Hijab Paper - salamalmahadin

JAMMR 6 (1) pp. 3–18 Intellect Limited 2013

Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research
Volume 6 Number 1
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jammr.6.1.3_1

Salam Al-Mahadin
Al-Ahliyya Amman University

The social semiotics of hijab:
Negotiating the body politics
of veiled women

Abstract Keywords

Hijab and other forms of Islamic head cover have become indelibly associated Arab women
with notions of inequality and repression in the minds of many non-Muslims. gaze
This article queries the meanings and functions of hijab within both Muslim and hijab
non-Muslim contexts. It begins by exploring hijab as a transcendental signifier and niqab
the epistemological challenges it poses to the gaze. The discussion shifts to focus on Muslim women
the social semiotics of hijab in Arab/Muslim contexts and the myriad fashions and
signifieds associated with hijab before situating the hjiab within the western context
of the society of enjoyment. The article concludes that the repressive hypothesis
associated with hijab is too reductionist to explain the complex and multiple
meanings attached to it.

Introduction

A woman fully arrayed in a burkha walks towards you. All you can see of
this fellow human being are her eyes. What is your instinctive response?
Do you recoil? Are you instantly alienated by this vista of swirling fabric
and faceless being? Do you feel frustrated, short-changed, piqued at the
contrived lack of social contact?

3

Salam Al-Mahadin There is no shared smile, no mutual exasperation, none of the customary
4 eyebrow raising and rueful grinning which relieves our isolation and
eases the tedium of our days. Do you experience a pang of fear?

Or are you immediately assailed by waves of sympathy towards this
creature whose features you will never see?

Do you wish you could set her free, release her from the shackles of her
enfolding garments? Or do you think: ‘Quite right, too, my love. You
wear what you fancy and I’ll tog up in what I fancy. Live and let live.’

(Vanessa Feltz, The Daily Express)

Fear, anxiety, trauma, sympathy, alienation, frustration, curiosity,
disappointment; Feltz (2010) disavows political correctness to encapsulate the
quiddity of the hijab from a typical western perspective. The atheist professor
Richard Dawkins compared the burqa to a ‘full bin-liner’ and announced his
‘visceral revulsion’ at the sight of a woman wearing one (Thomas 2010). To
the list above, one may add revulsion and disgust. Leading French i­ntellectual
Julia Kristeva who penned a whole book on the meaning of being a stranger
feels that hijab leads to violence and melancholia (Wajid 2006), a striking
­departure from a book in which explorations of themes such as foreignness and
­unbelongingness cut across a wide array of classical theme to outline our fears
of everything that is foreign (see Kristeva 1991). Touted as an antidote to racism
and xenophobia, the book stands in stark contradiction to Kristeva’s musings
that the hijab ‘is a reaction against colonialism and a symbol of pride, but
maybe we could explain to them why they locate pride in this symbol and not
in another’. Kristeva, further, decries the head cover which she claims leads to
‘schizophrenia’, ‘a psychic catastrophe’ and ‘to states of violence’ (Wajid 2006).

Kristeva’s Eurocentric ‘we’ locates in the hijab a moment of utter
madness, a renouncement of sanity, a detachment from reality, a call for
violence and fanatic symbol of resistance to a long-dead colonial power. The
woman in hijab is transformed into a stranger, a foreigner, an alien; precisely
the kind of subjectivity and subject-position Kristeva bemoans in her book.

In Spanish director’s Xavi Sala’s 8-minute documentary Hiyab (2005)
a very young girl is held up in the corridor as a teacher patiently explains
why she – Fatima – cannot simply wear the hijab in class as it would make
her stand out and remarks that everyone in that school ‘is the same. We
don’t want differences between the students, ok?’ The teacher emphasizes
the notion of difference a couple of times and asks the student whether her
parents would beat her if she took it off and the student quickly responds
that her parents would prefer if she did wear it. As a last resort, the teacher
points out that she would look much prettier without it. Almost bullied by the
teacher, the student has no recourse but to take it off. Despite the very short
length of the documentary, the act of removing the scarf is allocated a full
minute, after which the teacher cups the student’s chin and smiles and says
‘Do you see?’ in reference to how prettier she thinks the girl looks. Fatima
enters the classroom and while the teacher introduces her, her gaze scans the
classroom for another full minute. A wide array of head covers can be seen:
a number of European female students wearing head scarves tied in a variety
of fashionable ways, a beanie hat, a basketball hat. The film ends with images
of Fatima turning her head to the left to look outside the classroom door and
to the right and back to the classroom as if posing the question ‘What is the
difference between my head cover and what the other students are wearing?’

The social semiotics of hijab

This article is an exploration of the social semiotics of hijab, more
specifically how the meaning of hijab is culturally, socially, economically and
politically mediated. My goal is to contribute to a growing body of research
that sees the hijab as a very complex phenomenon that often stands in sheer
contrast with the reductionist discourses surrounding it in western contexts.
Drawing upon the semiotics of hijab in the Arab and western world, I employ
insights from a variety of disciplines (discourse analysis, media studies,
psychoanalysis) to query the notions of problematized sexuality, body and
image that have become inextricably linked with hijab.

