172. Karen ArmstrongThe same principle underlines the return to Islamic
dress. When this is forced upon people against their will (as
by the Taliban) it is coercive and as likely to create a back-
lash as the aggressive techniques of Reza Shah Pahlavi. But
many Muslim women feel that veiling is a symbolic return
to the pre-colonial period, before their society was dis-
rupted and deflected from its true course. Yet they have not
simply turned the clock back. Surveys show that a large pro-
portion of veiled women hold progressive views on such
matters as gender. For some women, who have come from
rural areas to the university and are the first members of
their family to advance beyond basic literacy, the assump-
tion of Islamic dress provides continuity and makes their
rite of passage to modernity less traumatic than it might
otherwise have been. They are coming to join the modern
world, but on their own terms and in an Islamic context that
gives it sacred meaning. Veiling can also be seen as a tacit
critique of some of the less positive aspects of modernity. It
defies the strange Western compulsion to "reveal all" in sex-
ual matters. In the West, people often flaunt their tanned,
well-honed bodies as a sign of privilege; they try to counter-
act the signs of ageing and hold on to this life. The shrouded
Islamic body declares that it is oriented to transcendence,
and the uniformity of dress abolishes class difference and
stresses the importance of community over Western indi-
vidualism.
People have often used religion as a way of making mod-
ern ideas and enthusiasms comprehensible. Not all the Amer-
ican Calvinists at the time of the 1776 American Revolution
shared or even understood the secularist ethos of the Found-
ing Fathers, for example. They gave the struggle a Christian
colouration so that they were able to fight alongside the sec-
ularists in the creation of a new world. Some Sunni and Shii
fundamentalists are also using religion to make the alien