What do the women of Kabul have in common with Ursula Andress, the super sexy icon of the Sixties? Apparently nothing at all. However there appears to be something. Last summer Italian public opinion discovered a link between the famous bathing costume worn by Ursula, as James Bond’s partner, and the full veil that covers a woman’s entire body. And, just in the animal world, mating two different breeds creates a new one, obviously with its concurrent risks. In the case of dogs, for example, the experiment resulted in the pit-bull! For the moment we can relax, the bikini-burqa combination has only resulted in the ‘burkini.’
The Italian media devoted a great deal of attention to this new creation. The central character of these events was a forty-year-old Moroccan woman named Najat Rezki, a cultural mediator resident in Verona. The headline in the Corriere della Sera read: Muslim woman in swimming pool wearing a “burkini”. Mothers say “it frightens the children.” Mrs. Rezki provided newspapers with a few additional details. Her ‘burkini’ was bought in Morocco for 200 Euros (three months salary for a worker in the Maghreb!). “The children’s fear” she explained “is only an excuse for hiding their mother’s racist attitudes. Do you not all say that Muslim women just stay at home and never go out and that they should become integrated? How can we integrate if we are not free to do so while respecting our own values and not offending yours?”
The Moroccan lady is right is stating that scaring the children is only an excuse; but I do not think her ‘burkini’ complies with the laws of Islam. This story is a very significant example for understanding how a serious issue can become trivial and tabloid gossip. The essence of the problem concerns social control over the female body in public areas. The Islamic veil was invented to “regulate” the presence of women outside the home. Keeping the two genders separate is a priority. Fear of promiscuity is exclusive to the Muslim world, but also exists in many traditional and conservative societies, in which the male’s ‘moral and psychological protection’ means excluding women from the public sphere.
In the Muslim concept, promiscuity (ikhtilat), means women and men coming together in the same space, which increases the risk of fitna, which means temptation. This word comes from the Arabic root f-t-n, which has many meanings: to test, to tempt, to seduce, to excite, and above all to create disorder. Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi observes that this fear of fitna derives from the fact that, in the Muslim concept, women have the enormous power of attracting men and making them lose their minds, thus weakening them and overturning the dominated/dominator, inferior/superior, passive/active relationship (1). It is because of fitna that women are excluded from the public sphere. Once again there is discontinuity in rules applied to women from the time of the Prophet and today. One example is access to mosques, which are places of worship and study. In God’s eyes men and women are equal believers; they have the same rights and duties. Nowadays however, in many Islamic countries women are only allowed to enter mosques for Friday prayers.
Thus Muslim society is hence based on a clear separation between men and women. Differences are mythicised in childhood. I remember my father and his obsession about hair. We males always had to have short hair so as not to look like girls, and my sisters had to grow theirs long so as not to be mistaken for boys. I can still remember a discussion between my father and my elder brother, at the beginning of the Eighties, when it became fashionable for men to wear black necklaces. My father opposed this to such an extent that my brother had to wear his in secret.
The mythicization of differences achieves unthinkable and surreal levels. According to peasant women in Giza, Egypt, female circumcision is not an act of violence but a practice necessary to safeguard the beauty of women and their feminine individuality. Hence they perceive the clitoris as a penis that therefore confuses the two genders (2). The project of Muslim extremists is based on the separation of space between men and women. I remember well the battle undertaken by extremist students at Algiers University in 1990 for dividing up the dining facility. In the end they obtained what they wanted, the ground floor for the boys and the first floor for the girls.
So the only place acknowledged for women is the home, and they cannot leave the home without permission from their fathers, husbands or brothers. There is a very well known proverb in the Arab world, “A woman leaves the home only twice in her lifetime. She leave her father’s home to go to her husband’s house, and she leaves her husband’s home to go to her grave.” In Syria there is another proverb that says, “A woman’s world is the home, a man’s home is the world.” The issue of covering women’s bodies in public places must be addressed from the complex issue of social control. Therefore I believe that the ‘burkini’ is simply a rather provincial quirk. The fashion was started in France before appearing in Verona. This has of course been exploited by the Northern League to once again address insurmountable problems concerning the integration of Muslim immigrants. The burkini is also a non-problem. There are other far more important issues. For example, Muslims (immigrants and converts) resident in Italy still do not have decent places of worship in which they can pray and for decades have been waiting for a concordat with the state.
Amara Lakhous is an Algerian author and anthropologist. His work includes the novel “Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio” (Published by E/O, winner of the 2006 Flaiano Award).
Notes:
(1)See Mernissi F., Beyond the Veil: Male-female dynamics in a modern Muslim society, Schenkman Publishing, New York, 1975.
(2) Khattab H., “Women’s Perceptions of Sexuality in Rural Giza” in Giza, Egypt: The Population Council: Monographs in Reproductive Health , no.1. 1996, p. 20.
Translated by Francesca Simmons