Hijab: The challenge to the gaze

The hijab is an instant problematization of the body. Unlike a hat, a scarf or
any other head cover, the hijab stands for permanence, unattainability and
i­nterdiction. The message it bears is that of ‘inaccessibility’. The hijab does
not tuck the woman away but displays her to the open gaze while keeping
her under wraps, similar to a boxed and wrapped gift that can never be
ripped open but tantalizes/traumatizes the viewer with its unapproachability.
The hijab tantalizes because it forces the body to the forefront; nudging
it forward, making the gaze pay attention to its hiddenness. The body, to
borrow from Heidegger’s (1962) terminology, ceases to be ready-to-hand and
becomes present-at-hand – an object of inquiry and observation, especially in
a non-Muslim/western context that often has very little understanding of the
dynamics of hijab.

In Xavier Sala’s documentary, neither the hat nor any of the other head
covers worn by the other students held the body in the positionality imposed
by the hijab, hence the teacher’s insistence that the girl take it off. The other
head covers rendered the bodies underneath them transparent and familiar, a
non-issue, because they imposed no interdiction on the gaze; a gift that could
be unwrapped at any time. When people usually hear of an epidemic, their
first instinct is to enquire if there is a cure. It is not the disease that worries
them – although that could be a source of anxiety as well – but the possibility
of its incurability; the hijab is the trauma the gaze encounters without the
chance for a cure. In a sense, it signals the death of the gaze.

The Hijab presents the body to the world as a predicament. Hijab is the
body problem par excellence. Without it, that body floats about minding its
own business, disappearing into the background, in total harmony with any
other object open to the gaze. (This is not to argue that unveiled bodies are
not problematized but they are considered the norm in a western context and
are gazed upon as such, so the nature of their problematization is different
from that which the gaze is denied access to.)

The hijab, that tiny piece of clothing, is often the main organizing principle
of someone’s identity and subjectivity (in both Muslim and non-Muslim
contexts). Almost everything is anchored in it (Haw 2009; Hessini 1994;
Tarlo 2010). It is simultaneously a transcendental sign and an empty one.
Transcendental because once it is there, it takes precedence over any other
sign, a supra-signifier under which every other sign slides. And precisely
because it is transcendental, it is void of meaning but the ones imposed
by the gaze. In an essay on the Eiffel Tower, Barthes (1997) recounts how
Maupassant used to lunch at the Eiffel tower not out of fondness for the food
there but because it was the only place in Paris where he did not have to
see the Tower. The inescapability of the tower, argues Barthes, is rooted in

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Salam Al-Mahadin

its being an ‘infinite cipher’ and an ‘inevitable sign’. He remarks that ‘this
pure – virtually empty – sign is ineluctable, because it means everything’
(1997: 4). In the presence of all other signifiers, it remains the most powerful; it
dominates the field of semiotic play in the body scene, yet resists meaning and
anchorage. The western gaze in particular is unsettled and unnerved by it,
hence the need to fetishize it by claiming that the body behind the hijab is
that of an oppressed and abused woman. If fetishization, as Mulvey (1975)
pointedly argues, turns the object into something reassuring and less
threatening, then semiotic fetishization – assigning it a Eurocentric meaning –
dispels the horror of the stain that the hijab represents and avoids the trauma
of not being able to grasp the meaning of the hijab simply because it belongs
to the context of an ‘other’. (The stain blocks vision rather than offering itself
as a thing to be seen, it constitutes a disruption, a point of indeterminacy in
the visual field, where the subject fails to see [Krips 2010: 94]).

And what exactly is a ‘gaze’? It is the anxiety of the subject as s/he seeks
meaning and sense. Phenomena must be invested with meaning since nothing
is more traumatizing than a signifier that escapes meaning. Gaze is first and
foremost one of fear and apprehension; two emotions that construct and
weave narratives to allay anxiety. We are afraid of what is hidden (the hair), of
what is inaccessible (the body as a whole as symbolized by the hair). A nun’s
habit does not arouse the same kind of anxiety because it has one meaning: I
am the bride of Christ.

In an era of rights, the inalienable right to gaze is almost sacred. People
rush to expose themselves; their thoughts, their feelings, their bodies, their
sentiments, their emotions, their darkness, their weaknesses, their strengths,
their conscious and unconscious thoughts, their families, their pasts, their
presents, their futures. Illouz (2003: 77) argues that the famous American talk
show hostess Oprah Winfrey galmorized misery and transformed ‘private
experience through the deployment of publish speech in the form of “debate”,
“dispute”, “confession”, and “therapeutic dialogue”’ and people are laying
themselves bare on the sofas of social networking, keen to demonstrate they
have nothing to hide. People are celebrating their monstrosity by revealing
it as a uniqueness. The Turkish painter Yüksel Arslan’s painting Capitalist
Process of Production (1990) (part of the permanent collection at the Istanbul
Museum of Modern Art in Istanbul, Turkey) depicts rows of factory workers
toiling away but in a moment of pure genius Arslan bestows upon all of them
identical faces, while coins are used in lieu of the heads of the factory owners.
Capitalism’s biggest achievement has been the diversification of products but
the standardization of people, hence an almost cerebral desire for exposing
everything in the hope of attainting the recognition of being incomparable
and inimitable. But exposure demands reciprocation, a form of gratification
the hijab cannot grant the gazer. In producing Paintings for the Blind (1996)
(also part of the permanent collection at the Istanbul Museum of Modern
Art) the Turkish artist Husamettin Kocan used Braille to paint a figure but the
moment the painting was put up in the museum it became inaccessible to the
blind; they can never know it because they can never touch it, touch being
the language of the blind. The museumization of the female body by the hijab
renders the body an object of art that should be put on display without being
available either to the gaze or the touch. The hijab showcases the body as a
work of art by placing it within the boundaries of a dress code that is not too
different from the walls of a museum; an almost sacred sexuality.

