Are Not the
Issue, New Study Finds” By Sonia Shah
Figure 38: “Erin Anzelmo wore this Burqa made of American flag and walked the streets
in Manhattan, New York, to show her solidarity with the Women in Afghanistan and to
protest the forced policies of the Taleban / Al-Qaida extremists that forced women to
wear Burqa in Afghanistan”
http://www.hazara.net/takeAction/911/911.html (accessed May 2004)
80
Feminist organizations absorbed RAWA’s press releases and experiential projects, such
as Erin Anzelmo’s project, the American Burqa project and Hazel Flyingdrum’s personal
quest for solidarity with Afghani womenii.
In the “Worldwide Sisterhood Against Terrorism and War”, an organization of about 80
feminists including women from Central Asia and U.S. notables as Gloria Steinem, Alice
Walker, and Susan Sarandon launched a petition headlined "Not in Our Name”. This
petition was willing to support a UN sponsored bombing and invasion of Afghanistan in
preference to US/British military intervention, and they seriously suggested that the
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan should rule the country.
However, Sunita Mehta and Fahima Danishgar who co-founded Women for Afghan
Women, Central Asian women more familiar with Afghani politics than the American
actresses, sharply reminded the group that RAWA was actually a very small, though
vocal Maoist organization, unlikely to have the strength or support to do any sort of a
credible job, and distinctly unpalatable to other governments.
Burqa as Signifier used by Rand, AP, Reuters and the US
Government
In 1999, the Rand Corporation published a paper drawing a clear connection between
terrorism, suffering, and poverty. Rand added the image Figure 39 of a suffering woman
in a burqa for emphasis.
81
Figure 39: “An Afghan woman and her daughter beg near a mosque in the village of
Dasht-i-Qala on Nov. 9. Twenty-four years of war in Afghanistan — combined with
drought, displacement, poverty, and human rights abuses — have turned the country into
a humanitarian catastrophe.” AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/SERGEI GRITS (accessed
May 2004)
Strike at the Roots of Terrorism
By Ian O. Lesser
Ian Lesser is a RAND senior political scientist and the lead author of
“Countering the New Terrorism”.
Terrorism has systemic origins that can be ameliorated. Social and economic
pressures, frustrated political aspirations, and bitter personal experiences can all
contribute to terrorism. Fertile ground is sown for terrorism wherever regimes
fail to provide for peaceful political change and wherever economies are unable
to keep pace with population growth and popular demands for more evenly
distributed benefits.
1999, the Rand Corporation (accessed May 2004)
82
The British and US governments and governmental agencies picked up the equivalence
of Burqa = Repression supplied by RAWA. And blended it with the message from Rand
that suggested paternalist intervention was a useful platform. The burqa was a convenient
signifier to excuse a military invasion, as RAWA had supplied it with associations with
oppression, fascism, atrocity, and brutality, and Rand had suggested that relieving
suffering, and feeding the hungry might relieve terrorism. The images of women in
burqas were increasingly paired with dangerous looking men, presumed to be terrorists.
Figure 40: A woman in a burqa passes by a man with an automatic weapon.
http://www.kargah.com/gallery1/index.php?action=show&picid=1367 (accessed May
2004)
A USA Today slideshow with suffering women in burqas, scary “Taliban”, and workers
at the World Trade Center site cemented the connection of these signifiers: suffering
women in burqas, terrorists, and defiant Americans.
83
Figure 41: USA Today image of Afghani women in a burqa walking along a barren wall
http://www.usatoday.com/news/gallery/terr1102/contenttemplate6.htm (accessed May
2004)
Figure 42: USA today image of Afghani Taliban men shouting
2004)
The implicit proposal was that if the intimidating-looking men (presumably terrorists)
were removed, by force if necessary, the woman might remove her burqa, be given a
good hot meal, 9/11 would be vindicated, and the international terrorist threat would
evaporate.
84
Figure 43: USA Today image of workers at the 9/11 site.
2004)
Burqa as Signifier of Terrorist Threat and Humanitarian Rescue
Increasingly after 9/11, Reuters and AP purchased photographs that placed the Burqa in
contexts which express Western discourse about Afghanistan, deploying a visual signifier
to justify the US/British invasion of Afghanistan as a humanitarian rescue.
85
Figure 44: News Image of Afghani woman posed with tank and armed men.
