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  The complexities of purdah observance reveal some of the norms, values, and structures of the wider society but can only be touched on briefly here. There is one major issue, particularly relevant to the family ideology and purdah practices of Muslims, that I want to address separately: the matter of honor.

  The Question of Honor

  Family status and family honor are inextricably tied up with purdah, as they are throughout the world with matters of women’s “being” and “doing,” but honor takes on a special salience in many Muslim populations around the globe.

  Proverbs express this well: Among the Pathans of northwest Pakistan, for instance, it is said that “A man is known by the qualities of his wife.” Another way of putting this (among the Mohmand tribal clans, referred to as Pukhtuns, living along the Afghan border in Pakistan) is that “The Pukhtun’s honor is tied to that of his women who exist to serve him and be loyal to his cause…. It is a man’s world [and] Pukhtuns will not compromise their concept of women…. Ideal women learn only to run a household.”9

  Hamida Khala,* an elderly Muslim friend, remembered that in her youth it was a matter of great pride for a man to be able to say “my wife is so pure that no man has seen even the hem of her veil.” And among the high-status Muslim families who care for an important Muslim saint’s shrine in the Delhi area, women told the anthropologist Patricia Jeffery that “the men like purdah because of izzat (honor).” She concluded that the seclusion of women was important to the men’s work as keepers of the shrine because it showed that they were highly observant, strict Muslims.10

  The theme of honor, often coupled with the concept of shame, runs through the moral ideas of many societies, particularly around the Mediterranean Sea (western Asia, northern Africa), and is also found in southern Asia in connection with purdah. It is a powerful concept that has been extensively discussed in anthropological studies—but almost always from the male perspective.

  In her study of Bedouins, the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod offers sensitive new insights into this issue. She traces the relationships among veiling, modesty, and sexuality in a society—unlike many in South Asia—where independent action by men is highly valued, and concludes that: “Separate paths to honor exist, appropriate to the socially and economically independent on the one hand, and to the dependent on the other…. The honor of voluntary deference [is] the moral virtue of dependents in Bedouin society.”11

  This point sheds new light on the matter of honor and purdah observance. For instance, one might imagine that making men’s honor entirely dependent on women’s actions—as in the statements noted earlier—gives women considerable power over men’s “derivative” honor. A woman might threaten to ruin a man’s reputation by disobedience. But it does not work out that way, for several reasons. First, a man’s honor is terribly important to him; in some groups, it is the most cherished attribute, one for which he may be ready to die or to kill. Men have physical and legal power over women: They initiate divorce and can send women back to their families. Depending on the specific type of Islamic personal law in force in a country, women may also be able to initiate divorce; recent legislation in some countries also limits men’s power to initiate unilateral divorce. But this is unheard of in those groups where violence is used to defend family honor. Men in such groups often beat women, and, in extreme cases, their concern for personal and family honor may prompt them to kill a female relative who has violated the group’s code of conduct. Such killings, like “crimes of passion” elsewhere, are condoned by the community.12 Second, women themselves may be imbued with the code of honor. Among the Pukhtuns studied by the anthropologist Akbar Ahmed, women are “paradoxically the most fanatic supporters” of the Pukhtun Code. Ahmed reports a couplet in which a woman exhorts a male to uphold the Code at the cost of his life and her happiness.13

  Although these ideas and actions sound paradoxical, the explanations for them are not difficult, especially in view of Abu-Lughod’s analysis. Respect in the community is vital to the family’s status and, in all societies, has both symbolic and material implications. Since women are entirely dependent on the family for survival, especially where the rules of purdah limit labor force participation, their own interests demand that they do what they can to advance the collective interests of the family. Strict purdah observance, in addition, is a way for women to gain respect from others in the family and community, as obedience and conformity are highly valued in these societies.

  Most critical to the concept of honor, however, are the implications for hierarchical relationships in family and society. The classic posture of deference to a superior not only assures relative safety for the inferior partner but also offers the only available claim for excellence within the hierarchical system. Seen from this perspective, the issue of honor provides men with extraordinary power to control female behavior, precisely because men are passionately concerned with safeguarding their “derivative” honor. Far from giving women any power to affect male behavior, honor becomes a burden, a harness with which to bridle women. Men’s passion to preserve their honor—often equated with manliness—becomes a passion to control women. This is the passion that can break out into acts of violence, as when men feel their personal honor threatened by the actions of women. In another sense, the passion to control women breaks out into other kinds of violence against women—as when writers and leaders of social or political movements invoke the fear of sexual anarchy in a whole society as justification for the imposition of purdah and other constraints on women. The apparently voluntary nature of purdah observance must always be examined in terms of the choices open to women in a given situation. Voluntary deference to superiors may well be the moral virtue of dependents and may represent the best available choice, but it indicates a society in which women are kept tightly within bounds and grievously punished for nonconformity.

  Encounter with Purdah

  It is hard to imagine what it might be like to live in purdah. There are the physical constraints—covering one’s face and body some of the time, avoiding certain men all of the time, staying in certain places, and so on—but these are rules that can be taught and learned. What is much harder to imagine is how women learn (and teach) the feelings that make it seem right to do these things. And that, of course, is the question one has to ask about any code of conduct, in any family or group or society.

