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HOW TO RECOGNIZE A MUSLIM

Romans and the spread of Christianity—did the practice of veiling and, more broadly, of
women’s enclosure, devaluation, and repression spread. In this sense, veiling was the
material measure of ancient Egypt’s Hellenization and Romanization, its ‘‘Europeaniza-
tion,’’ if you will, even as that process simultaneously integrated Egypt just as surely into
the surrounding Levantine culture. Until that point, Egypt had been the exception to the
rule of women’s occlusion, the trussing of female voice and body between walls of cloth
and mortar common to the worlds around it north and south, east and west. And so,
through Europe and in line with most of the Levant, the reification, the setting into stone
and law of the binary between veiled mistress and unveiled slave, of secluded virgin and
public whore, all founded on the fancy of woman as prime(d) receptacle for men’s libidi-
nal projections and economic intentions came to Egypt, too.

INTERLUDE: ANOTHER VEIL

That isn’t the whole story, of course. We must consider as well thesitr—the curtain behind

which the Fatimid caliphs were concealed at the opening of an audience session. Thissitr

was removed by a special servant at the opening of a session in order to unveil the en-

throned ruler, and it was put back in place at the close of the session. It is at such a moment

the mark of authority, of law, of power, corresponding to thevelumof the Roman and

Byzantine emperors. So our Latinate name for women’s fabricate seclusion—the ‘‘veil’’—

contains within it, itself screens, a plethora of royal, divinely justified masculine

predecessors.

And then there is Allah, whose Most Beautiful Names at once designate and veil the

Named: Allahal-Batinand Allahas-Satıˆr, Allah the Hidden and Allah the Veiler / the Protec-

tor, and Allahal-Ghafuˆr, the One who veils our faults and forgives our sins so they are not

seen by anyone else, even the angels.

This is the Allah to whom is called out in time of need:YaˆSattaˆr!‘‘O Veiler, O Coverer,

O Protector, O Shelterer!’’

In this sense, the modern debate about the veil—as it begins, at least, in Egypt under
British occupation—dramatizes Europe’s encounter not just with the Islamic world but
with its very own foundations. What this Egyptian veil literally embodied was in fact
Islam’s ties to the very Greco-Roman culture that Europe drew upon to sustain its own
Enlightenment and, subsequently, its nineteenth-century self-construction as a superior
‘‘Europe’’ distinct not only from the ‘‘Orient’’ on the other side of the Mediterranean but
from the Islamic Moor, Ottoman, and Balkanwithingeographical Europe. Which is to

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