For the Love of God and His Prophet

A major theme in this week’s readings and especially in lecture was the politicization of women’s clothing. Women often become “objects” of reform during colonial projects and national revolutions, with veiling and unveiling seen as the ultimate symbols of either acceptance of (or resistance to) Westernization. As an extension of this theme, I wanted to show in this week’s art project how women have been seen as “the battleground for ideological warfare,” as Professor Asani said in lecture, between competing visions of Islam and modernity.

I began with a picture of an Iranian woman wearing a chador. As we covered this week in the readings and in lecture, Iranian women were forced to cover their hair after the 1979 Islamic Revolution (Buchman 91). Although they were not required to wear the full chador, women in state-produced art (such as the propaganda art in pages 137-138 in the Chelkowski reading) were all depicted wearing the chador. Buchman himself points to the increasingly lax regulations in the Islamic Republic by saying that women veil less strictly than they did in the first years of the Revolution (95). Buchman, like so many others, measures the political values of a country by the veil’s popularity — or lack thereof. The decision to wear the chador, or any time of “Islamic” dress, is robbed of its personal significance and becomes a political act.

To reflect this pervasive tendency to politicize women’s clothing, I made a collage of important moments or art in modern Iranian history within the woman’s chador. I included the famous posters from the Chelkowski reading — one depicting the downfall of the Shah and victory of Khomeini and the Islamic Republic, and the other showing Khomeini’s face between a torn American flag, symbolizing the end of a perceived puppet government and victory of the Islamic Revolution. Other images in this collage are rife with political meaning — the ruins of Persepolis, Reza Shah, unveiling women in skirts, Iranians waving the flag of the Islamic Republic, a famous photograph of a protestor during the Islamic Revolution handing a soldier a rose, and a woman’s hands with زن = مرد (woman = man) written in black.

While I used a picture of an Iranian woman and pictures from Iranian history to fill her chador, this trend of politicization of women’s clothing is far from limited to Iran. Across most Middle Eastern states, a common response to the top-down imposition of “Western” constructions of identity on Muslim societies (through colonization or through the decrees of a “Westernized” dictator) was a return to visible markers of Islam — a beard for men, conservative clothing for women. All of these images underscore the point that women’s clothing is politicized to the point that it is often interpreted as the victory of one ideology (political Islam) over another (secular modernization, or Westernization), or vice versa.

For this week, I copied out two bayts from one of the ghazals of Hafez assigned this week. Elizabeth Gray had translated them as follows:

“My reason fled its house, and if this is wine’s work,

From what I’ve seen, what will happen to the house of my faith?

I spent my precious life on the beloved and on wine.

Let’s see what will come to me from the one, and from the other.”

The selection shows how Hafez adhered to the “rules” he set for this particular ghazal in the first bayt with the radif and ghafieh (in the original Persian, the radif and ghafieh are che shavad and dinam / azinam, respectively) and also how he incorporated several of the symbols and themes common to the Persian ghazal (wine, religion, beauty, and perhaps most common of all, the Beloved), making this ghazal a great representation of Persian ghazals at large.

One of the readings mentioned that before being adapted by the Persians, the Arabic ghazals were almost exclusively about love. While the beloved is an almost constant presence even in Persian ghazals, the Persians began addressing broader issues of religion and society. Here Hafez makes such a connection, wondering what will happen to the “house of his faith” — perhaps as a result of a lifetime of wine-drinking with the beloved.

In my drawing vines connect each of the four corners, which each have a symbol that Elizabeth Gray identifies in the introduction to her book as the most common in Persian ghazals, including those of Hafez — namely, wine, love, the rose, and the moon. Wine is a contested presence in Hafez’s ghazals; it is often a symbol for communion with the divine rather than literal wine, with many hedonistic interpretations of Hafez’s poetry overlooking this symbolism (Gray 25). Love is depicted through the narrator’s passionate relationship with the Beloved, who often spurns the Lover or is tragically separated by distance. Although not in this particular ghazal, the rose and the moon are both often used by the narrator, the Lover, to describe the overwhelming beauty of the Beloved.