Times Lit: Behind the Veil of Freedom

The Times Literary Supplement has a review this week of two books about the treatment of Muslims in Russian-occupied Uzbekistan and, later, Bulgaria, and what happens when you try to force “freedom” on a conquered population. I got the issue free at Foyle’s bookshop in London (along with a free copy of the Literary Review). This piece isn’t on their website; it’s on page 6 of the April 8th edition.

For, if secluded Uzbek women, the very icons of Asiatic backwardness and oppression, unveiled, so Soviet reformers thought, then … then what? If they donned European clothes and lived in modern apartments instead of the warren of secluded mahalla, and had wage-labour jobs rather than waiting in servitude on their husbands, if they chose to marry whomever they liked, then they certainly would become enlightened and emancipated. But there were very few places to buy European clothing, and few women had money to purchase them, for there were few wage-labour jobs, few places to live outside the mahalla, and not many marriages beyond long-established kinship ties cemented with qiin, tbe bride-price. As a consequence, the first women who unveiled were left exposed, walking home alone in their undergarments, objects of derision and scorn. In unveiling, an Uzbek woman became the very symbol of colonial dependency and, for the men who saw her, the object of rape by Soviet Russian rulers.

As a result, the article continues, the veil became a symbol of national pride and resistance, and its uptake increased after the deveiling campaign started in 1927. The campaign also led to much violence against these women.

Isn’t it interesting that, whenever a society is taken over by either fanatical secularists or religious fanatics, it’s women who are worst hit – even when the campaign is ostensibly to “liberate” them?