When I got off the plane I was immediately struck by two things: the heat, and the number of women in headscarves. Since high school I have been a very vocal feminist. Like any ‘good’ feminist I thought I knew that the headscarf was a symbol of the oppression of women in the Middle East; it indicated how distant true gender equality in the Middle East was. There was no doubt in my mind. It should be done away with entirely. So when I got off that plane my first thought was, “They still have a long way to go.” I didn’t even realize how ethnocentric I was being.
See, even though I was a hardcore
feminist, I was (and still am) also a cultural relativist. As an archaeologist,
the only way for me to understand a foreign culture is for to try to view it as
objectively as possible. That means I have to leave my own culturally informed
ideas about how the world works at the door, and attempt to understand foreign
cultures on their own terms. If I do not, my own preconceptions could hinder my
ability to fully understand a culture I am studying.
Along the same lines, I am a
moral relativist. I believe that terms like, “right,” and “wrong” do not
encompass universal truths. What I perceive to be “right,” could be completely
different to what you (the reader) perceive to be “right,” and each “right” is
equally valid. So, when two cultures disagree about what is “good” and “evil,”
they are both speaking from their own cultural norms, and neither of them is
more correct than the other. Morality can only be judged by examining it
through the lens of a specific culture.
And yet, when I first arrived in
Jordan my cultural and moral relativist ideas left me. For some reason I was
unable to realize that I was doing exactly what my education had taught me not
to do: I was imposing my own moral and cultural values onto another culture.
Luckily, I am not as daft as I might seem. Eventually, I realized that before I
decided that headscarves were intrinsically bad, I had to look at those
headscarves in their cultural context. And seeing as I was in a country where
many women wore headscarves, I figured I should start talking to people.
It is perhaps obvious, but
although all the women I met who wore the headscarf were Muslim, not all of the
women I met without a headscarf were non-Muslim. Jordan has a large Christian
population, compared to the rest of the region, and so it might be easy to
assume that all the women who aren’t wearing headscarves are Christian.
However, that is not the case. In Jordan, there are no laws regarding the
headscarf, and so there are Muslim women who don’t wear it.
Anyway, all of the women I talked
to wore headscarves by choice. It served as an indicator of their religion, a
statement of fashion, and a symbol of modesty all in one. On a more practical
note, headscarves protected their heads and necks from the sun and wind. And
let me tell you, the sun and wind can be brutal in Jordan. By the end of my six
weeks there, I was wearing a headscarf whenever I went outside. That’s right;
I, a ‘good’ feminist, was wearing a headscarf regularly. Imagine my mother’s
surprise when I walked off the plane returning from Jordan without much of a
tan, and with a headscarf covering my hair.
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On the last day I was in Jordan,
I was taking a taxi from a hotel to the airport and the taxi driver pointed at
a woman on the street and said, “She is not Jordanian.” I was a bit surprised
by this comment, but I looked at the woman and saw that she was completely
covered in black clothing, with only her eyes showing from a slit in her veil.
The woman’s clothing was styled in a way that is more common in countries on the
Arabian Peninsula, and I thought that perhaps he might be commenting on that.
However, he continued to explain that Jordanian women don’t cover their faces
like that. Now whether that is true or not is a question I can’t answer. I
don’t have any statistics on how many Jordanian women wear a face-covering
veil.
However, what I find important
and most interesting was the way the taxi driver reacted to seeing it. In the
west we tend to assume that all Muslim men would prefer it if all women were to
walk around completely covered. Yet, from what this taxi driver was telling me,
that’s an incorrect assumption, made by yet again viewing the Middle East
through a western cultural lens. For this taxi driver, good Jordanian Muslim
women did not cover their faces. In fact, maybe only part of how the taxi
driver interpreted the headscarf had to do with gender at all.
Jordanians are fiercely proud of
their national identity, or at least, the Jordanians I met were. I assume that
part of what the taxi driver was saying was meant to differentiate Jordanian
identity from other Arab nationalities. He was effectively saying, ‘that is not
who we are.’ In a sense, his comment had more to do with national identity than
it did with gender. Perhaps, for this man, seeing a woman wear a headscarf in a
particular way wasn’t just about religion or fashion. Perhaps he also viewed it
as a statement of national identity, akin to wearing a small American flag
pinned onto a jacket.
