From any angle, the Western world’s fascination with the Islamic practice of veiling has persisted for centuries—and it shows no signs of abating. Amid discursive and public debates grounded in Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a supposedly insurmountable (that is, “historical”) cultural divide between the “civilizations” of the West and Islam, the veil remains a favored topic, reason, and target for attack—whether by various advocates of what is seductively termed “women’s rights,” or by supporters of ideologies that are not only anti-Western but also based in non- or anti-liberal democratic regimes. Much like the veil itself, concepts like “democracy,” “women’s rights,” and “Islam” are perhaps best approached by asking “when,” “how,” “where,” and “for whom.” Answers to these questions, when considered across time and space, reveal how inconsistent, diverse, mutable, and fragmented the meanings, experiences, and realities associated with these terms truly are.

The following brief reflection on the veil is the product of the author’s nearly two-year stay in Indonesia—the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country and the fourth most populous overall—where she is pursuing interdisciplinary doctoral studies in religion and culture (ICRS) at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta (Central Java). Instead of offering statistics, the author presents a narrative for two reasons. First, the unreliability of statistical data in a country that ranks among the world’s most corrupt. Indeed, Indonesia’s historical statistical instability is illustrated by the fact that, to this day, the number of victims of the 1965–66 anti-communist purges remains unknown, with estimates ranging from 200,000 to over 1,000,000 dead or disappeared. The second reason is the author’s attempt to give voice to the women who wear the veil—or are preparing to do so—offering their individual experiences as refracted through her own lens, to an audience for whom such experiences may be impossibly distant. Underlying this is an explicit agenda: debates about “Islam” and “women’s rights” and the veil must be rooted in positionality. Hence the guiding questions: “where,” “how,” and “for whom?”
Jilbab as a Fashion Ensemble

Today’s Republic of Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelagic nation, home to over 250 million people, the majority (over 90 percent, according to some sources) of whom identify as Muslim. A mere glance at veiling practices reveals that “Islam” here signifies different ideologies and practices to different people—especially women. An increasing number of Muslim women wear locally designed jilbabs; others casually drape a nearly transparent fabric called kerudung over their heads; occasionally, though rarely, one sees a woman veiled from head to toe, with only a narrow slit for her eyes; and many Muslim women show no outward sign of religious affiliation at all. Interestingly, the jilbab is a relatively recent social phenomenon in Indonesia, emerging only in the 1980s. Before that, most Muslim women either went unveiled in public or wore the kerudung on special occasions. Furthermore, just over a decade ago, both domestic and international companies in Indonesia frequently required women not to wear the veil at work. Today, the jilbab has become common in both professional and everyday contexts—and in some cases, companies now require female employees to wear it.

Huntington develops his thesis by drawing on a centuries-old tradition of thinkers who have viewed the world through the lens of Orientalism. In this imagined world of “clashing civilizations”—Islam versus the West—the covered heads of Muslim women repeatedly draw the attention, suspicion, and condemnation of public opinion in liberal democracies and in countries aspiring to such systems. Some secular Western countries, like France and parts of Germany, have even banned veils in schools—justifying these bans through the ideology of religious privacy and the subordination of religion to state secularism. Elsewhere, in societies not strictly opposed to Western democratic models but based instead on different social systems and cultural practices, the wide variety of Muslim women’s veils undermines Huntington’s black-and-white worldview—without denying that some societies impose veiling (and thus control of the female body) in the name of a “true” Islam grounded in misogynistic interpretations of the Qur’an, Hadith, and other texts. For example, in Aceh—a region in Sumatra known in Serbia as the area devastated by the tsunami that killed over 100,000 people—a Sharia law mandates that women in public cover not only their hair but also their neck and chest, in accordance with what is claimed to be Qur’anic instruction.
Jilbab in Youthful Styles

At a recent international conference titled “Globalization: A Challenge and Opportunity for Religions,” organized by ICRS in Yogyakarta, Lili Zakiyah Munir—head of the Center for Pesantren and Democracy Studies (a pesantren being an Indonesian Islamic boarding school for Qur’anic education)—rejected proposals for a national-level implementation of Sharia law in Indonesia. Lili explained her stance by noting her uncertainty about what model of Sharia the loudest proponents were advocating, fearing it was the oppressive model already enacted in Aceh, which she firmly opposes. Educated in a pesantren and wearing the jilbab herself, Lili embodies what the author identifies as the essence of veiling in Indonesia: rather than focusing on the veil itself, one should focus on the woman who wears it. Since she dons the jilbab voluntarily and consciously, Lili opposes forcing women to cover their heads, necks, and chests in the name of Islam.

In collaboration with the Center for Women’s Studies at the State Islamic University Sunan Kalijaga in Yogyakarta, the author learned through conversations with the Center’s activists—who identify as Islamic feminists—that each wears the jilbab as a social symbol of religious affiliation, in context-specific ways. In contrast, and unlike these highly educated women who reject linking the jilbab to religious “correctness,” let alone equating its absence with sin, the average-educated Muslim woman in Java today believes that the jilbab should align with—and reflect—the wearer’s level of piety and religious purity. Most of the young women the author spoke with do not yet feel ready to wear the jilbab, hoping that one day they will become worthy of this, to them, clear symbol of sincere and devoted faith.
For Formal Occasions

Although the author had been “initiated” into the dangers of Orientalism long before arriving in Indonesia—through reading Edward Said’s Orientalism—she discovered that the process of self-reconstruction is a slow one, especially for someone raised in an Islamophobic environment. Listening to Indonesian women’s stories about the veil, the author began to feel the veils covering Islam(s) in her own culture lift, revealing different realities and histories. She recalled stories told by a professor at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade about the (deliberate) lack of research on monuments from the nearly two-century-long Ottoman presence in Vojvodina. She also remembered the plea of a Belgrade archive director who lamented the need to study numerous Ottoman-era documents that remain unexamined, silent about centuries of Turkish presence in what is now Serbia. […] For the author, the veil stands as a symbol of her own shame at the prevailing ignorance, disrespect, and fear—breeding hatred—toward those who wear it in her native society. The veil, and the story of the veil, either reveals or conceals secrets—depending not only on who tells the story, but also on who listens.

Like the photographs accompanying this text, stories about the veil often forget that beneath it there is, first and foremost, a body—one that wears it.