6

The social semiotics of hijab

Hijab then is a place, a museum, a temple, a delimited area of isolation.
The valorization of the body through hijab is what transforms that body
into a coveted object. In modern conceptual art, Tracey Emin’s bedroom
(My Bed, 1998) and Marcel Duchamp’s urinal (Fountain, 1917) are insignificant
constructs that acquired their value from being shifted into a museum.
Had they been placed within any other walls, they would have remained
unnoticeable because they are accessible and unproblematized. In Sala’s
documentary, the only body inside a museum is that of the little girl hence
the teacher’s insistence that the hijab come off to strip the body (literally and
figuratively) of such valorization. Žižek (1999) rightly comments that

being a work of art is not an inherent property of the object; it is the
artist himself who, by pre-empting the (or, rather, ANY) object and
locating it at a certain place, makes it the work of art – being a work of
art is not a question of ‘why’, but ‘where’.

If hijab hides only the body and the hair, then niqab is the museum par
excellence for it conceals even the face and similar to a museum object,
renders that body almost timeless for no age is discernible without a
face – nor, as some claim – any truth. In 2006, the media picked up the
story of the Michigan district judge who dismissed a Muslim woman’s
case against a car rental company after she refused to take off her niqab.
He argued that he needed to see her face to determine her truthfulness
(Jones 2009). Does the truth lie in a face? How can access to the truth be
impeded by access to the face? Would someone whose face had been burnt
or disfigured be disenfranchised in court because his face cannot reflect the
truth? What is the difference between a deformity and a niqab? This takes
us back to the question of the ‘place’ and ‘meaning’ of hijab outlined above
in Sala’s documentary. The judge was clearly unsettled by what he perceived
an encroachment on his right to access the object. He was being asked to
stand behind the imaginary line at the museum that separates the work of
art from the audience. Staging a coup against a value, the judge refused
to acknowledge the self-assigned boundaries that marked this woman as
possessing more value that he was willing to accept. Anyone with an exposed
face can lie; that is neither here nor there but the most unsettling aspect of
the experience lay in the voice that the judge would have heard; it was a
voice without a source, a disembodied entity floating about the courtroom. In
the presence of the body, the body had to be totally present, unlike a phone
conversation where the gaze is not traumatized by the absence of the body
because it is a compulsory absence, not a voluntary hiddenness. The danger
in the voice-only experience lay in the judge becoming libidinally invested in
a voice while being denied the truth of the body that produced it. His mind
would have constantly wondered what she looked like. He did not wish
to be traumatized by the suspicion that she was not what his fantasy was
propelling him to believe she looked like. That is the truth/lie he sought to
avoid. Žižek (2008: xii) employs a Lacanian perspective to wonder

What happens to the body when it is separated from its voice, when
the voice is subtracted from the wholeness of the person? For a brief
moment, we see a world robbed of fantasy, of the affective frame and
sense, a world out of joint.

7

Salam Al-Mahadin The judge’s libidinal terror in encountering the voice without the frame and
8 receptacle from which it emanates meant that he was being asked to contend
with a pure voice which is not how we usually experience anyone’s voice.
Žižek cites the example of Proust who upon hearing his grandmother’s voice
over the phone for the first time realizes how sweet it is:

After a few seconds of silence, suddenly I heard that voice I supposed
myself, mistakenly, to know so well; for always until then, every time
my grandmother had talked to me, I had been accustomed to follow
what she was saying on the open score of her face, in which the eyes
figured so largely; but her voice itself I was hearing this afternoon for
the first time. And because the voice appeared to me to have altered in
its proportions from the moment that it was a whole, and reached me in
this way alone and without the accompaniment of her face and features,
I discovered for the first time how sweet that voice was.

(Marcel Proust [In Search of Lost Time], quoted in Bond 2009: xi)

The absence of the face decentres the whole body from its spacio-­temporal
dimension. Merleau-Ponty (1968: 147) describes the face as the c­ orporeal
emblem of the other’s otherness. An experience marked by the absence of
a (present) face is lacking, for the face has been historically considered the
­repository of truth, beauty, identity and selfhood. The stand-in for the whole
body as the synecdoche/metonymy par excellence. Donning the niqab is a
l­ifestyle choice rather than a religious injunction and although many (both in the
West and in the Muslim world) might frown upon it or indeed see it as a sign
of oppression, even in cases where women make that choice out of their own
volition), the niqab’s predicament lies more in the disjuncture it creates rather
than the oppression it signifies. Those who reject the niqab attempt to situate
their repulsion in comprehension – listing reasons why the niqab is abhorrent –
while in fact it is not an experience reducible to comprehension; we cannot
understand our revulsion of niqab but merely ‘feel’ our anxiety at its presence.
The niqab denies access to a being since it commits an act of partial violence by
hiding that which defines what it is that presents others to us as an other: the
face. The face does not simply stand for the assortment of features that organize
our faces (and more importantly lend them their unique difference) but is
rather a self-signifying space (every face is its own signifier and signified) that
acts an anchorage for intersubjective relations. Levinas philosophically – and
poetically – argues that the Other is the sole being I can wish to kill but

