Veiled Sentiments

Abu-Lughod presents her motivation to more closely examine how language of honor and modesty seeps into gendered discourses of Bedouin society. In general, she reminds her audience that “maleness is associated with autonomy and femaleness with dependency” in Awlad ‘Ali communities (118). Because hierarchical power is connected to morality, the Awlad ‘Ali implicitly assume “that men’s precedence is due to their moral superiority” (119).

Numerous cultural artifacts, like “sayings, institutions, rituals, and symbols” (119), reify the structural superiority of Bedouin men. According to Abu-Lughod, women’s perceived moral inferiority is the most common reason for their devaluation. Although women work to display ḥasham, their bodies (and femininity in general) are inextricably linked to “reproduction […] [and] its concomitants: menstruation and sexuality” (119).

Because of their association with negative reproductive processes, women must take “the path of modesty” to gain “respectability,” even if they may not ever achieve “moral virtue” (119). Chastity and sexual modesty are the ultimate manifestations of modesty, or ḥasham, that allow women to “show deference” to hierarchical values and “deny” connections to sexuality, which is “the greatest threat” to the Bedouin social system (119).

Preference for masculinity begins at birth, where Bedouins prefer sons over daughters. Abu-Lughod notes that “there is good sociological reason” for this preference (122), given the group’s strong patrilineal structure and the need for larger numbers of men to demonstrate strength and make political bonds. Women want strong daughters to help with housework, but boys are their “social security” for the future (122), and for that reason, most women ultimately follow suit and prioritize their sons.

The patrilineal structures of Bedouin society also condemn girls because they must eventually leave the home; bonds with them will not last in significant ways if they marry outside the camp. “Despite fondness for maternal relatives,” the distances that separate a woman from them “cannot be surmounted” (123). Abu-Lughod describes an old woman who loved her daughter and appreciated her care, which superseded her sons’ care for her; nonetheless, she explained that “she preferred her sons’ children to her daughter’s” because her daughter’s children “belong to someone else” (123).

The patrilineal system can be “peripheralizing” for women, but it does not exclude them completely. Their nobility (aṣl) can carry through them to their children, and so they still possess inherited cultural capital, even if it is limited by their inability to achieve individual morality.

Femininity, inextricably linked with the “natural aspects of menstruation, procreation, and sexuality,” renders them, in Bedouin eyes, naturally “[compromised] vis-a-vis one of the crucial virtues of honor, the self-mastery associated with ‘agl” (124). Even women’s clothing, their “ubiquitous red belt,” references this inability to control bodies to achieve “the same level of moral worth as men” (124).

Fertility is a curse placed upon women, yet it is also critical to a woman’s value in the community. Women are “linked to life” and “linked symbolically to rain,” since they bring the next generation; by contrast, men are linked “to death” (126). Using a story recounted to her by an elderly woman, Abu-Lughod describes the affiliation of wombs and fertility with riḥm, or “pity, compassion, or mercy” (129).

Menstruation and sexuality, the negative attributes of femininity, undermine these feminine virtues by representing “inescapable weakness, and lack of self-control or independence” (129). In Islam, Abu-Lughod explains that “women are handicapped because menstruation is considered polluting […] [and] a menstruating woman cannot pray” (130). Where men wear pure white, in Bedouin society, women wear red and black, even when they go on pilgrimage to Mecca. Women also bear the physical symbol of pregnancy, which attests to sexual activity, whereas men bear no such sign. Childbirth “is considered polluting” (132), and women who have just given birth cannot prepare food for men and should not bathe for forty days after childbirth.

Abu-Lughod explains: “Through sexuality and pregnancy, women lose control over their own bodies” (133). Although women gain power through the children they produce, the actual processes attached to reproduction (and the possibility that it will happen again/has once happened) diminish their power. Sexuality distances them from ‘agl, which equates to prestige. This setup, Abu-Lughod prepares to show, demonstrates that sexuality is a threat to the social order ruled by ‘agl.

In this chapter, Abu-Lughod outlines the processes of outward gender symbolism in Bedouin society. “The transition from virgin to woman is radical” for the Awlad ‘Ali, and it is “marked by a change in a girl’s clothing” (134). After the defloration ceremony on her wedding day, a newly married woman wears “the black headcloth that doubles as a veil and the red woolen belt” that “represent Bedouin womanhood” (134). The young women are used to belts, which they start to wear upon their first period; after marriage, not wearing a belt “is considered highly indecent or shameful” (136).

More elemental even than the red belt is the black headscarf, which even Bedouin women who live in towns (and have let go of the tradition of the red belt) continue to wear. Unlike women’s headscarves in other Muslim nations, Bedouin women’s scarves are adjustable, revealing or hiding parts of the face depending on the person to whom the woman speaks. The black color is important, as it symbolizes a woman’s shame, “particularly sexual shame” (138).

