Another example of a misinterpretation in the Quran as it relates to the headscarf is found in sura 33:59. Once again here the dress code that is advised ("to draw their wraps a little over them") is not aimed at prescribing the wearing of a hijab for Muslim women; rather it is meant to distinguish between the clothing of free aristocratic women from that worn by the female slaves. The dress code here is a social marker, and has nothing to do with a gender dress code.

Finally, sura 24:30-31 is particularly valuable to this discussion of the dress code for the Muslim faithfuls because before even addressing the particular dress code for women, the Quran speaks first of the Islamic dress code for men. And it does so in the same words as it does for women. This sura is interesting because throughout the Islamic world and in the West, one never hears anything said about the way men must dress or conduct themselves in public. The focus has always been and continues to be on women.

These examples demonstrate that the exclusive focus placed on the hijab (veil) as it relates to women and the implications the veil has for the female body clearly constitute another form of veiling, this time of the prescriptions that the Quran specifically addresses to men. By focusing on women, Muslim men have allowed themselves to be removed from any type of responsible behavior, and have ended up maintaining an inequality of the sexes, despite of Islamic prescriptions on the subject of equality, because the latter is viewed as a threat to their power and political monopoly.

In conclusion, it seems that the hijab is a construction created shortly after the Prophet's time and maintained till today by patriarchal society in order to keep women in a subordinate position. Because of the vagueness of its prescriptions on the dress code for women, the Quran has been manipulated at various historical times, including in our own times, in order to uphold various political agendas. Fatima Mernissi, in her famous The Veil and Male Elite, has poignantly explained the political construction of the veil throughout the post-islamic times. She has described how shortly after the Prophet's time, Muslim men attempted to keep the privileges they enjoyed in the pre-islamic world over women by denying women the equality of the sexes preached by Islam, by discouraging education even though the first words of the Quran revealed to the Prophet were precisely "to read;" by not allowing women to go out to wars and collect booty, thereby maintaining them in an economically dependent position vis-à-vis them, etc. These injunctions have translated into the modern period by the imposition on women by men to wear the veil, to remain in the house, and not participate in the socio-political world. In the 19th century, the question of the Islamic Veil became a particularly heated item during the Western colonization of the Arabo-Islamic world, and was used and misused by the West in its claim to bring civilization and liberation to Muslim women from their socio-cultural oppression. The same debate surrounding the Veil continues in France today even though the terms of the debate have changed (laïcité and equal opportunity instead of oppression and cultural superiority). Evidently, the history of the meaning of the veil teaches us that the veil is a construction that has little to do with Islamic prescriptions over a particular dress code for women, but is rather a space where conflicts of male superiority and patriarchy on the one hand, and power relations between the Islamic world and the West on the other manifest themselves.
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Sahar Amer
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