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III
So I put it on, in submission to God (SWT), invoking modesty, privacy and resistance, entering sacred space — and, all around me. Things clarified and became pleasing and simple while simultaneously they clouded and got harder. The words of a young Japanese revert to Islam, Sister Khaula, reverberated in my mind. She had noticed, "If one observes hijab from the outside, one will never see what is hidden in it…a woman with the hijab is so brightly beautiful as an angel or a saint with self-confidence, calm, dignity," Was Sister Khaula correct? She was. To put the veil on in its most positive sense is like stepping onto the prayer rug to begin praying, like aligning one's prayer times with the sun's daily movements, like circumambulating the Ka'aba. Like washing one's self to invoke spiritual cleanliness. To be beneath the veil in the best way is to be in a tenenos, the Greek concept which means a sacred space cut out from a profane one. It is the magic circle into which no evil jinn or malignant force or worldly distraction can enter. When one is veiled, the prying eye of the predator is blocked. When one is veiled, one moves through the world like a spirit — in the world but not of it. When one is veiled, the essential mystery of the Feminine is preserved. One sees but is not seen. Through pollution, one moves unpolluted. Beneath the veil one is Kumari, a virgin belonging to herself — not necessarily a physical virgin but a psychological one — like that special form of Kali Ma the Hindu goddess. Beneath the veil, I became timeless, nun-like, fiercely proud of my identification with other sisters. Immediately, however, my mammalian glory, my hair, began to upbraid me (no pun intended) and demand my ego rescue it! Indeed, my ego busied itself with endless, plaintive questions. Was I good enough to veil? Did it give me extra responsibility as a role model? Was I now too spiritually proud, too smug in my delight and embrace of my humility? Would I be shot? Would non-veiling sisters be disgusted with me? What should I do to make people respond to me as a person and not a "veil?" IV Indeed, putting on the veil in my American, white bread, Midwestern city summoned forth a worthwhile identity crisis, a dramatic continuance of a spiritual journey to Islam, to god-consciousness, not towards the superficial ego with its unthinking acceptance of cultural definitions and statistical approaches to life, In most every moment that I was out on the street, I thought of the greater "jihad," the struggle to individuate, to demand inner truth, to walk the razor's edge to the Self. I thought constantly of the Prophet (SAS and his brilliant psychological insights and his bravery in the face of all external opposition and prejudice. Often these thoughts brought me to tears and I felt blessed in my trials. V The other day for the first time in mid-town Kansas City, I saw a huge woman in a dove gray burqua, standing on Oak Street in the hot busy light of noon. She herself was like a cool, unruffled mountain of power and the force field around her spread out for seven feet on all sides. Nothing was given away without her permission. She created her own weather and did her own forecast. It was thrilling. It was an enormous relief to see her. She lightened my spirit and reconfirmed my beliefs. Yet I felt many eyes on her form other motorists, trying to figure her out, or more to the point, trying to figure out their own reactions. Was she a threat? A weapon? A political activist? A slave to evil fundamentalism? Was she sadly anti-social? Her husband's lackey? An immigrant who hadn't been shopping at the Gap yet? Did she have low self-esteem and so was hiding out? Did she have overly high self-esteem and thought that no one else was good enough to see her? Was she serious? And art student? Hadn't she seen the end of "Star Wars" where Luke takes Darth Vader's shiny black helmet off and liberates him? In the Western, mostly non-veiling world everyone knows how "liberation" works. Women get to be liberated by not wearing things-like most of their clothes, for example. In the west a woman's negative veil can be the culturally approved neurosis, which grips her as she worries about the secular religions of fashion and "commoditification" of the body. The invisible veil the West puts over women is the one which says, "You aren't thin enough, rich enough, good enough or healthy enough. Use many, many products to veil these inadequacies and with more education, love relationships, vitamins, pills, cosmetics, retreats, spas, gyms, breast enlargements or diminishments and psychotropic drugs you will be OK — temporarily."
How suspicious of kinds in hoods! (Are the kids in hoods all "hoods?") Finally, I thought of how enjoyable it was to read about other cultures' approaches to veiling, Iraq's for instance. In her book "Grandmother's Secrets," a wonderful account about growing up in Baghdad and learning to be a woman of wisdom and courage-as well as to belly dance, Rosina Al Fawzia speaks of the women of her country wearing abayas, black, floor-length cloaks. She describes the celebration which took place on the first Thursday of each month. She explains how the men went to one room and the women another. "Meanwhile the women had sat down in a circle. Their heads were covered with black veils-the color of Mesopotamia, this old-between-the-rivers-country since the beginning of time. They held their heads slightly bent forward so their veils slipped over their faces. Among the women was a female mullah who also began praying. Her voice was clear and came from deep in her belly. The women began rocking their trunks back and forth, their bodies moving together in harmony like one huge wave. Just as suddenly as she had started the mullah fell silent. Each woman sat there lost in her own meditation. Their veils made them look like beings from another world. Then the drums started beating from the men's room. The heavy, overpowering rhythm flowed over us and swept the women away. They bowed, slowly at first, starting with the right, then to the front, raising their heads in the middle to bend them again to the left — 'La ilaha illa llah-la ilaha illa llah,' 'There is no God but God.' Grandmothers sat outside the circle and moved the prayer beads between her strong fingers while murmuring softly." For Fawzia Al Rawi the veiled women of her youth belonged to a "secret sisterhood: solemn, unapproachable, spirit-like." Her memories bespeak another world and time in which the Feminine was honored with her own place to sit, stand, dance and pray. Her depth and mystery were neither eradicated nor placed on display but woven into the fabric of daily life. Individual, cultural and cosmic space was all hers to occupy simultaneously. How many women or men in Western culture can claim that same place, I am unsure. I only know that not all the veils which fall over the Feminine of Al Rawi's world are the flimsy, one-dimensional burquas or hijabs of mainstream American imaginings. They are not all cloth prisons., not the evil antithesis of "red, white and blue" jeans. Symbolically, they are far more than that and so are the women beneath them, each with her own account of just what a woman, a veil and a veiled woman might possibly mean. <<Previous | 1 | 2
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