Abu-Lughod retells a complex folk story about an incestuous mother-son relationship that is the supposed root of the tradition of women’s black veils. Associating veils with this story of incest clarifies the connection between the veils and “negatively valued sexuality” (142). It renders the veil a symbol of shame over sexuality that is both negative and out of the control of senior, powerful men. Female moral worth varies in the story—there is a “good” woman and a “bad,” incestuous mother—and the story shows ways that women “can counteract their moral inferiority” (143). Women can do this: first, by acting and associating themselves with men; second, by remaining pious; third, by respecting men and older women; and finally, by remaining chaste. “Through proper action […] a woman can at least partially overcome” the shameful nature that her headcloth symbolizes (143).

Abu-Lughod seeks, in this chapter, to recognize Bedouin rejection of sexuality as more social than religious. Where previous frameworks cite Islam as the reason for negative attitudes toward sexuality, Abu-Lughod claims that Bedouins see “sexuality and sexual behavior as threatening” (145), whereas Islam sees sexuality “as a relatively positive fact of life” (144). If marriages among the Awlad ‘Ali can be between cousins, then the patrilineal parallel-cousin relationship can supersede, and mask, the sexual. This way, social relationships can avoid sexuality as much as possible.

This preference demonstrates how sexuality is viewed as a “threat” to the “conceptual system that orders social relations” and “to the solidarity of the agnatic kin group” (145). As sexual activity bonds a man to his wife, it pulls him from his agnatic family group. Although reproduction is desirable, the strains that sexual activity places upon the family are undesirable. Bedouin songs, which Abu-Lughod provides, reflect this tension. When young people leave their families for marriage (and the marital bed), elders lose some control over them. This occurs as a woman develops new bonds with her husband’s family and as men gain a new sense of control and power, disrupting the firm bonds of Bedouin family and morality. Sexual desire also disrupts efforts toward honorable values like ‘agl.

For these reasons, senior community members retain as much control as they can over marriages. “Divorce is common” (149), and the divorced are not stigmatized, for marriage is not seen as sacrosanct or emblematic of a kind of separation or independence from the patrikin. This vision of marriage as a bond between families is a carefully orchestrated means of hiding, as much as possible, the presence of sexuality. Like symbols and behaviors of modesty, the framing of marriage works to suppress the threat that sexuality can pose to a Bedouin community.

Ḥasham is closely tied to the “denial” of sexuality among the Bedouins, as modesty (the ultimate compliment to direct at a woman) centers on denying and hiding interest in or connection to sexuality. Avoiding men, eschewing makeup, and behaving quietly are all markers of ḥasham, but “[denying] interest in sexual matters […] [and] their own sexuality” marks a woman as “good” (153). Girls are raised to believe that ḥasham requires sexual self-denial.

A good bride, Abu-Lughod writes, should scream when her groom approaches her: “Even married women must deny any interest in their husbands” (154). While both men and women must deny their sexuality, ḥasham is critical to women, Abu-Lughod believes, whereas men’s honor and self-control attend to a broader range of possible shortcomings. Importantly, women need not retain this strict modesty when in the company of other women with whom they are close (and, in certain cases, men, like their nephews); Abu-Lughod overhears many bawdy jokes in private company.

A woman’s chastity, then, is a marker of her respect for the customs of Bedouin society; her kinsmen share her dishonor if she transgresses sexually, for it shows a lack of voluntary deference to the power of her superiors. Because a woman’s honor most directly validates her kinsmen, not her husband (who has restricted authority over her), her kinsmen are most directly shamed by any sexual transgressions eroding her ḥasham.

Abu-Lughod describes how “veiling is both voluntary,” enforced not by men but by other women, “and situational” (159), happening in different degrees for different men. Veiling is explicitly linked to sexuality, as only women who are sexually active (married and not menopausal) veil. In the company of men for whom they do not usually veil (like husbands or other family members), women will still use the veil if anyone references sex or sexuality. Importantly, Abu-Lughod reminds her reader that the veil is not intended “to prevent seduction or arousal” (162), but rather that it is a symbol of sexual shame. This is why women can “interact unveiled and quite familiarly” with many men and why they veil around some men to whom they could not marry (162), like close kinsmen.

For this reason, patterns of veiling align more closely with hierarchies of respect: women veil for fathers, elders, and married men more often than for unmarried men. They do not veil for their husbands or men who are younger and/or of lower status than them. Women will not veil when they visit Cairo or Alexandria, where they are among the “immoral” (7) Egyptians. Ultimately, “the system is flexible” (163). Because the veils are flexible, women can vary the degrees to which they cover themselves based on the amount of deference the situation requires.

Abu-Lughod ultimately frames veiling “as a vocabulary item in a symbolic language for communicating about morality” among the Awlad ‘Ali (165). By adopting the veil, women speak a language that can earn them the honor available to them: morality. This morality supports family honor, demonstrated by dependents who are “modest” and “deferring to their providers” (166).

This system of moral honor is complex, Abu-Lughod recognizes, and rather than seeking more knowledge of its roots, she focuses on how it “is reproduced by the actions of individuals motivated by a desire to embody the good” (167). This question, of “how the ideology of honor and modesty engenders a discourse of morality, shapes individual actions, and, most important, affects sentiments and experiments in relations with others” (167), is the direction in which she turns as she concludes the first part of her text.