The battle over and banning of women’s clothing continues, this time in Egypt. The BBC is reporting that Sheikh Mohamed Tantawi, dean of al-Azhar university, has announced that he will issue a religious edict banning the niqab. Egypt is comprised of 90% Muslims, many of whom wear religious head garments in their daily lives. While it would be extremely difficult to ban wearing headscarves in, say, schools, the way that France and Turkey have or that Germany has for teachers, this announcement strikes at a particular religious garment considered more extreme insofar as it covers the entire body. While it leaves some open space for the eyes and small sections of the face, it is an intense practice of hiding the female body in response to specific ideas of female sexuality. It is perhaps this extremism that the edict aims to strike at.
If this is the case, Egypt joins the ranks of other countries such as the Sudan that seek to use women’s clothing as a battleground for religious and political conflict. As I wrote about earlier, in the Sudan women are banned from wearing trousers because they are considered an indecent affront to traditional ideas of femininity. Government intervention into such topics shows state willingness to regulate cultural ideas about the roles of women and men via their sex differentiated clothing. The sexual and sex-based meaning of clothing is often derived from religious teachings. The struggle over Islamically related clothing is a struggle for the control of Islam as much as it is a struggle for the control of women.
The governments of France, Germany, and Denmark have all banned headscarves in certain settings, as has Turkey, all in the name of secularism and protecting the state from radicalism. The BBC implies that the Egyptian cleric has a similar motivation, noting that the niqab “is widely associated with more radical Islam.” The cleric was quoted in an Egyptian newspaper as distinguishing the niqab as only a tradition and not mandated by Islam.
If this and the other wellspring of cases is any indication, the battle over women’s Islamically related clothing is just beginning. Wherever women go, the sexual politics of their clothing choices follow them, projected onto them through their social context. With the conflict between radical Islam and the rest of the world, including more moderate forms of Islam, sticking around for the time being, the battle over women’s Islamically related clothing is also set to continue. It will be interesting to watch what unfolds in Egypt, given that like Turkey it is a predominantly Muslim country, and so the grounds for protesting such a ban will be based on different grounds than for minority Muslim groups in Western Europe.
