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Why
She Veils
Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the
Hudson Institute |
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The veiling issue is anything but a sideshow. On the contrary, Middle Eastern regimes have been toppled by disputes over veiling. More than we realize, in fact, the stability of the region continues to turn on this issue. So here I want to answer objections to "Veil of Fears" raised by pundits and letter writers, and to show in the process what's really at stake in our debates over non-Western women. Briefly, readers raise three objections to "Veil of Fears" — Japan, Turkey, and the argument that modernization can't work if it's piecemeal. In "Veil of Fears," I claimed that even when America forcibly reconstructed a defeated Japan after World War II, we were smart enough not to seriously challenge the traditional Japanese family or sexual system. Against this, some object that the constitution General MacArthur imposed on the Japanese did indeed make revolutionary changes in the role of women. And plenty of readers point to the example of Turkey, where women are forbidden to wear headscarves in many public places. Since there's no danger of a fundamentalist regime taking over Turkey, worries about reactions against efforts to discourage veiling seem exaggerated. Finally, a number of readers complained that it's inconsistent and futile to modernize economically and politically without also modernizing the role of women. How can a society modernize when half its people remain traditional? Well, there's hardly a better example than Japan of successful economic and political modernization which nonetheless leaves the traditional family and sexual system relatively unchanged. So it's worth taking a look at what really happened to Japanese women after World War II. It's true that on paper, immediately after the war, the United States revolutionized the role of women in Japan. For starters, the post-war constitution included exactly the sort of equal rights clause that even American feminists have failed to attach to our own constitution. And after the war, Japanese women were given the franchise and admitted to a universal and coeducational school system. The Labor Standards Law of 1947 contained a whole series of protections for women, including equal pay for equal work. And revisions of the civil code swept away the structures of the traditional Japanese household system — eliminating succession through the first born, for example. That certainly does look like an American-imposed transformation of the traditional Japanese way of life. Yet nearly all of these changes were on paper alone. Actually, although a number of women in America's postwar government pushed for even more radical attacks on the traditional system, those plans were blocked for fear of jeopardizing the occupation's key objectives. So the dangers of a cultural counter-reaction were well understood at the time. And except for some traditionalist protections that have actually inhibited women's employment, the key provisions of the Labor Standards Act of 1947 have never been enforced. The traditional Japanese household may have been technically outlawed by the postwar civil code, but its fundamental principles and practices live on. It's a good thing too, since Japan's route to successful modernization actually involves extending the principles of the traditional household system to companies. That leaves the franchise and compulsory attendance at coeducational schools as the living legacy of America's postwar reforms. But while the education of Japanese women has played a key role in modernization, it has done so in a manner that can only disappoint American feminists. The graph of Japanese women's lifetime work experience looks like an "M." Women do work — usually part-time — after they finish school. But in middle age, the graph goes down, as the vast majority of women who have children stay home. After the children leave home, the graph goes up again, as women return to part-time work. Then it falls again, as women return home to care for aging parents (Japan has little in the way of public programs for elder care, which is thought to be the responsibility of families.) Feminists often claim that the postwar laws at least succeeded in "delegitimizing" the traditional system, but that is doubtful. On the contrary, most Japanese women are entirely comfortable with the notion that men and women have different roles to play. True, there are signs of late that some of the traditionalism is fading. But Japan became an economic giant and joined the ranks of democratic powers — all while remaining traditional in the matter of male and female roles. And this is far from disastrous. Do we really think that American nursing homes are superior to Japanese family care for elders? And in her groundbreaking article, "Home Alone America," Mary Eberstadt has shown the costs to a generation of America's children of the entry of women into full-time work. Clearly, there are advantages to having women serve as caretakers. The Japanese case establishes that this social choice need not stand in the way of modernization. Yet there's no doubt that the well-schooled Japanese mother has helped to make her country's children among the most educationally successful in the world. So shouldn't we at least insist that all Muslim women be schooled in a coeducational environment, just as we did in Japan? Maybe so, but as I pointed out in, "Veil of Fears," the rapid spread of coeducational schooling in the Middle East is actually one of the most important causes of the rise of Muslim fundamentalism. As traditional women from small towns and rural areas are increasingly drawn into coeducational schools, the calls for veiling and a return to Islam have actually increased — not as a rejection of work or education, but as a way of assimilating these innovations without also destroying the marriage and family system upon which a great deal of the "work" of Muslim society still depends. So