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Student wears ‘burka’ for a semester

by · 23rd April, 2005

I found a report on website of the Eastern Echo, the student magazine for Eastern Michigan University, about a female student who wore a “burka” for a semester as a kind of academic project. ‘No one wanted to be near me’ is the story of what Zoe Piliafas did as part of a survey of people’s attitudes to the garment and people who wear it. She did this under the supervision of two political science professors, and received one “credit hour”.

I got linked to this story through a sneering write-up on one of Robert Spencer’s blogs. This woman isn’t Muslim, although it appears she pretended to be one and adopted the name Zhooda (is that Persian?). It appears that she did not have a positive view of her subject matter before she started, but that her worst experience was other people’s reaction:

“In one sense, Zoe’s project began with a women and politics class in which we discussed some of the human rights issues during the Taliban control of Afghanistan, and other countries with similar practices, including ‘honor killings,’” Martin said. “Zoe’s interest was in women’s rights.”

“I wanted to say that you can’t breathe underneath this, which you can’t,” Piliafas said. “I wanted to say that this is so inhibiting I couldn’t run, which you can’t. I wanted to say that you can’t feel the sun on your face. You can’t. You can’t feel the wind on your face … And you don’t realize how much you miss those things until they’re completely taken away.

“There isn’t just a dress and then something you put over your head,” she said. “There’s something that goes on your arms … and then you have the dress and then you have a headband that pulls your hair completely back so … it never would be shown. And then you have a scarf that goes over all your hair and then you have a veil. So you have three layers of clothing on your head.

“But at the same time,” she said, “Everything that I wanted to go in and say negative about this, I ended up finding more — not positives — but more negatives in the opposite direction. How people treat people dressed like this.”

I’m not sure what she put over her arms before she put “the dress” on. Perhaps a woman who dresses anything like this could explain - I suppose most women would wear their normal clothes, then a long, loose overcoat, followed by the veil (which may be a one-piece or, as in Piliafas’ case, a two-piece), then the veil or niqab.

In the last college I went to, there were a number of women who wore the niqab - as there are in a lot of British universities. Most, but not all, were of the “Salafi” tendency, and many wear the veil due to a personal religious commitment rather than due to family pressure. I’m sure they have found ways of dressing this way that makes it as comfortable as possible given that they wear it indoors and out; this includes, for example, using decent fabrics. I’ve seen both niqabs and head-veils on offer in some Islamic shops which are made of cheap and nasty synthetic fabric which looks ugly as well as no doubt not being very comfortable. And as for being inhibiting so that you cannot run, anything that stops you running is to do with the bottom half of your garment, not your head or face veil. I’ve seen women in dresses which stopped them opening their legs wide enough to walk properly, who didn’t cover their heads or face.

Also, I question the wisdom of having a non-Muslim woman do this survey, even if she took a Muslim identity. There are lots of women willing to wear niqab and to do it for the right religious reasons, fi sabeel-illah. While women being forced to dress like this is not unknown, a more common phenomenon in the west has been Muslim immigrant parents (and the state) pressurising young women not to wear hijab. It’s likely that the very aspect Piliafas named as a disadvantage - people “not wanting to be near her” - is the very reason some women wear it; they want to keep off unwanted, particularly male, attention. Bear in mind that the Muslim women who wear it have Muslim friends who do want to talk to them. If you are not a Muslim and you wear this, you will be confusing and alienating even your normal friends. So of course you will have nobody to talk to.

Perhaps a better survey would have been a more conventional question-based survey, aimed at a cross-section of women who wear the veil anyway - whether or not by choice. That would have resulted in a fairer assessment than the experience of one woman, who is not Muslim, who appears to have been hostile to the idea of the veil anyway.

(Update: Umm Zaid has comments on this here, which she couldn’t post on my blog for some reason.)

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