The Muslim Woman And The Headscarf: A Study Of Catherine Bullock’s Work

By Grace Mubashir, New Age Islam 16 January 2023 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Catherine Bullock Gives Us An Overview Of The Debates About The Hijab In Europe And America By Discussing In Detail The Hijab Experiences And Discrimination Heard From Muslim Friends And The News. This Article Is About The Book 'Muslim Woman And Face: Rethinking Public Consciousness'. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Catherine Bullock's ‘Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical and Modern Stereotypes’ is a book that has given a new dimension to the media debate and academic discourse on hijab and Niqab through the voice of a Muslim woman. She is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and Canada's first female chair of the Islamic Society of North America. The book was published in 2002 by The International Institute of Islamic Thought in America. Born into a Christian Anglican family in Australia, Bullock converted to Islam in 1994 while studying in Canada. Bullock's study of different religions led to this change. During that period, converting to Islam and starting to wear hijab caused her to face some special experiences. Personal experiences and stereotypes about the hijab led Bullock to choose a topic related to the hijab for her PhD research. This research, which was completed in 1999, was later published in book form. This work discusses in detail methodological issues common to studies of Muslim women. In five chapters, Bullock analyses the hijab's colonial history, experiences and perspectives, multiple dimensions, Islamic feminist perspectives including Fatima Mernissi's, and different theories about the hijab. Colonial Politics The first chapter, titled ‘Hijab in the Colonial Age’, provides a history of Europe's establishment of political and cultural hegemony over Middle Eastern countries. By doing so, Bullock brings out through historical facts how the European discourse that the hijab is anti-feminist has been included in mainstream discussions and how the same Western-liberal ideas are reproduced by thinkers including feminists in the post-colonial period. "The suffering of women is the creation of the Qur'an, and as long as the Qur'an is accepted as a book of faith, there is no way but to accept this tragic life," this Western argument was used not only by Christian missionaries, but also by colonial powers to exercise political dominance in the Middle East. The veil became a symbol of a country's backwardness as the indigenous elites adopted this European argument as well and propagated the notion that the status of their caste women could only be elevated to the European model. Moreover, this dispute caused internal division among the people of the Muslim lands. Thus, the author observes that two social hierarchies were formed, the elite class who were the consumers of colonialism and the lower class and traditional Muslims who did not conform to the Western models. Bullock points out in this chapter that the Western intolerance of the mask is because it obstructs the male gaze and subverts the European system of authority of 'seeing others rather than oneself'. The veiled beauty of the Orient was envisioned as imprisoned and awaiting a saviour, the European male. Posing as the saviours of Muslim women, they saw the veil as a design of a jealous husband who forbids him from seeing the woman created for the pleasure of mankind. In this book, Bullock explains the cultural fraud perpetrated by the French in Algeria. Upset that veiled Algerian women were not yielding to them, they selected models from sex workers, covered their faces or wore Niqabs but exposed their breasts, put them inside iron bars, took dark-coloured photos, painted portraits, made postcards, and widely circulated in the Western world. The book discusses how the West has stripped away the veil of women in many Muslim countries to apply Lord Cromer's idea of “civilization by force if necessary” and how post-colonial modernizing rulers have implemented the same principle. Bullock accuses mainstream feminist-neo-liberal-left, neo-orientalist discourses of reproducing and expanding this colonial paradigm, including Fatima Mernissi, who is cited as an authority in all discussions. They charge that liberals and feminists who defend many of the impositions of contemporary conditions not only fail to see the discriminatory regulations adopted by many governments at face value, but also support them. Bullock supports Laila Ahmed's argument that anti-mask views were not initiated by women by linking different state machineries and male-centric interventions. New Discrimination Experiences Catherine Bullock describes the changes in her environment and colleagues and the questions she faced from them since she started wearing the hijab in Toronto. By discussing in detail, the experiences of hijab from Muslim friends, discrimination and dismissal from work and educational institutions, it gives us an overview of the active debates about the hijab in Europe and the United States that continue today. What differentiates this chapter from the book is that it gives voice to Muslim women's opinions and self-analyses about their own existence, role and representation, most importantly excluded from these discussions. Catherine Bullock matured into this endeavour in the absence of purely academic approaches, as opposed to writing stories in which Muslim women express emotional responses to the discrimination they faced. Western liberal narratives and anxieties about hijab and niqab are Islamophobic discourses, centres on the Muslim woman, and the narrow-mindedness and denial of freedom of choice espoused even by feminists are as relevant today as they were twenty years ago when the author conducted interviews for this book. In a detailed report codified by interviewing sixteen women of different professions and age groups living in Canada, she argued that each woman has different reasons for choosing the hijab and that easy generalizations are not possible. This chapter discusses the positive aspects of hijab, non-repressive dimensions of socialization, equality and freedom that hijab determines, and attitudes towards hijab in different societies. Catherine Bullock explains that her mission is to present for analysis the perspectives of Muslim women within the veil in a way that is palatable to Western audiences. Criticism of Fatima Mernissi Another feature of this book is that Fatima Mernissi’s writings are widely criticized. Bullock critiques Mernissi's both works, ‘Beyond the Veil’, ‘Veil and Masculinity’, and the entire argument, including methodology, in light of the works and social contexts Mernissi himself used to discuss the veil. Acknowledging the tragedies Mernissi faced during her childhood in Moroccan society with the veil and hijab, Bullock questions the generalization of general theories by generalizing discriminations that exist as part of a particular society's customs or state interests. Finally, Bullock posits an alternative theory of masking that draws on an anthropological and sociological approach. Bullock argues that the hijab functions as a sign of resistance against the consumerist capitalist culture of the twenty-first century. This puts forward a different reading from the stereotypes about the hijab. Bullock develops the multiple dimensions associated with the hijab, including revolutionary resistance, political protest, religious, means of entering the public sphere, statement of identity, ritual, and state law. In her inquiry into the source of the Western discourse that the veil is oppressive, Catherine openly writes that while hijab wearers in Toronto and the West argue that it is liberating, the colonial state interest has always sought to make the hijab oppressive and a flag of disenfranchisement. Contrary to the perception that the Muslim woman is not part of the public and confined within the home, the right of the hijab to the woman points to the fact that the woman has to fulfil her role in the public and the mainstream. Catherine supports the feminist’s argument that to accept the natural difference between men and women is to accept male supremacy by citing the Islamic teachings of equality between men and women and the freedom of worship that does not differentiate between men and women. Catherine Bullock argues that the hijab is a safe weapon of resistance in a 21st century consumer capitalist culture that reifies and commodifies the female body, does not deflate femininity and is not a sign of social disenfranchisement. The final sections address the broader conceptual dimensions of the hijab and its wearer, including the hijab, sexuality, masculinity, the beauty industry, and religiosity. The author argues that the hijab acts as an empowering weapon of resistance against beauty competition in the twenty-first century consumerist capitalist culture, which has disastrous effects on women's self-esteem and physical health. The book 'Muslim Women and the Veil: Rethinking Public Consciousness' is a precise response to those interested parties who attack the religion rather than embracing the religious, revolutionary, political and aesthetic dimensions of the hijab in its broadest sense. In this book of about three hundred pages, the author has discussed many scholarly sayings and other narrators' references about the subject in this context. ----- A regular columnist for NewAgeIslam.com, Mubashir V.P is a PhD scholar in Islamic Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia and freelance journalist. URL: https://newageislam.com/books-documents/muslim-woman-headscarf-catherine-bullock-/d/128881 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism