VEIL - RAFI ZAKARI
125 Total impulse pick-up at the library. I’d heard of this series before, “Object Lessons” which is sort of like the 33 ⅓ collection, but for “objects”. Short, maybe 2500 word essays about things like “The Walkman” or “The remote”, each written by a different author. I haven’t read anything else in this series, nor do I know who Rafi Zakaria is but this was pretty great. The book weaves between personal-life anecdotes from Zakaria, a Pakistani Muslim woman who often does not wear a veil or any sort of head covering. My appearance has never been policed anywhere near this level, nor did I have a great grasp on what the “rules” are for halal head-coverings. Zakaria wisely doesn't get too deep into Islamic theology and jurisprudence about this. The issue is literally 1k+ years old and someone who isn’t enmeshed in the discourse isn’t going to have the ability to really understand the purely religious angle. I will say I was interested to read that certain Islamic scholars consider the Burka, the most emblematic and toxi version of the veil to Western eyes, un-Islamic due to the fact that at the time of the Prophet, only Jewish women wore them in Mecca. Fascinating. The broader discussion of what the veil means and how it’s seen in “Western” society is more a subject I have feelings about and can consider deeply. The issues of being “seen” or not being seen and who controls public space and who is in-charge gain resonance, at least with me, when you consider the panopticon. Are these women able to avoid the often aggressive male-gaze in public, the veil acting as a visual cue that this sort of viewing is off-limits for male outsiders? Are they subjecting themselves to a patriarchal panopticon in their own homes and families? She gets into questions about whether “enlightened” Western governments are liberating or subjecting women when they ban the veil in public spaces. I would say she correctly comes down on the side of “they’re doing this because they want to control the way the public space looks and the sorts of people in it” rather than “the veil clashes with our deeply held and sincere love/respect for women”. The final move she made, bringing in drones, the other “technology” most associated with Muslim and the Islamic world (esp. The Islamic world of the Western imagination) was the most interesting and provocative to me. The idea that the drone is also a panopticon, reading faces from the sky, identifying people and their movements anywhere in the world, dealing death, and that it is also obsessed with “unmasking” and “identifying” Muslims, who from the Orientalist days of Harems were considered mysterious and unknowable. I don’t believe the book to be “pro-veil” as much as interested in the ways the veil complicated this Western rush to have everyone identified, tracked, monitored. Very thought provoking. 632 Veils