©September11News.com http://www.september11news.com/DailyTimelineNov.htm
(accessed May 2004)
Senior British officials say that coalition forces are about to mount the
first significant ground offensive in an attempt to establish a
"humanitarian bridgehead" in a corridor from Uzbekistan through enemy
positions in northern Afghanistan "in support" of Northern Alliance
forces. U.S. jets continue to blast Taliban strongholds on Afghanistan's
two main battle fronts. ©September11News.com
http://www.september11news.com/DailyTimelineNov.htm
The British and US news and government leaders regularly used images of “suffering
86
(repressed) women in burqas” as justification for the invasion, and paired them with
weapons of war.
Figure 45: Poster supporting the Republican Party platform
http://www.jerseygop.com/posters.html (accessed May 2004)
:
The Republican Party printed posters with the “burqa removed” as a symbol of liberation,
with the logo implying that removing burqas was an act of “defending freedom again”;
“again” implying that the invasion of Afghanistan was one in a series of “liberations” by
the US military, similar to that of the Philippines, Panama, Viet Nam, and others since.
President Bush has stated: "The women of Afghanistan, imprisoned in their
homes or beaten in the streets and executed in public spectacles, did not reproach
us for routing the Taliban."
Actually, that was hardly the case. In the National Geographic issue featuring the
“finding” of Sharbat Gula, she said, categorically, "life under the Taliban was better. At
87
least there was peace and order" And, tragically, the “horrors” presented by RAWA to
feminists and other groups, used to whip up patriotic fervor and to justify the military
offensive, were found to be lies, or at least, Afghani Urban Legends.
Kabul women keep the veil By Kate Clark BBC Afghanistan correspondent
Saturday, 24 November, 2001, 16:38 GMT
When Western politicians decry the Taliban’s treatment of Afghan women, it is
difficult to recognise the picture they paint. Many stories repeated as fact never
happened - at least not as far as I can judge from living in Kabul for two years.
Exaggerated stories
Afghan women never had their nails removed for wearing nail varnish or their
feet beaten for wearing white socks. Indeed, in Kabul, they walked proudly wearing high heels, platform shoes, fish-net stockings and tailored trousers,
letting their burqas flow behind them to reveal what clothes they wore
underneath.
Lifting the Burqa becomes a Signifier of Support for the West
Of course, if the burqa was designated the signifier of oppression, and whether or not
there was any truth to that, the lifted burqa would have to be the signifier of liberation,
and gratitude to western forces. Photographs were collected and disseminated so serve
the purpose.
88
Figure 46: Women lined up for food being donated by the United Nations World Food
Program
http://www.faithfreedom.org/faq/4.htm AP Photo/Laura Rauch (accessed May 2004)
“An Afghan widow smiles after lifting her burqa in the United Nations World
Food Program bakery in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2001. About
350 widows, identified as the most vulnerable group in the city, received two cans
of oil and two sacks of wheat from the United States Agency for International
Development.” (AP Photo/Laura Rauch)
But as photographers, foreign aid workers and government agencies entered Afghanistan,
they saw the burqa still in place in its indigenous geography. President Karzai decreed
that women had the right to choose whether to wear a burqa. Despite this announcement,
women inside and outside Kabul continue to wear the burqa. Some observers began to
89
question the premise that “repression = burqa” and its corollary “liberation = removing
burqa”.
While the images of Afghans huddled around radios listening to music, looking at
movie posters and shaving their beards has been heartening, these scenes of postTaliban life are missing something. Once the Taliban's suffocating oppression
was lifted, I imagined Afghan women running into the streets and heaving their
head-to-toe coverings, called burqas, into a massive bonfire. It would be a scene
akin to the 1960s bra burnings only with more passion and relief.
My first reaction to this timidity was frustration. How could these Afghan women
keep themselves from rushing to liberation? Frustration soon gave way to anger - not at these women, but at myself. How could I be so naive and arrogant to
presume to know how these women should react after having endured
unimaginable hardships?
The vision of a feminist revolt is so unrealistic and, yet, typically American.
Waiting, hoping, praying for liberation of Afghani women Athens BannerHerald on Sunday, November 25, 2001. Joanna Soto Carabello
http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/112501/opi_1125010018.shtml
(accessed may 2004)
90
Even some women in Afghanistan who had worn the burqa under protest, and
participated in counter Taliban activities found themselves still wearing their burqas.
