[100 challenge] Roberta Gattel_73

It’s not about the burqa, Mariam Khan, 2019

Every time I hear about the issue of the veil, I don't think of Islam but of Christianity.

The first image that comes to mind is a skull with a black veil still tied around its forehead. It is not an image I saw with my own eyes but imprinted in my mind by my mother's detailed, macabre stories. The skull with the black veil was the head of. I don't know which ancestor had been dug up from the family tomb and moved to an ossuary. Mom was a girl when they recovered this woman's bones and was deeply struck by the fact that the only part of the body that had remained intact was the veil. She told me that that woman had never taken it off since her son died, that she used to tie it so tightly that it had dug into the bone.

The veil was a very mainstream practice in Italy until the 1970s: many women wore it in mourning, and all put it on their heads when entering church. The women took their places in the right half of the church, the men in the left half. Virgins covered their heads with a white veil, married ones with a black veil. Those who were widowed no longer took it off. In Orthodox Christian countries, women still wear the veil in church. And throughout the Christian landscape, the woman who marries still uses it.

Even I had to wear the white veil when I took my first Communion "because it is beautiful to see," "because it is tradition," "because you are female," so they posed me near the altar, with the candles lit behind me, my hands clasped in prayer, asking me for the most pious look I was capable of before taking the ritual photograph. In the shot, however, there were two veiled people: the first - the least convincing one, with the look of a cornered animal - is me; the second is behind me: the Madonna painted in the altarpiece becauseeven the Madonna wears the veil.

The veil has always been, for Christianity, both a cultural and religious phenomenon, and it was consolidated starting from Paul's Letter to the Corinthians (11, 1-34), where the apostle writes: "Therefore if a woman does not want to wear a veil, let her cut her hair! But if it is shameful for a woman to cut her hair or shave, then cover up. Man must not cover his head since he is the image and glory of God; the woman, however, is the glory of the man”.

I found the photograph of my First Communion a few years ago; it had been placed in a tin box together with all the other family photos; there was the photo of the First Communion of my mother and my aunts, all in the same pose, halfway between sanctity and statuary; there were several, significantly damaged, black and white photos of unknown and expressionless women, leaning against the wall of the house in front of the year's harvest, with their mouths half open. A black veil covers their heads. And then there was the photo of my grandmother's wedding, in a gray dress and with a dark veil around her head: the priest had forbidden her to wear white because she had become pregnant before the wedding, and her sin had to be seen. He celebrated the wedding before sunrise without allowing guests.

That box contained generations of injustice and suffering, many of which were avoidable. “Do you think we felt oppressed because we wore the veil?” one of my many aunts asked me. “It wasn't the veil that oppressed us; it was the men.” My aunt explained to me that for women, the veil had a social value; it was a sign of belonging to the community and an indicator of distinction, "it was an opportunity to show how good one was at sewing because we crocheted the veils. And it was also a way of showing modesty and hoping to find a husband."

Talking about the veil is something that only one who wears it can do; this is what my aunt taught me, but it is also what Mariam Khan remembers, gathering more than a dozen voices of contemporary Muslim women who talk about hijab, faith, sex, shame, pride, and justice. In a heterogeneous, authentic, and critical choral mosaic, which highlights how female voices resemble each other, with or without the veil: “I was a geeky young woman who had never shaken hands with a man, let alone had a boyfriend. I'd attended an all-girl Catholic school before opting to study science at university. My life was Malcolm X and Maya Angelou, X-men, and Spider-Man; summers were spent at my nani's house in Karachi, and winters trudging through Yorkshire snow. Bespectacled in a time before it was collected, I was short-sighted in more ways than one, young enough to believe that good things happened to good people”.