What She Has to Look Forward To: The sky-blue burqa, popular in Afghanistan, is a symbol of piety customary norms, modesty or repression, depending on which way you look at it. For women wearing the burqa, perspectives are severely restricted. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)
A few years ago the Christian Science Monitor's Sara Terry was on a photo shoot assignment for a humanitarian organization in Afghanistan. She couldn't go anywhere without attracting too much undue attention--as a woman, as a foreigner, as a potential trouble-maker. So she decided to wear a burqa.
"I wore the burqa whenever I could - in the park, the countryside, a bazaar," Terry wrote of the experience. "Stumbling, at first, and coping with the uncomfortable confinement of the cheap polyester, I took pictures of the world around me, through a veil that for many Afghan women is the way the public world is seen every minute of every day." She continued,
I took my burqa to Bamiyan, where the Taliban in 2001 dynamited the ancient Buddha statues carved into sandstone cliffs. I walked up a short incline and threw on the burqa, and heard one of the local guides shout up to me, "Can you see?"
I turned around, covered in the robe. "Of course, I can't see anything," I yelled back. "I'm wearing a burqa." Later, I assured the four men who'd accompanied me that if men had to wear burqas, there'd soon be no burqas in Afghanistan.
In the end, I made a series of photos I call "Circle Vision," because of the way the circles in the burqa mesh screen divide up the field of vision. For me, they ultimately came to represent little intersecting boundaries that remind me of the many woven boundaries encircling the lives of Afghan women every day. It was the briefest of encounters with their world - but an enlightening one. I saw a bit of what they see, and learned, in surprising ways, what it means to be seen inside a burqa.
Terry, of course, had a choice. She didn't have to wear the burqa. She also did not have to stay in Afghanistan. And she could describe her experience in an enlightened western newspaper. She could not only separate herself from the experience but milk it for all its worth, as good journalists generally do. Hers is not the issue.
From France to Egypt to Turkey, Islamic face-coverings (call them burqas, niqabs, chadors or whatever else describes the full-body cloaking of women) are under assault. Should they be banned? French President Nicolas Sarkozy thinks they should be because, he argues, they repress women. Feminists and liberals agree. But it's just as true that clothing is a personal choice, religiously inspired clothing even more so, and that some women gladly wear the burqa or the chador as a full-fledged expression of their faith--and a pointed reaction to those who would contravene it in any way. So whose rights prevail?
You decide: you're welcome to click here share your thoughts.
See Also:
- Nicolas Sarkozy Wants to Ban the Burqa
- Brooks: Nine Paris of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women.
- Moroccan Woman Denied French Citizenship for Her Niqab
- French Citizen Denied Driving School for Wearing Muslim Veil
- TheVeil and the Law in Europe and the Americas
- Does the Quran Require Women to Wear the Veil?
- What Is the Burqa?
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