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2004 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights
Reserved
Wednesday, 31 March 2004
Afghanistan: Author Awaits Happy Ending To 'Sewing Circles Of Herat'
By Ron Synovitz
"They would arrive in their burqas with their bags full of material and scissors.
Underneath they would have notebooks and pens. And once they got inside,
instead of learning to sew, they would actually be talking about Shakespeare and
James Joyce, Dostoyevsky and their own writing. It was a tremendous risk they
were taking. If they had been caught, they would have been, at the very least,
imprisoned and tortured. Maybe hanged," Lamb says.
"I went to find the same women writers and I was expecting they would be very
happy that now they are free and they can write. One of them was studying at
Herat University, which of course was impossible under the Taliban. So I went to
see her," Lamb says.
The woman's name was Leila and she was among the first group of female
students to enroll at the Literature Faculty of Herat University in seven years.
91
Indoors, Leila wore tight jeans, high-heeled shoes, and lipstick. But the classes
were only for women, and Leila pulled on her burqa the moment she walked
outside.
"I was surprised because she seemed a bit depressed, and she said that although
she could now study, that it is segregated education in Herat. The literature
faculty where she was for women had very few books in the library still -- maybe
just a shelf of religious books and a few other books. And I was also astonished
that she was still wearing the burqa because she had spoken really vividly about
how imprisoned she felt inside it, and how there was no oxygen. She couldn't
breathe. She was always tripping over it. I asked her, 'Why are you still wearing
this?' And she said, 'You know, our society has changed [but] even though the
Taliban have gone, the mentality is still the same,'" Lamb says.
RAWA had been so successful in promoting its agenda, that the Afghani women’s
continued wearing of the burqa in the umma because a cause for calling the organization
into question; not only motives and tactics, but their financial accountability. RAWA had
solicited millions of dollars from private individuals and humanitarian foundations, but
did not seem to be able to account for money spent.
On Aug. 1, the prominent left-wing Feminist Majority Foundation declared a
"Victory for Afghan Women."
92
Legislation approved by Congress will funnel billions of U.S. tax dollars into
reconstructing Afghanistan. FMF had campaigned vigorously for the measure
and undoubtedly expects to guide the money slated for Afghan women.
Before this occurs, FMF should be called to account for its role in funds directed
toward the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. In a blitz of
post-Sept. 11 media, RAWA became the sine qua non of Afghan women's
oppression, largely due to PC feminists, especially FMF, who acted as public
relations and fund-raising agents. The money poured in.
Skeptics who mentioned fiscal accountability were ignored. We are even less
likely to be acknowledged now that RAWA is embarrassing FMF
http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2002/0820.htm (accessed May
2004)
The Maoist collective group of revolutionary women eager to relieve Afghani women of
their burqas were suddenly was no longer above law and accountability in the presence of
other sources of information and interpretation. Afghani women’s problems were
examined from different perspectives, and so was the burqa. Indeed, the burqa did cause
some difficulties, though patriarchal oppression was not among them. Years of veiling
kept sunlight off of women’s skin, making their bones fragile from poor calcium uptake.
Women had become shy and reclusive from years of seclusion.
93
Doc Risked Life For Women's Health
BOSTON, March 16, 2004
Samar's work often concerned the intersection between civil rights and physical
health. For example, according to the Canadian group Rights & Democracy, she
told Taliban officials that Afghan women forced to wear a head-to-toe burqa
received insufficient sunlight, exacerbating a common bone condition.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/16/world/main606655.shtml
(accessed May 2004)
"I think the burqa made women more or less invisible," says Esme. "It locked
them up in a certain place where they hardly had any interaction with friends and
suddenly they come out and they have to be amongst people again. The very
strange thing is that their social skills are actually quite bad because they have
been living in an isolated manner for six years, it's like a prisoner coming out of
prison and suddenly finding himself in the open and not knowing what to do next.
Women are trying to find their place and trying to find a way of dealing with each
other and trying not to hurt each other, which they did in the beginning."
Esme de Jong, a Dutch anthropologist
http://www.rnw.nl/development/html/burqa030123.html
Radio Netherlands (accessed May 2004)
94
The physicians and aid workers in Afghanistan also understood that the burqa was not
going to leave its geography. If there was a “burqa removal” reported by photographers
and newscasters, it was not by the indigenous Pashtuns, but by Pakistanis coming in over
the border.
