Abstract
There is perhaps no sartorial choice more argued about, revered, and disdained than the hijab. It signals many things to differing constituencies in varying cultural contexts and moments in time. For some, it is the embodiment of religious devotion and belonging, and for others, it is the mechanism of religious zealotry and patriarchal domination. It signifies communal belonging and portends secular destruction. From European attempts to banish the hijab from the public sphere to the colonial desire to remove the veil to peek at what is underneath, there is no doubt that the hijab invades the imaginations of the so-called “liberal secular West” as much as it signifies the nuances of religion and gender in the varying spaces homogenized as the “Islamic world.”
One wonders how much more ink could be spilled about the politics of the hijab at this point. Indeed, I asked myself this question as I began Falguni A. Sheth’s Unruly Women: Race, Neocolonialism and the Hijab. Yet, by the end of the first chapter, I was convinced that Sheth’s book brings new life to the conversation. Sheth takes a unique approach to the perennial question of how the regulation of the hijab has worked to discipline Muslim women and, more importantly, how this disciplining is imbricated in liberal claims of state neutrality and freedom. Turning away from the European context, Sheth focuses on the United States and deftly explores the different and complex ways in which race, gender, and religion are disciplined in and through juridical encounters with the law and corporations. Throughout the book, she centers an experience that is rarely written about in terms of the hijab: that of Black Muslim women in the United States. In part, this neglect may be because of their small numbers. A little over one percent of Americans are Muslim. Of that group, only a fifth are Black Americans. And of that fifth, only 45 percent are women. Yet their very existence, as Sheth argues, troubles and challenges the very terms of the American liberal legal order all while it subjects these women to an ontopolitics—“a moral/political apparatus that instantiates distinctions between good and bad subjects/populations, doing so through a range of subtle practices that claim adherence to race-neutral procedures, while employing invidious strategies to produce subjects in certain lights” (9).
Methodologically, it is this exploration of the subtle practices of the neoliberal and neocolonial order to which Sheth is committed. She begins her project with a claim that frames the entirety of the book, namely that the essential discourses of liberalism—particularly those that espouse neutrality and freedom—do quite the opposite by bending Muslim women to a form of comportment to which they cannot or will not live up. As Sheth notes, “Freedom is not about being free, but about comporting oneself properly to appear free in a way that is recognized by the regime. And yet, women of color, Black women, many immigrant women, marked as they are visually, cannot ‘perform’ successfully” (11). This inability to “appear free” marks not simply an aesthetic difference but a political difference that indicates the impossibility of true freedom. Sheth calls this excruciation, or what scholars like Marilyn Frye have thought of as a double-bind. 1 This focus on the production of (un)freedom requires a different kind of methodological sensibility. As Sheth dives into case after case in which Muslim women’s claims of legal discrimination and violence are thrown out on technicalities, she shows how the work of excruciation works in tandem with dismissal to trap Black Muslim women as responsible for their own harm. Unlike legal scholars who might focus on the technicalities of the case or the jurisprudence that grounds decision-making, Sheth turns to the discursive to analyze how neocolonial discourses not only haunt liberal and feminist ideals when looking outside of the United States but worm their way into the very ways in which we see Muslim women within the United States.
To make this argument, Sheth offers a deeply nuanced analysis of how the colonial frame in which women’s bodies, and their sartorial decisions, come to signify both modernization and capital. Throughout chapters 3 through 5, Sheth maps the ways in which dress and comportment have been at the center of the colonial narrative by showing how the hijab takes on special meaning for colonial rule and neocolonial forms of feminism. For example, in chapter 4, by juxtaposing the hijab with the sari, Sheth warns readers not to read all forms of colonial narratives about women’s dress in the same way. Indeed, both the hijab and the sari have a political genealogy to which one must attend in order to see how one (the sari) becomes an acceptable, even “sexy” garment, while the other (the hijab) violates the conditions of appropriate liberal freedom. While this chapter spends more time on the sari than the hijab, it contributes to Sheth’s argument that the hijab reflects a particular kind of aesthetic that is rendered as resistant to the powers of liberal-capitalist domination. Interestingly, Sheth reads the hijab as signifying a kind of “strangeness” that signals hijabis’ refusal to comply with the openness and neighborliness demanded of women in the liberal West (102–3). While the comparison between the sari and hijab illuminated key differences in responses to these sartorial choices, I wanted Sheth to say more about the particular racial dimensions of religion that are distinctive here.