  This question has haunted me for some time, but it took a while for it to float to the surface. When I first met veiled women in the streets of Karachi, Pakistan, in the 1950s, I was very angry. “How dare THEY do this to women?” I thought, not stopping to think, in my anger, just who THEY might be or how the women themselves felt about it.

  In those days, a few years after independence from British colonial rule and the partition of India and Pakistan (in 1947), I spent a lot of time in the poorer sections of the city, near the big old markets and the port, getting to know the place and deciding how I was going to do my dissertation research. At that time, it didn’t occur to me to do research on purdah; the study of women was not yet an acknowledged part of social science, especially at Harvard, where I was a graduate student. I hadn’t yet learned to listen to myself, to hear what most interested me in a place that I found fascinating.

  Purdah: Lots of women on the streets in that part of town, but most of them encased in a billowing cloak, the burqa, black or white, that covered a woman entirely, including her face. The women moved in twos or threes usually, sometimes with a man, often with children. Crossing the busy streets, they were hesitant, sometimes lifting a corner of the face veil to peer at the traffic. There was something about these women that bothered me very much and contributed to my anger: I couldn’t make eye contact with them! I hadn’t realized how much that meant to me, even with strangers, but it did and it still does—that fleeting glimpse, the guessing about another’s thoughts and feelings, the recognition when eyes catch and hold. And with these women, it was impossible.

  They cou
ld see me, if not very clearly, through their veils (on the black burqa) or the eyeholes (on the more traditional white garment), but I could not see them. As far as I was concerned, that made them invisible, because there was no possibility of interaction—and that was, of course, the point. The wearing of the garment signaled to everyone to stay away. I did not know what it meant to the women, to their sense of self, their self-esteem.

  I began to think about what it would mean to live like that, what kind of a society would make people need this particular way of hiding from one another. Purdah became a kind of prism: a window into a society that worked only when you turned it to get the best angle but that yielded many new images once you tried it. Analogies to purdah came to mind, but none really fit. On the streets, I couldn’t communicate with people inside cars either—but cars were fast and powerful which these women were not. I thought about nuns (in those days all nuns wore habits) but that analogy wasn’t right either, even if the costumes had some striking similarities. Nuns announce to the world, by their habits, that they are not sexual beings but “brides of Christ.” Pardanashin were signaling something quite different. In a way, their burqas announced openly that they were sexual beings, for very little girls and very old women did not wear the garment, even in families where other females did. I toyed with the interpretation that the burqa so emphasized women’s sexuality—by trying to hide it—that all other human qualities were obliterated. Certainly any sense of individuality was erased, at least in public, by the covering of faces. So these crowds of “invisible” women I saw on the streets of Karachi seemed to be women-in-general rather than specific individuals, and I knew nothing about what they thought and felt.

  Over the years, I spent time thinking and reading more about purdah, eventually putting these ideas into print. In the late 1970s, an elderly Muslim woman whom I had known for a long time volunteered to tell me about her life. She had grown up in strict purdah, had been married very young, and had finally given up purdah under the strong and persistent pressure of her husband, a civil servant. We talked about her life (and mine) for many days. From her, I began to learn what it had been like to live in purdah.

  Purdah and Muslim Identity: The Story of Hamida Khala

  She was the youngest in a very large Muslim family in north India. Her mother died when she was three; her father, a highly educated man, held a post at Aligarh University. Hamida Khala remembered a quite happy childhood. Her father was strict but reasonable; his understanding of Islam emphasized living according to the prescriptions of the Quran, and he did not allow superstitions, such as the wearing of amulets, in his family. Purdah was an important part of his beliefs, and Hamida Khala remembered that she longed to put on the burqa because that would mean she had grown up. Her father wanted all his children, both boys and girls, to be well educated; daily lessons were supervised by adult members of the family. The young Hamida was very close to her father and recalled how she had wanted to please him by being obedient.

  Her father remarried but Hamida’s elder sisters, who had brought her up after their mother’s death, did not get along with the new wife. Perhaps that is one reason why the family accepted a marriage proposal for Hamida—then only thirteen, much younger than her sisters had been when they had married. The prospective bridegroom was a widower, much older than Hamida, but known to the family and with a promising job in the civil service. He was said by some relatives to be “modern,” and there were rumors that he would stop Hamida from observing purdah. She came to her first adult decision: If he asked her to leave purdah, she would return to her family. After that, she felt more confident and consented to the marriage.

  As was customary she did not live with her new husband for a couple of years, until she was about fifteen. His job took them to Calcutta, thousands of miles from her family, and to a small apartment instead of the large house with an open courtyard she had been used to. The trip to Calcutta, by train, was a nightmare: She heard the voices of men all around her and found it hard to walk in her burqa, even though her husband was beside her. She remembered: “I felt helpless, I could do nothing…. I wondered will I really have to take off my burqa? He is a man and he will want me to do whatever he wants.” In their new home, she found that the servant her husband had hired was a man (no female servants were to be had). She refused to meet him face to face, true to her training, creating serious problems in running the house. Hamida felt increasing pressure to accommodate her husband’s wishes and yet remain true to her father’s early training.