"The changes that you see in Kabul is that more and more women stop wearing
the burqa or so it seems. But what we found was that the majority of these women
actually come from Pakistan, not the old population that used to live there. It's
something that newcomers are bringing into the country, rather than women
suddenly taking off their burqas in the street."
Esme de Jong, a Dutch anthropologist
http://www.rnw.nl/development/html/burqa030123.html
Radio Netherlands (accessed May 2004)
"What is very complex is when you have forms of behavior that have been in
conservative societies for ages and that takes time to address. This is the kind of
thing that you cannot force down people's throats, nor do you want things to
happen in that kind of way," Manoel de Almieda e Silva, a spokesperson for the
United Nations Assistant Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), told IRIN. (accessed
May 2004)
95
Figure 47: “A sea of blue and white burqas walked one and a half kilometres through the
centre of Mazar to register for the forthcoming elections.
Photograph by UN Assistant Mission in Afghanistan” Copyright © IRIN 2004
http://www.irinnews.org/printreport.aspx?reportid=23854 (accessed May 2004)
Figure 48: This promotional piece for the Royal Air Force features an Afghani teacher
with her burqa pulled back so she can talk to other women; underneath she wears a trendy
black leather motorcycle jacket. "The Lifted Burqa" Ministry of Defense, Operation
Fingal http://www.operations.mod.uk/fingal/photo_gallery_school.htm (accessed May
2004)
An excellent example is Qasaba school, near Kabul airport; Royal Air Force and
Royal Engineer personnel based at the airport adopted the school soon after their
arrival, and have leant it much support, both moral and practical.
96
Afghan police in smart new uniforms provided security, assisted by ISAF troops,
and the children turned out in colourful traditional dress. Dr Karzai was clearly
overwhelmed by the occasion, and declared, "This is a happy, happy day. A very
happy day!"
Another school much in need of assistance is Abd-U-Ali Mustaghni School. The
British Embassy and 3 Close Support Regiment, serving with the British ISAF
contingent, have organised the provision of new furniture. There is no doubt that
much more needs to be done, the years of neglect having left the building in an
appalling state of repair where no less than 3,500 pupils, male and female of all
ages, are starting to receive once more a proper education.
A particularly special gift for Qasaba School arrived in early May - a
consignment of books and pens donated by the pupils of Aberdare Town Church
Primary School in Wales. The children organised a collection amongst
themselves after receiving a letter from an RAF dental officer serving with ISAF.
The gifts were very warmly received by the staff and children at Qasaba.
"The Lifted Burqa" Ministry of Defense, Operation Fingal
http://www.operations.mod.uk/fingal/photo_gallery_school.htm (accessed May
2004)
The “lifted burqa” remains as a signifier of humanitarian presence accepted in
Afghanistan though the burqa is no longer used as a justification for military intervention.
97
Conclusion:
In Islam the discourse of veiling and burqa was constructed in concepts of gendered
space, privilege and honor.
"The link between dress...and sanctity of space is reflected in the Islamic rituals of
"dressing" The Ka'ba, the center of the holy site of pilgrimage...The
correspondence between the sanctuary of the Ka'ba and the home (as sanctuary)
is exemplified in the measures for protection and attitudes of protectiveness in
both spheres" (Guindi, 1999, 5-6).
The Western discourse on veiling and burqa was constructed in concepts of victimhood,
oppression, and paternalist Orientalism. This discourse is completely removed from
Islamic, particularly Afghani, discourses of space, gender and agency. A garment that
was a symbol of purity and prestige in its indigenous geography was interpreted as a
symbol of oppression and violence when viewed from western context. This in itself is
not unusual in the history of Orientalism. It is also not particularly remarkable that a
signifier was used to justify an invasion in the name of “liberation”. What is unusual in
the case of the burqa in the late 20th century is that a group of indigenous women
deliberately created and exported this discourse, equipping it with exaggerations, rumors,
lies, profited off the enterprise, and therein constructed their own destruction.
98
Apart from the political challenges facing RAWA, tremendous social and relief
work amongst unimaginably traumatised women and children lie ahead of us, but
unfortunately we do not at the moment enjoy any support from international
NGOs, therefore our social programmes are presently greatly reduced for lack of
funds. RAWA.org. 2004
References:
Barr J., Clark I., Marsh M.
The Veil and Veiling
http://www.skidmore.edu/academics/arthistory/ah369/finalveil.htm
Belghiti, M, 1970
Les Relations Feminines et le Statue de la Femme dans la Famille Rural”
Collection du Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc
Rabat
Brooks, G. 1995.