while educating Muslim women may indeed be a wise and necessary policy, we shouldn't be so naive as to believe that it will solve the political problems of the region. On the contrary, for the moment, education seems to be causing those problems. But what about Turkey, to which many point as the model of a successfully modernizing Muslim country? If Turkey can take a hard line on the veil — even banning it in places — and escape a fundamentalist reaction, why can't other Muslim countries do the same? In part, the answer has to do with something I discussed in "Veil of Fears." A particular form of "cousin marriage" marks out the Middle Eastern kinship system as unique in the world. While veiling and seclusion can help to protect almost any sort of arranged marriage system, and are not restricted to Muslim societies, cousin marriage adds tremendously to the motivation for veiling, since it means that in protecting their close female relatives from the gaze of outsiders, Muslim men are in effect protecting their own future wives. But Turkish culture is an exception to the Middle Eastern kinship rule. While Turkey's traditional kinship system is some respects similar to the general Middle Eastern pattern, cousin marriage was never practiced there. That helps explain why Turkey has had at least partial success in discouraging the headscarf. But the belief that Turkey's anti-veiling policies have not provoked a fundamentalist reaction is mistaken. On the contrary, the banning of headscarfs in Turkey's universities has stirred up a furious reaction, having collided with the large-scale influx of women from traditional parts of the country to the university system. With the demand to restore the veil to universities and other public areas as perhaps its most powerful issue, an Islamist party now threatens to take power in the next Turkish election — an outcome which could easily provoke a coup or civil war in this critical American ally. So, given my "qualified defense" of Muslim veiling, would I recommend American pressure on the Turkish government to permit the wearing of the headscarf? Not really. In "Veil of Fears" I argued for a "realist" policy that both acknowledges the priority of American security interests and includes a healthy respect for the dangers of tampering with traditional practices. Turkey is a strategically critical country — a member of NATO, and a key ally in any future war on Saddam Hussein. I wouldn't recommend jeopardizing our security interests in Turkey in the name of a crusade for veiling rights, any more than I'd recommend jeopardizing our position in other parts of the Muslim world by a crusade against veiling. And Turkey is unique, in that Kemal Ataturk's reforms have created a well-established secular tradition in the cities that stands against the Muslim tradition of the rural areas and small towns. With the country split between two warring traditions, outside interference on the veiling issue in either direction is ill advised. Having said that, the coming showdown between Turkey's "Kemalist" secularists (named after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey) and the Islamists will be an extraordinary event — maybe even a hopeful one (although that is anything but certain). Contrary to the rosy picture sometimes painted of Turkey's Kemalist secular regime, the deep hostility between secularists and Islamists has brought Turkey to a dangerous impasse. By going so far in their opposition to religion as to ban the headscarf (something Ataturk himself never did), the Kemalists have polarized the country, without being able to win over the majority from its loyalty to Islam. Some believe that, given the determination of the Islamists to establish a theocratic state, the secularists have little choice but total opposition. Others argue that the very toughness of Turkey's secularists has forced the country's religious party to build a more moderate platform than anywhere else in the Muslim world. So there have been calls for a kind of "grand compromise," in which the Muslim party formally accepts the legitimacy of the secular state, in return for which the government would grant permission to veil in universities, offices, and government buildings. The claim here is that, precisely because of its long secular tradition, Turkey might be able to forge a moderate accommodation between Muslims and democracy — one that could stand as a model for the Islamic world as a whole. The problem is that this could be a false promise — and a dangerous one to boot — if Turkey's Islamic "moderates" are, as many claim, merely feigning moderation in order to gain power. So maybe the Kemalists are right to believe that no form of Islam will ever be compatible with modernity. If so, the outlook may be bleak, since uncompromising Turkish secularism itself seems to have led to a cultural and political impasse, just as uncompromising Islamism has elsewhere. The underlying problem is that there is a profound tension between Muslim society and modernity. We can hope for a breakthrough in a place like Turkey (and risk getting badly burned by Muslims who may only seem more moderate than their counterparts elsewhere in the Middle East), or we can dig in our heels and go with the region's radical secularists, although they are clearly losing the battle for the hearts and minds of their Muslim countrymen. There is no easy answer here, but the veil is serious business — a question on which the fate of governments literally hangs. And in contrast to Japan, which has a tradition of assimilating diverse foreign religious practices, Islamic countries have a history of rebelling against colonial powers (in Algeria and Afghanistan) and indigenous modernizers (in Iran) who are hostile to the veil. Given all that, we need to leave it to the people on the ground to work this issue out among themselves, rather than messing around in something so explosive and important, and about which we understand so little. |
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this year, in an article for National Review called, "