When I have grasped the other (autrui) in the opening of being in
general, as an element of the world where I stand, where I have seen
him on the horizon, I have not looked at him in the face. I have not
encountered his face. The temptation of total negation, measuring the
infinity of this attempt and its impossibility – this is the presence of the
face. To be in relation with the other (autrui) face-to-face is to be unable
to kill. It is also the situation of discourse.

(1996: 9)

Put simply, another human being is the only creature I cannot wish to kill
or consume the way I use any other object for nourishment or ease of living
because in the face-to-face experience exists the moral imperative and the
ethics which organize my relationship with other human beings. In the

The social semiotics of hijab

majority of instances in the Koran, the word face does not stand for the self
but rather for being, especially in reference to the face of Allah. The Belgian
artist Magritte often depersonalized the subjects in his paintings by hiding
their faces, thus obscuring not only the only marker of their identities, but the
true windows to their soul. Movies and books abound with stories of human
anguish over the loss of their faces. Indeed, the term ‘loss of face’ figuratively
stands for the most violent form of epistemic transgression.

The Michigan judge was responding from an ethos that runs deeper
than the mere claim that he would not be able to tell whether the woman
was telling the truth or not. In refusing to reveal her face to him, she was
announcing that she was not partaking of that Levinasian ethics; she was
announcing she is able to kill him. For Levinas, that is the moment where
responsibility towards the other is completely renounced because ‘the other
is not an object of comprehension first and an interlocutor second. The two
relations are intertwined […] to comprehend a person is already to have
spoken with him or her’ (1996 125).

In Arabic, the word for face (wajh) comes from the root (wajaha) which
means to direct or find direction and in interpreting the Koranic verses which
speak of the ‘face of Allah’, Muslim scholars opined that it could mean a number
of things including Allah’s being, His religions, His direction, His prophets
and His proofs, His self and His uniqueness. In all of these elaborations on the
signification and meaning of the words ‘face of Allah’ it is quite easy to discern
that in the face lies the essence/thisness/haecceity of a being.

Hijab in Arab/Muslim contexts

The urge to write this article started a few years ago with the attire of a student
of mine. She had walked into the lecture hall with her colourful scarf pulled
back in the form of a turban, exposing her neck, but the most intriguing part
was how it was slightly pushed back to expose the almost one centimetre of
hair that seemed to frame her face. It was a moment in which she seemed
suspended between hijab and un-hijab. Almost like she could not make up
her mind or possibly because she was forced to wear it and she was seeking
ways to minimize its existence. Whatever her motives were, her appearance
was quite unusual in a culture where, no matter how much liberty women take
with the interpretation of modest dress, a head cover almost always covers the
whole hair. The word muhajjabba in Arabic denotes a women who wears the
head cover but the term itself says very little about the style of clothing she
uses to cover the rest of her body. In a country like Jordan, a wide array of
fashions are worn by a muhajjabba; long loose clothes, a long coat that covers
everything except the feet, medium-length skirts, very tight top and jeans, etc.

Muslims usually refer to the following verse to support the religious
injunction to wear the hijab:

O Prophet, tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the
believers to bring down over themselves [part] of their outer garments.
That is more suitable that they will be known and not be harmed. And
ever is Allah Forgiving and Merciful.

(The Holy Koran, 33. 59)

A far-reaching debate has raged for decades about what constitutes proper Islamic
dress. The function of hijab may be clear from the Koranic verse but the format

9

Salam Al-Mahadin remains a contested field where interpretations abound. The verse commands
10 Muslim women to cover the body which was later to be clarified (in terms of
format) by numerous Hadiths or sayings of the Prophet (pbuh).The f­unction
is clearly stated in that the Prophet was commanded to order his wives and
women folk as well as the Muslim women (so not to allow for the ­interpretation
that this is exclusively for the Prophet and the women of his ­household and of
his time), to extend their garments so that they cover their bodies, as this is the
least they could do to be differentiated from others and would be protected as
a consequence. The ending of the verse is an indication that the command is to
bring mercy and forgiveness upon those whom it concerns.

Commentators went into lengthy detailed descriptions as to exactly what
kind of harm was the verse trying to protect the women from: whether it
was a 'disadvantage' rather than actual 'harm', as women who exposed their
bodies would usually be maids and slave women and hence be deprived of
certain rights (see Boulanouar [2006] for a detailed overview of some of these
debates). Some spoke about how these harms or disadvantages could be
properly assessed and evaluated, and what would be the consequence should
these increase or decrease from one time or location to another leading to
many disagreements over this highly contentious issue. As a result, jurists
classify the act of hijab within the context of Islamic jurisprudence as Qa’ti
Athubut wa ghair qa’ti Addilalah, which means that its revelation and attribution
to the Koran is indisputable, but that its exact signification is disputable and
subject to disagreement.