Nine Parts of Desire
New York: Anchor Books,
Cavanagh, Dr. E., 2003, 2004
http://afghan.smugmug.com/
99
Kabul, Afghanistan
Doubleday, V. 1988
Three Women of Herat
University of Texas Press, Austin
Dupree, N. 1978
Behind the Veil in Afghanistan
Asia, 1 (2)
El Guindi, F. 1981
Veiling Infitah with Muslim Ethic: Egypt’s Contemporaty Islamic Movement
Social Problems, Vol 28
El Guindi, F., 1999
Veil: Modesty, Privacy, and Resistance.
Oxford, New York: Berg.
Kroeber, A., 1919
On the Principle of order in Civilization as Exemplified by Changes in Fashion
American Anthropologist 32: 235-263:
Kroeber, A and Richardson, J. 1940
100
Three Centuries of Women’s Dress Fashions: a Quantitative Analysis
Anthropological Records, V, 111 – 153
Kuper, H., 1973
Costume and Identity: Comparative Studies in Society and History
15, 3: 348-367
The Library of Congress - Country Studies
http://reference.allrefer.com/country-guide-study/afghanistan/afghanistan33.html
Linsisfarne-Tapper and Ingham, 1997
Languages of Dress in the Middle East
Curzon, Surrey, UK
Mernissi, F., 1991
The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam.
Lakeland, Mary Jo, tans. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Mernissi, F. 1987
Beyond the Veil, Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society
Indiana University Press
Molteno, M., 1987
101
A Language in Common
The Women's Press:
London
Pound, O, tr., 1976
The Persian of Iraj (1874 – 1924)
i
RAWA, Mission Statement:
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, was established in Kabul, Afghanistan, in
1977 as an independent political/social organization of Afghan women fighting for human rights and for
social justice in Afghanistan. The founders were a number of Afghan woman intellectuals under the
sagacious leadership of Meena who in 1987 was assassinated in Quetta, Pakistan, by Afghan agents of the
then KGB in connivance with fundamentalist band of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. RAWA’s objective was to
involve an increasing number of Afghan women in social and political activities aimed at acquiring
women’s human rights and contributing to the struggle for the establishment of a government based on
democratic and secular values in Afghanistan. Despite the suffocating political atmosphere, RAWA very
soon became involved in widespread activities in different socio-political arenas including education,
health and income generation as well as political agitation.
Before the Moscow-directed coup d’état of April 1978 in Afghanistan, RAWA’s activities were confined to
agitation for women’s rights and democracy, but after the coup and particularly after the Soviet occupation
of Afghanistan in December 1979, RAWA became directly involved in the war of resistance. In
contradistinction to the absolute majority of the vaunted Islamic fundamentalist "freedom fighters" of the
anti-Soviet war of resistance, RAWA from the outset advocated democracy and secularism. Despite the
horrors and the political oppression, RAWA’s appeal and influence grew in the years of the Soviet
102
occupation and a growing number of RAWA activists were sent to work among refugee women in
Pakistan. For the purpose of addressing the immediate needs of refugee women and children, RAWA
established schools with hostels for boys and girls, a hospital for refugee Afghan women and children in
Quetta, Pakistan with mobile teams. In addition, it conducted nursing courses, literacy courses and
vocational training courses for women.
Demonstrations against the Soviet invaders and their stooges and later on against the fundamentalists, and
unrelenting exposure of their treason and heinous crimes has been a hallmark of RAWA’s political
activities. It was in consequence of its anti-Soviet occupationist struggle and agitation that RAWA was
marked for annihilation by the Soviets and their cronies, while the Islamic fundamentalists vented their
wrath on our organisation for our pro-democracy, pro-secularist and anti-fundamentalist stance. Our
uncompromising attitude against these two enemies of our people has cost us dear, as witnessed by the
martyrdom of our founding leader and a large number of our key activists, but we have unswervingly stood,
and continue to stand, by our principles despite the deadly blows that we have been dealt.
For the purpose of propagating our views, aims and objectives, and to give Afghan women social and
political awareness in regard to their rights and potentialities, RAWA launched a bilingual (Persian/Pashtu)
magazine, Payam-e-Zan (Woman's Message) in 1981. Publication of this magazine is on-going and byissues in Urdu and English for non-Persian/Pashtu speakers.