  As a civil servant in colonial India, her husband worked with British, Hindu, and Muslim colleagues. In this sector of colonial society, social life was organized around couples. A married man whose wife could not participate in tea parties and dinners—because she was in purdah—was at a serious disadvantage because social life and work were closely connected. As long as Hamida’s husband had been a bachelor, he was invited freely, but once he was married, his colleagues resented the invisibility of his wife. In the recollections of former British colonial residents, this theme comes up repeatedly—“The greatest social stumbling block between the British and the Indians was purdah”—because Indian men would be able to mix socially with British wives while their own wives could not mix with the British.14 Whether this curious notion of reciprocity was realistic or simply an excuse for racist snobbery, Hamida’s husband was clearly affected by these circumstances. She tried to accommodate him by visiting the wives of friends and going for walks with him in her burqa.

  The climax of the young Hamida’s struggles over remaining in purdah came unexpectedly, at a dinner party in the home of friends where she had visited before. With great emotion, she recalled this event more than forty years later:

  They were trying very hard, my husband’s friends … that somehow or the other I should come out of purdah. A friend had arranged a dinner. His wife was not in purdah but, because of me, women were arranged to sit separately. The men were always in another room. [On this occasion], the time came when we were supposed to go in to dinner. All the women went into the dining hall. They were told to sit leaving one chair empty in between. I thought they were probably expecting some more women…. In those times, English times, cards would be put whose seat is for whom, so we sat in the seat with our name….

  Suddenly, the men came into the room. They sat in all those empty chairs. What I experienced, I just can’t tell you. There was darkness all around me. I couldn’t see anything. I had tears in my eyes. I was sitting with my eyes downcast, I couldn’t look up. I tried to look once at my husband but he avoided my eyes….

  I don’t know when the dinner was over. What I ate I don’t remember … I was on fire. All my attempts, my endeavors to keep my purdah were over. I felt I was without faith, I had sinned. I had gone in front of so many men, all these friends of my husband. They’ve seen me. My purdah was broken, my purdah that was my faith.

  On the way home, Hamida’s husband explained that he had not planned this party, that he was not at fault—“I could never be such a tyrant!” he told her—and asked her to forgive and forget.

  “But for a long time,” she recalled, “I felt that I had sinned that day. How will God forgive me? Then I realized slowly that I would have to change my life.” Hamida decided to write to her father, to tell him about the struggle she was going through, and to ask his advice. He wrote back a long letter, telling her that if her marriage might be endangered, then she had to leave purdah. But he added, as she remembered those many years later, that “this present purdah is not Islamic but our men and women have accepted this kind of purdah.”

  Her father also told Hamida that there was no purdah in Europe and that European men did not mind. But Indians who want to follow the European example, in this respect, would have difficulties, he told her, cautioning that “our men, it doesn’t matter how liberated they think they are, they will not endure it that their wife will talk or be informal with other men. From now on, you should always go
out with your husband. Don’t meet his friends alone without him and don’t be informal with them.”

  This letter consoled her but she was not fully satisfied. On her own, she started reading about purdah and sought out passages in the Quran and hadith that were about women. At that time, early in her married life and before she was twenty years old, she worked out for herself the rules of modest dress and demeanor that she would follow for the rest of her life. “I realized that if you go out without makeup and if you are not wearing a dress that will attract attention,” she recalled, “then you can go out.” Hamida started wearing long-sleeved blouses and gave up all her makeup and jewelry. She mixed very little and often did not recognize her husband’s friends and colleagues because she kept her eyes down in their presence.

  She no longer wore the burqa and went for long walks with her husband, rejoicing in her greater physical agility and strength. She still took the burqa with her on trips, just in case, even though she did not wear it. But on one memorable train journey, her husband angrily threw it out the window and she never had another one made. She learned to manage things like bank accounts and dealt with officials on her own, at her husband’s insistence. When he died of a heart attack while some of their seven children were still young, she was able to manage the household. She felt sure she could not have done it if she had stayed in purdah, and pitied pardanashin who were forced by circumstances to try managing on their own.

  In retrospect, Hamida Khala recalled that “it was a big sacrifice for me to leave purdah … [but my husband] had a lot of respect for me…. He knew that it was part of my religion and still I left it…. We learned a lot from each other.” Her views on purdah could be summed up in three sentences—and there were many people in Pakistan who felt the same way, at least in the 1960s and 70s: “The real purdah is modesty (haya). If a woman has no modesty, then even in a burqa she is not in purdah. If she has modesty, she is in purdah even without burqa.” But Hamida went further. With evident delight, she recounted that a man from a very conservative group had come to call on her one day, knowing she had been in purdah and was the widow of an important man, to solicit her support for bringing back widespread purdah in Pakistan. He spoke to her of the harm that would be done to the country if women did not wear burqas. She smiled at the memory of what she told him: “Let a thousand women come out at once, not just a few. Then you will see how quickly men get used to seeing women and think nothing of it.” She had come out of purdah herself, after all, and had kept her modesty, she added, and that was what mattered.