Touchy Material
It was April and I was out there in it, cycling through Olympiapark with my jacket sleeves rolled up to catch all the rays out there to be caught. Not something I normally do. But I had gotten my bone density measured a few days before. Not good, ladies and gentlemen. Not good at all. The brightly-colored chart showed I had plunged right through the youthful green zone that had harbored me so securely eight years before to the bottom of the yellow zone, where I rested, in fact, at a point of tangency to the vast red zone that ends, I presume, in death. As consolation when handing me the chart, the technician provided the homely reminder that sunshine is necessary. Hence my rolled-up sleeves now. I was going to beat this thing.
As I zoomed over the crest of the final hill that would shoot me out into the bustle of Munich traffic, I passed a couple strolling leisurely among the hillocks of the park. The woman was muffled in black, and on such a fine day. Either the couple was Moslem, just the woman was, or maybe just the man, but whoever was, she bore the brunt of it with that funereal garb. She was swathed in a jilbab—a coat of sorts; no problem; I know coats come in all colors and cuts. Her head was covered with a hijab; I’m fine with that. Her face was hidden behind a niqab, which reveals only the eyes. I can take that, but am not keen on it. Most chilling to me of all is the burqa, which this lady wasn’t wearing, a shroud-like garment that covers not only the head and body, but obscures the face behind a grillwork of cloth, as behind an oubliette. I will say it outright: I do not like the burqa.
None of which I admit lightly. These aversions of mine have been under self-reproof as prejudicial and narrow-minded ever since the profile of Islam exploded, shall we say, onto world consciousness some years ago. At that time, my awareness increased acutely of the religion, its followers, and how it costumes its ladies, behind which copious folds and flutes, any honest contemplative will tell you, they could be packing an arsenal. Although I have heard some call those sartorial customs barbaric, I held my opinion in check, working hard to develop an understanding, if not respect, definitely not enthusiasm, for the traditional tailoring applied to the Moslem woman.
And there she was. All covered up, not only now, but every time she stepped out into the sunny great outdoors. That slant on the religiously mandated cover-up made me pause on this particular day. I slowed down. I slowed down some more. I stopped. I turned my bike around and rode with dampened tempo back up the gentle ascent towards the unsuspecting couple.
“Could I ask you a question?” I addressed them both, but it became quickly clear that I would be dealing with the man. The woman, effaced so literally by those black cloths, seemed to fade back physically as well. The clincher, however, was she spoke nothing but her native tongue, the man informed me in English. So I turned to him:
“I would like to ask her”—I hesitated to call her his wife; I had no idea what their relationship was—”a question.”
Certainly, the man responded cordially. From that point on I addressed my words to the man, the man interpreted, the woman responded, and the man translated her answer into English with, it seemed to me, some elaboration, license he took, no doubt, since he understood the woman’s mind so well. For all that, the exchange was brief.
“Do you get enough sunshine?” I asked. The question stunned them. I clarified: “Do you get enough Vitamin D? You need Vitamin D. But you have to get sunshine on your skin so your body can produce it.” My woefully inadequate explanation of the conditions involved and nutritional components required for the body to keep the bones dense and strong did not tap into any vein in their corpus of general knowledge. We were not on the same page. Vitamin D? Bones? They had no idea what I was talking about.
“If you’re covered up all the time,” I finally said with greater point, “your skin … you have to expose your skin to the sunshine in order for your body to be able to make enough Vitamin D to keep your bones strong.”
As the man translated this, some fragment of sense seemed to get through to her because all of a sudden she lifted her arms and her eyes piously to the heavens and proclaimed something. The man translated: “She says, ‘You cannot expect me to open my body here to the world as I would open my body to my husband.'”
Oh, no. No. I didn’t want her doing that. What a dreadful suggestion. But apparently, I had suggested she do just that. So how much of her had become the property of some husband under edict of marital vow? That was easy. Exactly what the jilbab, the hijab, and the niqab covered. No one but her husband was permitted to see anything of the parts of her body shrouded by those outer garments.
Of course, it did occur to me that the woman was perhaps making the only response acceptable in front of the man: that of a contented, obedient Moslem woman mildly outraged at the idea of exposing her leased skin to the libidinous world. The fellow certainly seemed cheerfully satisfied with her answer. He was also quick to tell me that his wife (so, it turned out, she was) could walk around in their home naked if she wanted to. That domestic insight only made me feel a little worse.
With exceeding good will but no more ado, I apologized for taking up their time and wished them a good day; they wished me the same; I swung myself onto my bike and raced off, no wiser about the Vitamin D bit.