The notion of signification is quite central to any social/religious/cultural
interpretation of hijab and since this article is not going to concern itself
with the religious dimension of the debate, I shall restrict my commentary
and discussion to the socially and culturally determined semiotic dimension
of the hijab. The observations that follow are based on extensive interviews
and focus-group discussions with 156 Jordanian female students (123 veiled
and 33 unveiled) and 45 male students from Amman University (private) and
Hashemite University (public) between March 2010 and November 2010.

As noted above, the word muhajjabba refers to any female who chooses
to cover her hair with a scarf that is clearly distinguishable and identifiable
as hijab. This act alone is sufficient to acquire the social label of muhajjabba.
What women choose to complement the hijab with is another story, however,
as long as the skin is actually covered and only the face, hands and feet
can be seen. Any visitor to a university campus in Jordan cannot help but
be taken aback by the infinite interpretations of Islamic dress. It would not
be unusual to come across a female student wearing incredibly tight jeans, a
figure-hugging top, full make-up and a colourful head scarf underneath which
she has chosen to construct a prominent beehive that causes the scarf to rise
like a tower over her head. In other words, she is no different from any other
female student except for a small scarf that covers her hair. So what is it about
the hair that has come to signify the hijab to the exclusion of everything else?

To answer this question, we must refer to the verse and the arguments
that surrounded the signification of the injunction to hijab. Very few scholars
would dispute what the hijab is supposed to cover: all the body except for
the face, the hands and the feet – covering the face is optional and only
advocated by the most strict and conservative. There is also a general
consensus that, although the function of hijab is disputable, it is geared
towards protecting women from lewd stares. The Koran commands Muslims
to lower their gaze when in the presence of a member of the other sex. This

The social semiotics of hijab

injunction combined with the hijab reveals that Islam abhors ‘the gaze’ and
associates it with debauchery and licentiousness. Seen from this perspective,
the hijab is generally viewed as a strategy for rendering the body of the woman
inaccessible to the machinations of the male gaze.

For all intents and purposes, the function of the hijab has been associated
with a need to ‘hide’ the female body, an act of concealment of an object that
could create desire, a symbolic erasure, and a quest for invisibility. However, by
its very nature, the hijab is instant problematization of the body, thus it brings
forth the body rather than hiding it, thus the act of concealing the body now
problemtized both the body and the screen thrown as guard over that body.
When Tower Hamlets Council proposed to build a huge Islamic head-scarf
arch in London in 2010 to celebrate the multiculturalism in the Brick Lane
area, many Muslims considered the plans quite offensive (Gillian 2010).
There is nothing more horrific than a huge hijab flying in mid-air without a
body, like a Lacanian partial object that has acquired a life of its own similar
to Anderson’s (1845) tale of the girl with the red shoes who could not take
them off nor stop dancing and had to cut off her feet and replace them with
wooden ones while the red shoes continued to dance on their own. The
Brick Lance arches are the red shoes that have long left the body behind and
are now the partial object that stands for the body of the Muslim female. A
horrific metonymy that acquired its signification through proximity but no
longer needs that body to function. It is the sort of eraser where the signifier
obliterates the signified and now stands in for both.

The western context of Brick Lane could not be more polarized from what
I shall term the local context of signification of the hijab. As a form of attire
whose function has been heavily disputed, formats of hijab followed a similar
trajectory, hence the myriad of hijab fashions that exist today. Such varied
forms are testimony to the complexity of the phenomenon of hijab and the
sheer impossibility of reducing it to the binary oppositions of oppression/
freedom which western discourses insists upon.

The history of hijab in the Arab world mirrors that of any equally complex
cultural phenomenon. It is one mired in politics, religion and social mores.
During Algeria’s War of Independence against the French, local women
perceived the hijab as a marker of identity and tool of struggle against a colonizer
‘committed to destroying the people’s originality and under instructions to
bring about the disintegration, at whatever cost, of forms of existence likely
to evoke a national reality directly or indirectly’ (Fanon 1994: 36). At around
the same time in Egypt in the 1940s, hijab was invested with a different set
of meanings. Samara (2011) created by Mustapha Muharamma, broadcast on
Dubai TV) depicted the eponymous character going about her business in
the market wearing a knitted face cover, a colourful scarf and a short dress
although she worked as a belly dancer in her mother’s coffee shop in the
evenings. During her belly dancing performances attended by men only,
Samara usually donned very revealing clothes and danced provocatively. How
is one to reconcile the two attires?

During a recent debate show on television on the Jordanian satellite TV
channel Roya, a university professor wearing a very loose scarf kept taking
it off to adjust it. No one seemed to bat an eyelid. Neither Samara nor the
TV show guests are unique cases as hijab is caught up in an infinite web of
­meaning far beyond the intricacies of strict religious rules. Hijab should first
and foremost be approached as a label, a process of naming and bracketing.
Far from attempting to escape the narrow confines of a restrictive identity,

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Salam Al-Mahadin women don the hijab to acquire the label of muhajjabba. Thus, although the
12 female guest speaker engaged in an absurd act of Brechtian proportions by
continuously taking off and adjusting her hijab (the whole point of the hijab is
to keep the hair hidden), no discursive anchorage would strip her of the label
of muhajjabba. In Žižekian terms, she was undertaking an ‘empty gesture’; an
interactive game between participants where everyone knows the truth but
acts like they do not: only an undiscerning literalist would complain that this
woman is not a muhajjabba. Similarly with Samara, society expects the dancer
to go shopping decked out in the customary face cover and head scarf and
would criticize her if she did not, although everyone was aware that she danced
semi-naked in front of men in her mother’s coffee shop in the evening.