Something that is rarely
discussed is the fact that Arab men, including Jordanian men, wear headscarves
too. They’re just very different looking, symbolize different things, and have
a different name (keffiya). In Jordan, the practice probably started as a way
to protect a man’s hair and face from the sun and wind. And, as I already
mentioned, it’s certainly effective in doing all those things. However,
keffiyas have also taken on another meaning entirely.
A keffiya is a symbol of national
identity, and the colour and style is very important for that identity. In
Jordan, for example, keffiyas have a red and white checker pattern and have
tassels on the sides. They can be worn long and draped over the shoulders, or
wrapped tight around a man’s head, and sometimes around the neck too. And
though it is true that in Islam, it is highly recommended that men cover their
heads, keffiyas represent national, not religious, identity. So for my taxi
driver, perhaps seeing a woman in a bright headscarf wrapped around her head
and neck was a symbol of national identity first and religious identity second.
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I’ll be honest, where my moral
relativism falls apart is when I come up against someone inflicting pain
(physical or emotional) on other people. To me, the ‘golden rule’ is perhaps
the closest thing you can come to any absolute moral truth. Yet, even when my
moral relativism falters, I am still culturally relativistic. More often than
not, the reason someone is inflicting harm on another person can be explained
by examining the culture in which it is happening. Unless we’re talking about
psychopaths, violence and pain, particularly when it’s institutionalized, are
often tools used to accomplish something else entirely.
Every country is not as
free-thinking about the headscarf as Jordan. There are countries (such as Iran
and Saudi Arabia) that enforce the use of the headscarf and will punish women
who do not wear it ‘correctly.’ However, this is usually indicative of a
culture that is using the headscarf as more than just a way to enforce modesty.
They are often doing it as a way to force the religious laws the headscarf
represents on the population. It might sound obvious to say it, but in places
where headscarves are mandatory, men are being oppressed too. Mandatory headscarves
are only one aspect of this oppression. The enforcement of the use of the
headscarf has become a tool used to push a religious and political agenda onto
a country.
So even when discussing mandatory
headscarves, we still need to consider cultural (not moral) relativism. We
can’t take our own culture and values and plant them onto Iran (or any other
oppressive society). To do so would be as oppressive as the policy of mandatory
headscarves we were trying to overturn. This would be akin to what France has recently attempted to
do.
A couple years ago, France tried
to ban wearing headscarves in public spaces, such as courtrooms or even public
transportation. I’m not sure whether this was done out of fear of suspected
terrorists, or whether this was a case of trying to protect Muslim women from
the perceived oppression of their society. My guess was that it was a little of
both. Either way it indicates a fundamental lack of understanding about the
cultural norms surrounding the headscarf. It’s another kind of oppression to
ban the headscarf, and it’s just as bad as making it mandatory.
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Perhaps it is most difficult to keep
a culturally and morally relativistic perspective when discussing your own
culture. We are all socialized from such an early age and to such a great
extent that it can be very hard to separate what is cultural from what is
biological. Plus, we know so much about human biology and evolution we can now
often examine a specific cultural or behavioural attribute and point to a
biological cause.
However, we can also make false
cause-effect correlations. The ‘obvious’ answer is often simply the answer that
you come up with because of the culture you are part of. For example, for many
westerners the most ‘obvious’ answer to the question “What are the different
genders called,” is: men and women. However, if I were to ask 10 people from 10
different cultures that question, I would get at least 4-5 different answers.
None of those answers would be the most correct or “right.” All of those
answers would be based on their own culturally specific ideas of what
constitutes a different gender.
That exercise could be extended
to include any aspect of gender. Something as seemingly obvious as the
oppression of wearing a headscarf can be greatly misunderstood if viewed
without an understanding of an individual culture. As has often been discussed,
gender is not strictly biological; it is culturally informed. So when we
examine gender roles, like I did with my experiences in Jordan, we should take
a look at the meaning behind the traditions of the culture we are discussing
before we draw any conclusions.
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