Amin wanted a profound transformation of Egyptian society: “It is impossible to breed successful men if they do not have mothers capable of raising them to be successful,” he wrote, making very clear that liberation of women was a means to achieving a better sort of man. In Ahmed’s words, he claimed that “Muslim societies are to be counted as advanced or backward by the extent to which they abandoned their native practices, symbolised by the veil.”Ī Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence from the Middle East to America, by Leila Ahmed.įollowing Amin, huge numbers of Egyptians westernized their furniture, their cities, their houses and their clothing. In 1899 Qasim Amin published The Liberation of Women, which provoked a furor: He argued that European civilization was clearly superior to that of Egypt if women were not veiled in Europe, then it was clearly not necessary. Many of the issues raised in that time have uncanny resonances with the recent debate. The book starts at the height of British imperialism in the late 19th century when Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer) effectively ruled the protectorate of Egypt. Writing the book has forced her to reassess such assumptions, and come to a new, more positive understanding of the veil.

Like many Muslim women of her generation, the veil’s reappearance has been shocking, unexpected and regarded as a step backwards.

She grew up in Cairo in the 1940s, and was raised by a generation of women who never wore the veil she absorbed from them the assumption that the veil was backward, a restriction of female autonomy. What adds force to the analysis is the sense that the book has been a journey of personal discovery for Ahmed, a Harvard academic. Ahmed beds her analysis into the wider political currents of Egypt without ever losing sight of women’s own interpretations of what they were doing and why. It’s an acute study of how issues of political power and empire interact with women’s own claims to autonomy within families and communities. She focuses on Egypt, which was a key influence in both the unveiling and the veiling, to trace the many meanings that this piece of cloth has acquired. How and why these fluctuations of personal habit affected so many across the Muslim world is the question Leila Ahmed sets herself. During the first half of the 20th century, millions of Muslim women decided to abandon the head coverings their mothers had used in the second half of the century, millions of Muslim women resumed wearing the veil.

A quiet revolution by leila ahmed