Clearly the social rules that govern the hijab cross from the religious into the
culturally invested and significant. Although many women wear the hijab for
religious reasons and in strict adherence to religious teachings, it is important
to explore what the hijab stands for in Arab/Muslim societies, especially as,
I shall attempt to demonstrate, a much-sought after label by some women. In
Elia Suleiman’s 2009 film The Time that Remains, many of the movie’s shots
were poetically placed within carefully positioned frames; windows, mirrors,
rectangular shapes, all act as framing devices to chronicle the history of the
Palestinian saga. Most scenes had the feel of an image immortalized by a
photograph but more importantly, framing positioned the event with a visual
space that separated it from its surroundings, marking it for problematization.
Nor can framing escape labelling (think of labels on products). To situate an
object, a scene or a space within a frame is to problematize it and by default to
label it. Hijab is not far from this formulation where the social capital/meaning
contained within it exceeds the modality of the religious tenets that dictated it.
As a problematizing – and problematized – visual device, the hijab renders the
woman a space for the contemplative labelling of muhajjabba. But while the
original muhajjabba covered her head and body in loose clothes, the simulacra
that ensued carried enough of the original to acquire the label but without
retaining the ethos of the dress code. When the guest persisted in taking
off her hijab to adjust it, she was defying any viewer to claim she was not
muhajjabba. Was she not revealing the one thing she should not be revealing,
so how come could she legitimately claim she is muhajjabba?

Answering this question requires we explore the importance of the label/
brand of muhajjabba chiefly from a social-semiotic dimension. According to
92 per cent of the female students I interviewed and 98 per cent of the male
students, hijab acts as a taxonomizing tool of oppositional differences; in other
words, it singles out the muhajjabba as that which she ‘is not’. Thus, to carry the
label of muhajjabba is to invest the woman with values such as chastity, virtue
and honour which often far exceed the importance of the religious dimension
of hijab. Making a choice to mark oneself as a muhajjabba does not ­necessarily
entail adhering properly to religious modes of dress but it certainly reflects a
statement about one’s chastity. In response to what kind of woman a man
deems suitable as a wife, 87 per cent of male students responded with a one-
word answer ‘muhajjabba’. The rubric of muhajjabba delineates rules of conduct
that far exceed a man’s interest in whether a woman is religious or not. Thus,
even in the absence of hijab (as in the case of the guest on the TV show that
kept taking it off), the message is that the values attached to it are present. Even
when the product is absent, the label is enough to channel the set of values
attached to it. Indeed, even irreligious fathers sometimes force their daughters
to wear the hijab for the simple reason that hijab has a great social capital.

The social semiotics of hijab

Thus, a woman wearing very skinny jeans with a tight top and c­ olourful scarf
and full make-up is considered socially muhajjabba even if religious scholars
denounce her manner of dress as a travesty to the notion of hijab.

Hijab in Arab/Islamic cultures renders the body sacred, chaste and
desirable. It sends a message that the woman does not belong to other groups
of women who could be unchaste or fallen. In an interesting observation, Mary
Douglas (1997) reveals that the choices of lifestyle people make are not out
of preference for certain clothes, furniture, colours or products but precisely
because they involve hostility to lifestyles they do not approve of or do not
want to be associated with; choices are a form of protest against something else
rather than things favoured in their own rights.

Žižek (2008: 37) speaks of ‘empty gestures’ which are rules of exchange
that social interaction obeys and requires so that we can suspend disbelief.
A case in point would be a guest offering to help with the dishes because it
would be rude if she did not, yet she is fully aware that her offer would not
be taken up by the host who must politely refuse. The host would probably
consider it rude if the guest did not make the offer even though it is an offer
made to be rejected. Žižek labels this an empty gesture and opines that what
separates a fully functional individual from a sociopath is that the latter can
only understand these gestures literally. Thus, a sociopath would be quick to
point out that the guest speaker is not a muhajjabba.

Although 85 per cent of the veiled girls said they wore the hijab
voluntarily, almost 90 per cent of them felt they would stick out like a sore
thumb if they did not because almost all the women in their families wore
the hijab. (The same tyranny of fashion exists in all western communities
where girls come under peer pressure to conform.) A few students admitted
that they attended ‘religious’ lessons hosted by pious women in their home
in order to find a husband. They said that being seen at these events by the
mother of prospective husbands is looked upon very favourably. In response
to how many of the veiled women actually observed daily prayers, only 54 per
cent said they prayed on regular basis. More interestingly, a few of the male
students who described themselves as irreligious, said they would marry a
veiled woman. Thus, there is a clear dissociation between the religious and
social values attributed to hijab.

