Summary
Modesty dress — hijab, and in its fuller form the black abaya with niqab — whose increasing adoption by resettled Negev Bedouin women Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin analyses in Chapter 6 as a neo-traditional practice that can extend women’s mobility rather than only seclude them (Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin, PDF p.181-184).
Details
- Increasing numbers of women don the veil in full hijab and niqab alongside rising Polygyny, as part of the community’s growing identification with the wider Muslim world (PDF p.167, 181).
- Dinero, altering Hanna Papanek’s term “portable seclusion” (as noted in Abu-Lughod 2002, as cited), calls the hijab and niqab a “portable tent”: in the dense town environment it provides total anonymity — social worker Tsofit Goren (7 May 2007): “they can’t be recognized, it provides total anonymity” — and so lets women move about more freely, in Bedouin and increasingly in Jewish Israeli society (PDF p.182).
- Part of the rationale is situational: in town a woman outside her stone house is far more likely than in the nomadic environment to encounter kin and non-kin males in whose presence modesty is expected (Dinero 1997:255, as cited) (PDF p.181).
- Saeed El-Harumi (28 May 2007) adds fashion and pilgrimage: the dark black abaya seen in Segev Shalom “is what they see on the haj. They bring it back with them; it is not [originally part of] bedouin culture, it is Saudi culture” (PDF p.182-183).
- In the Bedouin Women’s Focus Groups (May 2007), all ten women wore head coverings and none a face veil; they explained the new veiling variously as religiosity, fashion, custom and mobility — Fatma: “[hijab] makes our lives here easier — I put on hijab and I can go anywhere” — while Wadha B., 54, opposed it: “There is nothing in the Qur’an that requires this!” (PDF p.184).
- Dinero holds two readings side by side: his own argument (2006:883, as quoted) that Western feminist views of veiling and polygyny as oppression are themselves Orientalist, and his proviso that such academic readings carry Western or class bias beside the lived pain polygyny causes (PDF p.183).
Related pages
Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin, Polygyny, Islamicization, Segev Shalom