Since the overthrow of the Soviet-installed puppet regime in 1992 the focus of RAWA’s political struggle
has been against the fundamentalists’ and the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban’s criminal policies and atrocities
against the people of Afghanistan in general and their incredibly ultra-male-chauvinistic and anti-woman
orientation in particular.
ii
News for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
103
From: Dan Clore (clore@columbia-center.org)
Subject: [smygo] Pale Blue Polyester Eyes
This is the only article in this thread
View: Original Format
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Date: 2003-10-20 09:14:21 PST
Pale blue polyester eyes
Twenty-four hours in a burqa becomes a unique experience for
Santa Barbara woman
By Ted Mills, Special to the [Goleta Valley] Voice
It began not so much as a political statement as pure performance art, but for a 24-hour period
earlier this year, a woman named Hazel Flyingdrum spent life under a burqa.
Before the U.S. campaign to rout the ruling Taliban, the press focused on the plight of
Afghanistans women. The use of the burqa, a kind of dress that covers a womans body from head
to toe, became a symbol of the countrys fundamentalist oppressors.
Although the media had moved on, Flyingdrum hadnt forgotten the image of women in burqas.
So when her class in performance art gave a term-ending assignment to take on a completely
different persona for a day, the returning student had to think for a bit.
"At first I thought I would cover myself with henna tattoos," said the 50-something Flyingdrum in
a voice that still shows hints of her British roots (shes long been an American citizen). She did, but
it didnt feel right, not enough of a project, so she contacted RAWA, the local chapter of the
Revolutionary ssociation of the Women of Afghanistan, which has been publicizing the plight of
the Afghan women for years, and asked if they had a burqa she could wear.
104
Brianna Lawrie of RAWA not only had a burqa she could borrow, but apparently a selection of
colors. Hazel chose a pale blue one.
She soon learned a lot about these clothes that she had only seen on television. Theyre made of
polyester, and bear a manufacturers label from Afghanistan. They are, in their own way,
beautifully made. Theyre also incredibly hot and stuffy inside.
"I had no idea how enclosed Id feel," she says. "Just shut off."
Like a Halloween mask, it provides limited eyeholes and a reduced field of vision. "Someone
could have come up right beside me and I wouldnt have seen them," she says. "It was very scary."
She also felt depressed. "Just trying it on made me feel sad."
For her day in the burqa, Hazel set about following her usual routine -- dance class, health club,
college -- but decided to also follow the rules that women must follow in public in Afghanistan.
"Youre not allowed to speak at all in public. I nearly gave the game away a few times."
Whether people saw Hazel as a real fundamentalist following rules or as someone performing a
publicity stunt, she didnt know, but from inside the burqa, she watched as people at the health club
quickly shrank away. "One lady said, Stop staring at me! But I wasnt," she says. "She just couldnt
see my eyes."
What really struck Hazel was a trip on the bus. At one stop a longtime friend got on, and Hazel
resisted calling out to her, though behind the burqa she was smiling. "My friend walked up to me,
frowned, and sat as far away from me a she could. I was truly faceless."
105
The reaction of men and women differed down the gender lines. "Men were drawn to it," she says.
"They wanted to see underneath. But women generally didnt even look at me. I got the impression
that in Afghanistan men just must see shrouded figures, not women. Its like another planet."
Her burqa also come into play at a womens ceremony she attends annually in San Luis Obispo.
Called the "Longdance," its an evening of empowerment and ritual, and each woman was told to
come as a character. "I came in the burqa as Hidden Woman," she says.
Flyingdrum had planned to rip the burqa off at the end as a sort of rebirth, but the burqa has a
strange power.
"I suddenly decided not to as I walked around the circle of women, just silent, looking at each an
every one of them. Then I walked off. Nobody knew it was me, even by the next day." To take off
the burqa would have been giving a happy ending to a story that is far from over, she feels, so it
stayed on. "It was a powerful moment."
Strangely enough, though her project is over, her relationship with her burqa remains a complex
one. It allowed her a perspective that shes still coming to understand. "RAWA plans to sell these
burqas by the end of the year," she says. "I have so many other projects to do that the burqa keeps
suggesting. I hope I can buy my one back from them."
Hazel Flyingdrum initially wore a burqa as performance art, but the experience quickly became
much more.

Burqa: Garment as Signifier - TapDancing Lizard Publications

Transcription

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