Most of the girls did not feel the hijab detracted from their natural beauty.
But when I asked some of them why they were wearing tight-fitting clothes and
so much make-up, their responses changed a bit and they admitted they were
trying to overcompensate for the hidden hair. Hijab, by its very nature, hides
physical beauty. Women are caught between their desire for the social brand/
label of muhajjabba and a deep-seated need to flaunt their looks, hence the surreal
and often absurd overcompensation through make-up and very tight clothes.

Interestingly, 23 veiled girls said they never take off their head cover even in
the presence of other girls, and when I asked why they said that it made them
feel very uncomfortable to do so. When I asked them if they were under ­pressure
to perform other religious duties, only 17 per cent said that their parents pres-
sured them to pray or fast for example, but were very strict with the hijab.

All of this demonstrates that hijab is more often than not a social rather than
a political or religious statement in a country like Jordan where the vast m­ ajority
of girls, especially from the lower middle class and working class, rural areas
and small towns wear the hijab as a matter of fact rather than an e­ xpression of
any religiosity or political identity. The social capital attached to the head cover
is so high in some circles that most girls cannot afford not to wear it.

13

Salam Al-Mahadin These formulations are a far cry from western discourse which does not
14 allow for women’s agency in choosing to wear the hijab or the interpellation
between the hijab and their subjectivities. Most of the veiled Jordanian girls
I interviewed perceived the hijab as a predominantly social investment in a
good marriage and an adherence to social norms within their circles rather
than an expression of a religious or political identity.

Hijab in a western context

In February 2010, a retired 63-year-old French teacher, Jeanne Ruby, attacked
an Emirati woman at an upscale shop in Paris and succeeded in removing her
burqa (face cover) after biting, scratching and slapping her. Defending her
actions, Ruby spoke of her rage at what she perceived was nothing short of a
‘muzzle minus the leash’ and described the veil as ‘an aggressive act’ (Allen
2010). Ruby’s perception of the veil as an aggressive act is not unique in the
context of the rise in Islamophobia (Ciftci 2012; Saeed 2007; Vakil 2008) but
poses a very important question: how could an item of clothing become so
contentious as to be perceived as an act of aggression upon the onlooker?
Clearly, many discursive practices had led to that moment when Ruby felt she
could not take it anymore and, to use her own words, ‘cracked’ (Allen 2010).
Ruby’s sentiments towards the veil were so powerful they led her to attack a
complete stranger who was minding her own business.

In an interview with Le Parisien, Ruby (2010) remarked that the niqab was
a ‘negation of femininity’, ‘a provocation’. Ruby removed the niqab the first
time then went about her business but noticed the Emirati woman had put
it back on again and so proceeded to remove it again, this time attacking her
physically and causing injury. Ruby said she was ‘defending’ herself against
what she perceived was an attack by the veil on her human rights. Ruby’s
reaction to the veil was quite disproportionate especially in a postmodern era
that celebrates fashion diversity.. Of all the endless plethora of styles available
in the West, very few items of clothing have provoked the kind of controversy
associated with the veil. So, why did Ruby crack, suspend all reason and
imagine that the veil was attacking her?

In ‘The End of Dissatisfaction’ Todd McGowan outlines a very interesting
thesis about western societies abandoning what he terms the ‘society of
prohibition’ in favour of the ‘society of enjoyment’. He (2004: 2) argues that
‘whereas formerly society has required subjects to renounce their private
enjoyment in the name of social duty, today the only duty seems to consist
in enjoying oneself as much as possible’. The shift from liberal or competitive
capitalism to monopoly capitalism around the turn of the twentieth century
and finally to the global capitalism of today, points McGowan, explains this
shift to a society which compels its subjects to enjoy and attain jouissance. Thus,
‘the mode of subjectivity that corresponds to global capitalism – pathological
narcissism – represents a decisive departure from the shared structure of the
autonomous individual and the organisation man’ (2004: 34). The last two refer
to the shift from the Protestant ethic of individual responsibility to an ethic
of responsibility towards others, both of which leave intact the structure of
the society of prohibition. Adopting a Lacanian approach, McGowan reveals
that the traditional/authoritarian father of prohibition whose task was to
impose limitations on enjoyment has been replaced by the anal father who
is the salient feature of the enjoyment. The anal father is an insidious form
of authority because he lives among us, appears as a modern-age father who

The social semiotics of hijab

embraces his children as friends, or the boss who works amongst his employees
to remove the distance between the traditional employer and the underdogs.

Although the command to enjoy exists, the moment the thing pursued is
attained, it loses its cause of desire, simply because the cause never existed to
begin with. The Lacanian objet a, which refers to the cause of desire in things,
is a phantasmatic cause that leads us to desire it but which does not really exist.
It is the secret that we seek only to discover every time that there is no secret to
discover. This means that enjoyment can never be attained and what we have
is constant pining and search for the Real enjoyment (the Lacanian Real).