The comparison also sets up her argument that this rendering of the strange hijab-wearing woman penetrates the American-liberal imaginary and “afterlife of colonialism.” This afterlife produces “a differential expectation for the cultural/ social comportment of women of color, whether they remain in the geopolitical regions that were colonized or are located in Western societies” (104). The final chapters of Unruly Women trace this afterlife from work dress codes to ostensibly neutral courts. Sheth shows how Black Muslim women become disciplined by the very structures that claim to champion freedom, economic access, and neutrality.
Perhaps two of the most interesting cases Sheth analyzes are of Deandra Spears and Ginnah Muhammad, two Muslim American women whose experiences with the legal apparatus reflect the technologies of power produced by liberal claims to neutrality and strict identity formations. While the cases are quite different—Spears had been fired by her employer and had sued for racial discrimination, while Muhammad had gone to a small claims court to dispute a rental car charge when the judge demanded that she remove her niqab—in both cases the intersections of their race (Blackness) and religiosity (Muslimness) were not only not taken seriously but dismissed. Here, dismissal not only forecloses engagement with the core claims made by the women about their sense of subjectivity and experience, but also renders their claims as illegitimate. In this dismissal, Sheth argues, the procedures trump the substantive harm, and the racial or religious discrimination claims are read as singular rather than interconstitutive. The reluctance of these judges to see the specificity of the claims is not simply about bad laws, Sheth proclaims. It is about Black Muslim women being seen as out of bounds, as outside of the norm of the ideal liberal citizen. The hijab and the hijab-wearer cannot be recognized, in these instances, as part of the liberal polity. Indeed, the hijab is always already read as defiant of liberalism and, thus, the intersections of race and religion are simply unacknowledged in many of the cases Sheth covers.
There is no doubt that Sheth’s focus on the intersections of race and religion in the US context brings an important intervention to the vast literature on women and the hijab. Yet, it left me with questions. Sheth argues that the condition of Black hijabis is different from their Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian counterparts in that their religion is seen as a form of nonconformity with idealized visions of African Americans as Christians. By “choosing” to wear the hijab, they are imagined to be “unruly subjects” (199), unlike other Muslim women who, it is imagined, are subdued by their culture (i.e., they wear the hijab because their “culture made them do it”). These women are seen to have choices in the way, say, Arab women do not. But I wonder if this is really the case. A comparative, or perhaps, relational approach to the legal cases would have significantly strengthened Sheth’s argument on this front. How did the cases differ from the myriad other cases in which Muslim women of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent have sued over the forced removal of the hijab or worker discrimination? A close comparison of these cases would have helped develop the distinctive character and experience of Black Muslim women. Sheth acknowledges that this might not be possible, insofar as determining the racial and ethnic standing of the litigants wasn’t always easy. However, her argument would have been bolstered by a few examples that made the distinctions more explicit. At times, Sheth’s distinctions are more intuitive than substantive, and I wanted more evidence.
Overall, Unruly Women: Race, Neocolonialism and the Hijab is an important intervention in the broad literature around Islam, gender, and neocolonialism. Sheth’s focus on the intersection and racial dimensions of the experience of Black hijabis with the juridical state gives her readers much to think about alongside her innovative approach to the analysis of the cases. For those of us well-versed in the literature on the intersections between Islam, gender, and race, and for more novice readers, this book brings a fresh new perspective to debates about the hijab.