Shelter or prison?

It said, "Polly Scanlon presents the

famous feminist, Fay Weldon, to speak on Feminism tonight at 7 p.m." I looked at my watch – twenty to seven. I’d better run or I’d miss out on the lecture. As I dashed towards the auditorium, I felt something flapping around my legs but I didn’t look down, not wanting to be distracted in my hurry to get a good seat.

When I got to the auditorium, the lecture was already over and Polly Scanlon – who bore a strange resemblance to the waitress, Polly, in Fawlty Towers – was taking questions from the audience for Fay Weldon to answer. "Yes?" she said, pointing at me.

I stood up. I hate how my heart always beats twice as fast when I’m asking a question at the end of a lecture. I get so nervous that the answer’s usually lost on me and the stress is never worth the response that I get. And yet you still have to pay attention to the answer otherwise the person you’re asking will be miserably insulted by the fact that you only asked the question because you wanted everyone to notice how much cleverer you were than the person you were actually asking the question of.

"Um, can you tell me why it is that western feminists discount the struggle of Muslim women? I mean, it’s almost as if they blame them for living in a patriarchal society and therefore their problems aren’t as valid as those faced by women in western countries."

I clutched the microphone, heart still expanding and contracting without any control in my chest. To my horror, Polly began to laugh hysterically at me. What? What? Had my question really been that stupid? Had I used an incorrect form of the verb "discount"?

The laughter swelled and soared across the audience and even Fay Weldon chuckled behind the politely raised hand in front of her mouth. I looked down and blushed scarlet. Because I was clad, head to toe, in a huge, black, voluminous burkha.

I’d like to tell you how I strode on to the stage and punched Polly right in the mouth and then presented my own novel that was much better than anything Fay Weldon had ever written. But at that moment my eyes opened and I realised that I’d been having a dream.
I think I had that dream not because of any substance I’d imbibed or smoked but because for some reason burkhas have been on my mind. Maybe it was a trip to Dubai where I saw women clad in burkhas examine Armani trouser suits and Calvin Klein lingerie in the luxurious City Centre mall with more aplomb than Parisian supermodels. Then they opened their Gucci purses and paid for these items of clothing – usually six of everything, in all available colours – and handed the shopping bags to their husbands, who wore the traditional white Arab jubba and headscarf and carried small mobile phones hidden in their sleeves.

Why did a man get to wear white and a woman black? Was it some kind of statement about their roles in life? Was it to show a marked contrast between male and female in that world? Who made up the rules that said a man could wear cool, pure white cotton while a woman had to cloak herself in synthetic, suffocating darkness?

I bought a book called Mother Without a Mask in which a British woman becomes a favourite of one of the ruling families of Al Ain (I suspect that the book, hugely sympathetic in tone and engagingly exotic, had been commissioned to combat the negative press of books like Princess, Daughters of Arabia and other ‘bought and sold’ stories about the Middle East).

In this book, the author, Patricia Holton, writes that the burkha is the Arab woman’s protection, her shelter. Instead of remaining at home in her cocoon, she can take her cocoon with her and venture out into the world. She is safe, knowing that underneath the veils and that strange contraption, the stiff mask that I’ve seen some Saudi women wear like gilded hawks, she can remain unobserved, instead, observing.

Nice idea, but I eventually dismissed it as too simple, too glossy, complicit acceptance of the need to veil without a deeper examination of its validity in the first place. I recalled watching Arab television where a man interviewed Saudi women completely covered from head to toe in black. The only thing that showed was their hands and my eye was drawn to their gestures and movements again and again. It was the only thing that reminded me there were human bodies underneath the yards of cloth. The burkha may protect but it also dehumanises. Is safety and security worth that loss of self?

I think back to the story of the famed Egyptian feminist, Nawal El Saadawi, who, in an act of defiance, went to a train station and removed her veil. The public unmasking was no less than an act of revolution. Suddenly, women were free to feel the sunlight on their skin, the wind in their hair.

And the weight of eyes and men’s stares. In our part of the world, the vast majority of men still haven’t learnt that to gawp and gape at a woman is a serious breach of manners. I’ve seen their looks upon me, and every woman I know, in every public place – on the street, in a shop, coming out of a bank. Their eyes roam and rape you, covering you with a blackness that is so heavy you can almost understand why women take to the burkha. It serves as a shield, deflecting those stares back to the starer, reducing their power and making them harmless. The man may stare but at least the woman knows she hasn’t done anything to attract them. At least, that’s the rhetoric they give you when they’re convincing you to wear the burkha. It’s a seductive lie, especially when whispered by those you love best.

To western eyes, and even to mine, to some extent the burkha represents everything that is negative and feared and hated about our eastern world – a woman who’s cloaked and covered, bound and gagged. Hidden from the world, removed from opportunities, kidnapped from her future. Burkhas represent dead ends, lost hopes, silenced voices.

The burkha could also represent something else – a bygone era, images of women who didn’t challenge but accepted the veil in order to move out into the world, under any circumstances, on someone else’s terms.

I considered carefully whether western feminists, when condemning the burkha, really understood the climate in which it was born. I don’t mean that of hot sticky days – but of days when marauding bands of men would steal and kidnap Bedouin women. When travelling was seen as a grave danger and men had to guard their womenfolk from greedy, hungry eyes. When partition ravaged the subcontinent and violence claimed mothers, sisters, daughters, in many cruel and senseless ways.

Another day in Karachi passes in the new year and women walk about in different attires – veiled, unveiled, head covered, gloved and masked like bandits. They look like mysterious tents, like penguins, like all the other pejorative terms I have ever heard used about the burkha but to me the miracle is that they are at least out there and not cloistered like so many jewels kept locked and hidden in a safe.

Every time I see a woman in a burkha driving a car my mind struggles. What should I think? "Go for it, sister"? "Oh god, why is she wearing that thing"? Does the first thought betray the struggle that women have undertaken to free themselves of the burden of the burkha? Is the other a patronising condemnation of a way of life that is as valid as my own, more liberal outlook?

In the end, who am I to pass judgement? Who am I to know what goes on in another woman’s mind when she chooses to wear the burkha or when she fights to take it off? The burkha may be a creation to keep women down or it may be something to help women cope in an often crazy and dangerous world.

The feminists say they want to work for a world in which the burkha is unneeded and will simply fade away, like a vestigial organ, a tail or an extra pair of teeth. The devout say that their unveiling will not be in this world but the next.

I listen to both arguments but neither strikes me as compelling enough to fully espouse. Perhaps I’m too old to oppose the burkha with the same passion I would have had in my early twenties; perhaps I’m too young to accept the reasoning of those who feel a woman should be free to choose the veil. But in a world where the fate of so many women is coloured in black, I am always reminded of those melancholy lines of that Smiths song I used to listen to in college:

"I wear black on the outside

Because black is how I feel on the inside."