Up until that encounter, my tolerance for the veil, albeit skeptical, had been based on two assumptions: that the woman partook to some degree in the decision to wrap herself up like a necromancer’s fancy, and that the veil, though oppressive, was meant to protect her, never mind that the ‘from what’ was not too terrific: the lustful visual caress of another man. (And fingertips? No sensual enticement there? Or was that simply not doable without putting her in a sack and carting her around in a wheelbarrow?) Knowing you were being shielded because you were, in a way, cherished would not make wearing those garments any more pleasant, especially on such lovely days, but it would be tolerable.
However, the response of the Moslem couple had been ever so slightly lascivious, and a darker consideration now simmered in my mind. During the next few months, two observations made me realize my assumptions about wearing the veil were dead wrong.
The first insight came from the two-volume treatise I am currently laboring through: Travels in Arabia Deserta by C. M. Doughty. It’s a classic book of travel and observation that Doughty produced after his visit to the Arabian Peninsula between November 1876 and August 1878. Unfortunately, his ambition was to write the book in the style of the King James Bible, and gloriously successful he was, hence my slow progress through those tomes and his fantastic ability to conjure a faraway, long-ago feeling about a way of life that is long-ago and faraway. The life of the desert nomad essentially vanished soon after as a result of the introduction of oil and the Haj railway, which replaced the Haj camel caravan, whose mode of travel Doughty so meticulously and sensitively documents. The fact that Doughty’s observations are praised for their objectivity only makes those touching on the veiling of the women the more damning. And they do pertain to the time in which he traveled, over 125 years ago. Nevertheless, they resonated mournfully against the substrate lowered in my brain by the pious, black-clad woman in Olympiapark.
Doughty had asked the opinion about the justice of veiling women of the sheik with whom he was travelling. That man replied: ‘The face of a wife should be seen of no man besides her own husband.’ The remark resounds harshly when coupled with Doughty’s comment elsewhere about the male Arabian belief that ‘El-entha, the female (mild to labour and bringing forth the pastoral riches) is, of all animals, the better, save only in mankind.’ Save only in mankind. Further, Doughty observed that upon the human entha the Arabians cast all their blame.
This told me that the veil was not meant to protect the woman, but thrown over her to mitigate her noxious influence on others. And what kind of noxious influence could this be if attributed to women but not to men? Female sensuality. (A cruel irony when you reflect on the often homely lineaments, often corpulent outlines detected down under all that material.) And why equate exposing the woman’s skin in public with licentiousness anyway? Because of the licentiousness of the male would be the rapid rejoinder, and it would be wrong. It’s because if the tautology goes down, it would be a most convenient way of imprisoning the lady and giving her the blame should anything go awry. And it has gone down. For centuries. Enforcing a single notion: the woman as possession of the man. Those robes curtained off male property. The darker question was for what? Erecting the tent? Cooking the rice? Tending the camels? And so much more. Horrible to consider and not to overlook is the corruptive nature of this unnatural relation; the rank growth it fosters of megalomania, not to mention the unpredictable effect of finally getting to yourself a possession over which you exert all power, even to the extent of denying its visibility to the world. All that coy material coldly ropes off chattel for domestic slave labor and the licensed orgy.
Exit Doughty. Enter an Afghani acquaintance of mine, a businessman who settled in Munich 35 years ago after fleeing Kabul within 24 hours with nothing but what he had on—and his life. From him came insight number two.
Now, before I say what my Afghani friend and I were discussing, let me interject that our communication is rudimentary. This is not only because his use of the German language is, let us say, slipshod. His Afghani logic is far different from mine, as are his tactics. So whenever I stop by his shop for a visit, I go with my outfielder’s mitt and stand ready to catch whatever hits come my way. The majority I simply watch sail by, remarking the divergence between cultures, minds, and purposes and knowing I will never know the degree of that divergence.
So back to our conversation: we were discussing his wife’s bad back. I mentioned the sauna might be therapeutic and swimming a good remedy. He agreed, but lamented, ‘Ah, try getting Moslem women to undress …’ No improper confidentiality this, he seemed frankly concerned about a stubborn obstacle to getting his wife to do something for her health. The remark hit me the harder for being so oblique. If that veil was meant to mitigate the corrupting influence of a woman’s noxious nature on those around her, as I was now pondering from Doughty’s observations, then forcing her to wear such trappings would have a disastrous effect. Forget her bones; her self-image was at stake. Bowing to universal opprobrium by obscuring herself publicly behind a veil would give her endless inducement to dwell on the unworthiness of her flesh, as dreadful a fate as undeserved.
My conviction is now that doing away with those garments would only be granting the women the dignity and respect long overdue them. If a woman chooses to sally forth on bright Spring days encased in a black potato sack, well, women have been done worse by Gucci. I do not think, though, that the custom will long endure once the insolence of male disapprobation no longer compels them to comply as they have done – piously, generously, selflessly – down through the generations.