McGowan’s interesting thesis is quite complex but what is relevant is
the emphasis he places on modern western societies’ obsession with access
to pleasure, remarking that ‘in a world of instant accessibility where nothing
is off-limits […] the most valuable objects are always the most inaccessible’
(2004: 76). Considering the West’s cerebral obsession with the hijab, it is
worth situating it within McGowan’s thesis where it can be seen as a denial of
a fundamental right to access some hidden objet a. In societies where sexuality
is openly debated, parsed and displayed, the hijab poses a disjuncture that
stops the psyche in its tracks since it places a distance between the subject
and an object in world which has let go of all forms of transcendence in
favour of minimal distance. The British newspaper the Daily Mail ran a feature
(Carey 2011) in which it asked women in four different British cities why they
dressed like sluts during their weekend outings. The pictures accompanying
the article were not much different from the images one is used to associating
with prostitutes lining the sides of the roads in many western cities. The women
spoke of the need to stand out, look attractive to men and appear confident.
Some expressed pride in being viewed as sluts as long they used protection
during sex. And if the Daily Mail reported on the way modern British women
dressed on their way out, the Polish photographer Maciej Dakowicz who lived
in Cardiff for five years captures images of post-binge-drinking women on
the streets of the Welsh city. The photos were displayed at the International
Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France under the title Cardiff After
Dark (Salkeld 2009). The shocking images depict women dressed very cheaply,
vomiting on the streets, lying face down in ditches, slumped on street benches
and all looking the worse for wear. The two events point to a culture which
privileges open sexuality and unadorned naked bodies. In his classic book Ways
of Seeing, John Berger announces that a woman is first and foremost ‘a sight to
look at’ while Baudrillard (2001) agrees with Jacques Henric’s understanding
that our curiosity with the visual is always sexual; we always look for the sex in
any image. The juxtaposition between these western bodies and veiled bodies
reveals the polarized reality of the two but only in terms of appearance; in
terms of intent (finding a boyfriend or a husband), both groups are responding
to a societal norm unique to their contexts. The British women’s obsession
with finding a man during a weekend outing is not much different from those
Muslim women who cover up their hair and attend weekly religious lessons to
attract the attention of a prospective mother-in-law.

The dilemma occurs, however, when we are saturated with images imbued
with sexuality; the sight of women lying on the streets of Cardiff or Newcastle
does not do much to quench the onlooker’s search for jouissance. Indeed,
he discovers from all this ‘uncovering’ that, to his infinite disappointment,
he is not yet satisfied. Similar to pornography which ‘endeavours to conceal its
re-presentation of reality by raising the visibility of the most powerful images
towards the points of maximum proximity and exhaustion’, the body as spectacle

15

Salam Al-Mahadin disappoints (Ham 2004). It is revealed as a void rather than abyss teeming with
16 secrets. There is nothing to discover anymore and certainly no secret for the
body to divulge. The body is not concealing any cause of desire or objet petit a.

The hijab appears as a blip on the radar. In the midst of all the exposed
bodies, it poses the most trauma and gives rise to the most anxiety. What
if it was concealing the much coveted cause of ultimate jouissance? But ‘no
empirical body embodies the objet petit a’ (McGowan 2004: 77). Yet, that does
not stop the subject from constantly seeking jouissance which shall always
remain an impossible goal to achieve. The permanence of inaccessibility
manifested in the hijab also represents the impossibility of achieving
jouissance which is why the western gaze regards hijab as an interdiction and
transgression on its right to explore yet another abyss in search for the objet
petit a. What the West regards as an oppression against Muslim women is in
fact a self-projected oppression against the western self which feels suffocated
by the hijab as if it is wrapped around its own head. It is only in deconstructing
the body’s integrity that the objet petit a can be proved not to exist and in the
hijab that body remains a whole entity immune to the deconstructive gaze of
the imaginary world of the society of enjoyment.

Conclusion

The discussion above illustrates the prominent – and often polarized and
plural – positions the hijab occupies in both Muslim and non-Muslim contexts.
Far from being a simple statement of religious beliefs, it invests the woman’s
body with a multitude of signifieds in whose name verbal and actual wars
have been waged. While it may be the case that some women are forced to
wear the hijab for a number of reasons, in the vast majority of cases, women
opt to wear it driven by religious, social, economic and political considerations.
Far from being a sign of repression, the horizons of interpretations should
be expanded to approach the hijab as a very complex phenomenon whose
‘dynamical interpretants’ reveal as much about the woman wearing it as the
person gazing atthe muhajjabba. My contention that the ‘society of enjoyment’
cannot tolerate the hijab turns the notion of repression on its head by arguing
that it is the western gaze that is being repressed by the hijab, not the
woman wearing it. More tellingly, that same woman may see in the hijab an
embodiment of her religious identity, a political statement, a form of social
capital, or even in some cases, the most economically viable mode of dress
in some poor families who can hide their inability to buy clothes under this
religious uniform (a head cover and a coat). Whatever the case may be, it
is essential to deconstruct the western gaze by querying both its fears and
anxieties and questioning the meaning of the object that is being gazed upon,
from the perspective of the woman this time.

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Suggested citation

Al-Mahadin, S. (2013), ‘The social semiotics of hijab: Negotiating the body
p­ olitics of veiled women’, Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research 6: 1,
pp. 3–18, doi: 10.1386/jammr.6.1.3_1

Contributor details

Salam Al-Mahadin is Associate Professor at the Department of English,
Al-Ahliyya Amman University, Jordan. Her research interests have focused
on the politics of national identity, media discourse and gender issues in the
Arab world.

E-mail: [email protected]

Salam Al-Mahadin has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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