War for Peace

Like other mothers, Halima Mirza takes her children to the museum, on camping trips, and to the beach.

And she does it all wearing a burqa — a garment that has provoked curiosity, dismay and even suspicion as news events have forced conservative Muslim women into the media spotlight.

The head-to-toe covering might be hot in July, but Mirza says it doesn`t stop her from living her life. She has non-Muslim friends, goes out in public and even wears jeans, tank tops and makeup — under the garment.

``I don`t know why people have the idea that we`re oppressed,`` she says in perfect English, the language she uses with her children. ``We do everything ... we have fun.``

The 32-year-old mother of four started wearing the garb in her late teens, in gradual steps: first the hijab, a scarf covering the head. Then the jilbab, a long, loose coat-like garment. Finally, the niqab, a veil covering the face. Now, the combination — often referred to as the burqa when combined with mesh covering the eyes — might as well be part of her body, she says.

``I wouldn`t take my hijab off for anything.``

Why the attachment to a piece of cloth widely viewed as a symbol of the subjugation of women?

``I felt the importance of it, the obligation of it,`` she says. ``A Muslim woman is supposed to cover her hair, her body.

``It`s for your own protection. It`s for your modesty.``

In fact, head and body coverings pre-date Islam. Scholars point as far back as the 13th century BC, to Assyrian legal codes requiring veils for married women, concubines and daughters of lords.

Veiling was also the practice of ancient Romans and Greeks, and a requirement for Jewish and Christian women for many centuries. Ancient Jewish texts even advised women to cover everything but one eye, says Kathy Bullock, political science lecturer at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, whose dissertation addressed the veil and its image in the West. Some orthodox Jewish women wear scarves or wigs today to conceal their hair.

In her book Women and Gender in Islam, Harvard University`s Leila Ahmed points to 10th century writings by a Byzantine Christian intellectual named Psellos. He describes his mother dropping her veil for the first time in public at her daughter`s funeral, and commends a royal woman who ``was so scrupulous in observing the concealment of the flesh`` that she wore gloves.

``Barring some general disaster, women were always supposed to be veiled — the veil or its absence marking the distinction between honest women and prostitutes,`` Ahmed says. The Catholic nun`s habit originates in the same tradition.

Academics speculate that women in some cultures, before Islam arrived, covered their heads but not their bosoms, ``indicative of an early tribal cultural practice,`` says Anver Emon, assistant professor of Islamic law and torts at the University of Toronto.

Like the veil, the headscarf differentiated free women from slaves: ``It started off as a class distinction element,`` Emon explains.

When Islam came along in the 7th century AD, it adopted the head covering for free women, and instructed them to pull down their headscarves to cover their bosoms as well.

By the 12th century, some jurists considered the distinction between free and slave women irrelevant, Emon says. Eventually, all Muslim women were required to wear the headscarf ``because they are all a source of seduction.``

The Qur`an also commanded the wives of the Prophet to speak from behind a curtain, so they began covering their faces ``as a way of protecting their high status in the community,`` Bullock says. When other women began emulating the Prophet`s wives, the veil became more mainstream in Islam, she adds.

But the veil came under attack during the colonial era, when ``it was seen as a symbol of oppression and backwardness,`` Bullock explains.

In Iran, police chased women who wore the veil on the street, threatening to rip it off and cut it up. Similar campaigns went on in Turkey, Egypt and Nigeria.

The 1970s saw the beginnings of a movement back to traditional Islamic dress, instigated by the loss of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the feeling that Muslims had departed from their religion, Bullock says.

Original coverings took many forms, including a sheet wrapped around a woman`s body and pretty, embroidered cloths that stopped at the chin. Now head and face coverings are as diverse as ever, from African-style turbans, to sheer Indian fabrics loosely draped around the head and shoulders, to modest Western-style clothing accompanied by a head scarf. The modern version of the burqa, the black tent-like draping, did not arise until the return to conservatism in the 1970s.

Today, the burqa still holds a degree of symbolism, though most Islamic scholars don`t consider it mandatory. As Lila Abu-Lughod writes in a 2002 article in American Anthropologist, women who wear the burqa in Afghanistan are considered ``good women`` who stay inside the home. ``It is for good respectable women from strong families who are not forced to make a living selling on the street,`` she writes.

Yet some Muslim women in the West say the burqa is less a symbol of class than an individual spiritual choice.

When Madihah Yarkhan, a 21-year-old psychology graduate from the University of Toronto, decided to cover her face in her last year of high school, her parents tried to talk her out of it. They worried that people would look at her differently.

She had been wearing a headscarf since she was young and wanted to take ``that extra step.``

Yarkhan agrees that it`s not absolutely required, ``but it`s just something I wanted to do, that level I wanted to reach.``

Back at high school in September, she approached her teacher and said, ``Miss, guess who?``

``It`s Madihah,`` her teacher replied.

``How did you know?``

``Of course! I know you by your eyes.``

And so it was. She was the first to wear the veil in her North York school. While it took some getting used to, she says she didn`t get any negative attention. In fact, ``a lot of non-Muslims supported me more than extended family members.``

For Bullock, the University of Toronto lecturer, the decision to wear a headscarf was much more difficult.

An immigrant from Australia, and an atheist at the time, she was ``quite hostile`` to the concept when she first engaged in conversation with Muslims in her master`s program.

They were ``such nice, friendly people`` that she began to question the image she had of them. ``I started to wonder why there were people in the modern world that still believed in God.``

When she got engaged to a Muslim man, her intrigue grew. Despite a temporary return to church, she was drawn to Islam ``like a moth to a flame,`` which scared her tremendously.

She tried to fight it, until ``finally, I couldn`t resist anymore.``

She converted a year and a half after marrying, but felt ``depressed`` that she would have to wear the hijab because she believed it was obligatory.

Wearing it around campus drew some hostility, she says.

``I was a very strong feminist. They just couldn`t fathom it.``

But as time passed, she found links between the hijab and her feminism.

``I explain it as a release from the pressures of the consumer-capitalist society that we live in,`` she says. ``Women`s bodies are put up as commodities, to help sell anything from cars to fridges to cigarettes.

``By covering up, I felt liberated from those pressures. I didn`t have to be thin. I didn`t have to be beautiful. My beauty was now a private thing; it was not for public consumption.``

This transition had all the more impact because she had always had anxieties about her body, leading to ``borderline anorexia`` and low self-esteem, Bullock said.

``It gives me more courage and confidence as a woman,`` says Yarkhan. ``It`s actually the opposite of oppression. I feel liberated when I wear it.``

Yarkhan, Bullock and Mirza recognize that in some places the burqa or hijab are not choices. But they insist that`s not the case in Canada, where the garments take many forms. They say it`s a matter of spirituality.

Emon argues it might be more than that.

``A strong argument can be made that the headscarf is no longer a matter of religious law as it is about political identity in the modern day,`` he says, recalling that the headscarf was adopted for the first time in Egypt after the British took control of the country in 1882.

Yarkhan agrees her niqab shapes her identity as a Muslim. But when she`s out having a picnic or driving a car, and especially when she`s ice skating, ``I consider myself just as Canadian as anyone else.``