Veiled voices
On a summer evening late in the 1990s, Harvard Divinity School professor Leila Ahmed was walking with a friend—a feminist scholar visiting from a Muslim-majority country—when they came across a large gathering on the Cambridge Common. As they stood to watch, they began to notice that all the women were in hijab, the head covering worn by some Muslim women. Ahmed's friend turned to her in dismay, saying, "To them, we are the enemy. That's how they see us, all of us, people like us, feminists, progressives."
Ahmed shared her friend's discomfort. The only veiled women Ahmed remembers seeing during her childhood and youth in Cairo in the 1940s and '50s were women associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The sight of Muslim women with their heads covered stirred childhood memories of the bombing of cinemas and the assassination of Egypt's prime minister, Mahmoud al-Nuqrashi Pasha, a friend of her father's. The hijab seemed to her a symbol of the gender hierarchy and gender separation advocated by Islamists in her home country.
How to explain, then, the sight of more and more women wearing the hijab in the United States? Ahmed began researching the return of the veil in the Middle East and its growing presence in the West. The result is A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America (Yale University Press), a book fascinating both for the story it tells and for its story of a scholar who has her own assumptions upended through her research. Her deliberate seeking out of a variety of "angles of observation" on the veil results in what she describes as "a complete reversal of my initial expectations."
