Face - Veli

S. Pathiravitana

From time to time a controversy arises about wearing the face veil. Not so long ago a Muslim woman lawyer wearing a face veil was presenting a case before a judge in a London Court.

The judge interrupting her said that he couldn’t follow her words and requested her to remove her face veil. Refusing to do so, she said that this was the first time in her two-year practice in Britain that a judge had objected to her wearing a face veil.

The judge suspending the proceedings said that he wanted to consult higher authority. And now, just the other day, in Cairo, a Muslim city, the Minister for Religious Endowments, Mahmud Hamdi Zaqzuq, said that wearing a face veil is not an Islamic requirement. “I will absolutely not allow the spread of the niqab (the face veil) culture in Egypt,” the Minister was quoted as saying.

He said that he has got up a book which he is distributing to all mosques where it is clearly shown that the Islamic rule was a woman had to be fully covered except her face and hands.

According to Marmaduke Picthall, the first translator of the Koran into English, the face-veil is a pre-Islamic form of dress that originated in Christendom. He converted to Islam and chose to be known as Mohammed Marmaduke Picthall.

Picthall was born in 1875 into a comfortable English family and was educated at one of Britain’s leading English public schools, Harrow.

He has travelled widely; his special interest being the lands of the Ottoman Empire which started out from Central Asia and spread across South-Eastern Europe and over to the Iberian peninsular in Spain.

In that process he acquired a good knowledge of Arabic and Islam in practice. Much later, when he translated the Quran, the Mufti of the Al Hazar University in Cairo authorised the translation and the Literary Supplement of the London Times welcomed it as ‘a great literary achievement.’ At one time in India he was employed as a secretary to the Nizam of Hyderabad. He died in 1936. His lectures delivered in India on Islamic culture in the first quarter of the 20th century were published in the Sixties under the title Cultural Side of Islam.

An interesting publication, it helps to dispel many of the wrong notions about Islam which are today creating much anxiety and alarm particularly in the Western world. About the face-veil, as observed by him, it was not an Islamic custom originally. “It was prevalent in many cities of the East,” he said, “before the coming of Islam, but not in the cities of Arabia.

The purdah system as it now exists in India was quite undreamt of by the Muslims of the early centuries. When they came into the cities of Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia and Egypt, where a pre-Islamic culture prevailed, they adopted at once the face-veil and some other fashions as a prevailing custom in order to save their women from mis-understandings by peoples accustomed to associate unveiled faces with loose character.”

He goes on to say further that later it was adopted even in the cities of Arabia under the impression that it was a mark of ‘civilisation’. It has never been a universal custom for Muslim women, the great majority of whom has never used it; for the majority of the Muslim women in the world are peasants who work with their husbands and brothers in the fields. For them the face-veil would have been an absurd encumbrance.

The head-veil on the other hand is universal.” And he concludes that the purdah system is neither of Islam nor of Arabian origin and he goes on to affirm, “It is of Zoroastrian Persian, and Christian Byzantine origin.

“It has nothing to do with the religion of Islam, and, for practical reasons it has never been adopted by the great majority of Muslim women. So long as it was applied to the women of great houses, who had plenty of space for exercise within their palaces and had varied interests in life; so long as it involved no cruelty and did no harm to women, it may be regarded as unobjectionable from the Islamic standpoint as a custom of a period.

But the moment it involved cruelty to women and did harm to them it became manifestly objectionable from the point of view of the Shar’ah, which enjoins kindness and fair treatment towards women, and aims at the improvement of their status. It was never applicable to every class of society and when applied to every class, as now in India, it is a positive evil, which the sacred law can never sanction.”

Incidentally, our relations with the Muslim world through those who came here, not as conquerors but as traders, got on excellently for nearly a thousand years until British times. Talking the Kandyan period, Lorna Devaraja in her essay, to which I referred last week, A study in Ethnic Harmony says, “Here we find two communities, aliens in race, religion and culture but considered equals in every respect, harmoniously co-existing in a mutually beneficial relationship.”

What brought the two communities together was the persecution of the Muslims, first by the Portuguese and then by the Dutch. The Sinhala kings opened their frontiers to them and settled them in many villagers. Akurana and Gampola are two places where there are large Muslim communities today.

It is incredible how they fitted into this caste-ridden, ‘godless’ society and occupied both high and low office in the royal household. They functioned as provincial governors (disavas) and Muhandirams in the administration, as ambassadors in the foreign service and as bodyguards to the king in the king’s palace. Their descendants still carry the name Muhandiramlage. King Senarat is reported to have built a mosque for them in Kandy and Buddhist temples helped and supported Muslim priests who lived in viharagamas.

The case of Ahmed Lebbe is even more remarkable. He attended to the temple duties attached to the historic Ambekke Devala, which are normally performed by those who come from the ranks of the govikula. But these are not professional services, rather a kind of honorary work, one of them being to participate in its ceremonies on the fifteen days the perahera is held.

Says Devaraja, “Obviously Ahmed Lebbe considered it a matter of pride and prestige to be associated with the devale ceremonial and the devale authorities in turn were honoured by the presence of Ahmed Lebbe in their midst.”

How did the Muslims who were encouraged by the king to take Sinhala wives treat them? Devaraja was not able to find evidence for this from the Kandyan territories.

But she goes on to quote the observation of the Rev James Cordiner who reports to have seen in the Maritime Provinces just at the time when the Dutch were handing over the territory they occupied to the British.

This is what he saw. “Their women are scarcely ever seen by strangers. When a man wants to transport his wife from one place to another, if he cannot afford a palanquin, he places her cross-legged upon a bullock (sic) completely covered with a white cloth so that not a particle of her skin could be seen, nor can she see where she is going. The husband walks by her side.” How a woman, seated cross-legged on a bullock, unless it was a bullock cart, could balance herself without even seeing where she is going is a wonder in itself. One is not certain whether the Reverend is imagining or seeing things.

However, Picthall deplored this kind of treatment in general of Muslim women in India. He tries to mitigate this partly by pointing out that the prevailing Indian culture places women not too high in the Indian social hierarchy. But that does not prevent him, as quoted earlier, in calling the treatment ‘a crime and a libel against Islam.’

“Please,” he says, “do not hearing me thus in-veigh against the present pitiful condition of Muslim womanhood that I am judging it by an any foreign standard” and quotes the Shari’ah as the standard by which he is judging it.

However, he would have been greatly pleased had he known that the Sinhala kings showed much understanding, tolerance, benevolence and kindness in the manner in which the Muslim minority living among them was treated. For this is exactly how some of the Caliphs in the Ottoman Empire treated the minorities that came under their rule.

There were no forcible conversions, no attempt to change their style of living or forms of worship. They were allowed to govern themselves according to their needs and conventions.

In turn the Muslims brought a culture to the West including their universities, unknown to the West till then, their sciences, mathematics, philosophy and astronomy which contributed to the intellectual awakening of Europe and the birth of the renaissance, for which they got no gratitude. They also showed Europe what tolerance is when they have asylum to the Jews and minor Christian sects who were persecuted by the Inquisition.

Mohammed Marmaduke Picthall recalls how “In my youth I saw a good deal of the Christian population, the descendants such of the conquered people of those days as would not embrace Islam; and they used to speak of the early Muslim period almost as a golden age and of the Khalifa Umar ibn-ul Khattah almost as a benefactor of their religion.”