Dismantling the Politicization of the Veil:

 

The questions of freedom and equality remain on the minds of many Syrians as the country navigates not only change, emerging from the Assad regime’s decades-long grasp, but also the recent tragedies of the coastal massacres. Liberating the country from tyranny extends beyond resolving its systemic judicial and political issues, but must also be re-examined from a fundamental human rights perspective. As Syria gathers its bearings for the future, Syrian writer and journalist Samar Yazbek highlights an issue that others have swept under the rug with the excuse that the “time was not right for such discussions.” To truly break the cycle of oppression, the issue of women’s rights and women must be included in the conversation as equals, as Yazbek states in her essay, “Syrian Women’s Veil and Niqab... A Meeting of Opposite Opinions,”* published in The New Arab at the beginning of the year.

 

Women’s issues remain a vital conversation that cannot be overlooked or postponed. Historically, women and their bodies have been used as a tool, often for humiliation. Authorities and societies have enacted control over the female body as a symbol of power over public space and the consolidation of influence. The hijab, niqab, and topic of unveiling are not just ‘personal choices,’ but are “loaded with political and ideological meanings used to impose a collective identity at the expense of the individual,” often under the guise of virtue or modernity.

 

Yazbek draws from historical precedent in her argument, citing two events under the Assad regime as major setbacks for women’s rights. The first was the deployment of the Tishreen Patrol on September 29, 1981, under the orders of Hafez al-Assad. Groups of paratroopers affiliated with the Defense Brigades (founded by Rifaat al-Assad, the president’s brother) roamed the streets of Damascus, forcibly removing women’s veils under threats, beatings, and violence. The event was a blatant assault on the people’s dignity and religious and spiritual beliefs, leading to societal and sectarian rifts that the regime politically exploited, writes Yazbek. Hafez al-Assad took advantage of these divisions to consolidate his authoritarian power and serve his political goals, weaponizing women’s bodies through brute force and violence.

 

Several bloody confrontations took place, resulting in the deaths of an officer who was killed while defending his wife, as well as a paratrooper and her companion. Operations to remove the veil affected women in shopping centers such as Al-Salihiyah and other conservative neighborhoods in Damascus. Women were kicked and trampled in the streets during a fierce resistance confrontation in the Hamidiyah market when merchants and residents armed with sticks prevented paratroopers from entering the market. Schools were not spared; female students were forced to remove their veils at the school gates, and many female students left school as a result, deprived of their right to study. 

 

As a measure of damage control, Hafez al-Assad delivered a speech following the event in which he justified the heinous behavior as the result of “the impulsiveness of some enthusiasts for the values of the revolution,” cites Yazbek. Since then, the Assad regime still has not issued a formal apology to the Syrian public, and the hijab remained banned in schools until 2001. Hafez al-Assad intentionally used women’s issues as yet another political tool to uphold appearances. In the words of Yazbek, “He wanted to appear to the world as a ‘progressive’ and ‘democratic’ defender of women’s rights to personal freedoms.” The truth behind this meticulously crafted exterior reveals his practice of imposing control through bloodshed and violence. Paratroopers were reportedly told that any veiled woman was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. As enemies of the revolution, they must be punished with the removal of their veils.

 

The violent campaign of enforced humiliation and oppression contributed to a surge of religiosity and extremism in the country. Historically, Hafez al-Assad has taken measures on numerous occasions to appease or manage the regime’s relationship with Islamist groups, from favoring certain groups, making concessions, presenting himself as a pious Muslim, and exerting control over religious institutions and leaders. To quell the Sunni population’s anger, Assad built more Quranic institutes and mosques throughout Damascus than at any other time in the city’s history. He strategically used Islamist and then jihadist groups as a geopolitical tool to extend his influence at home and abroad, cultivating sectarian strife between Alawites (represented by the Army) and Muslim religious groups (supporters of the niqab). As Yazbek explains, “Most of the participants in the Tishreen Patrol were Alawite, reinforcing the sectarian feeling that minorities were humiliating the Sunni majority. Later, the structure of the security forces and the army, along with economic and social disparities between sects, further strengthened this sentiment.”

 

The second major setback to Syrian women’s rights occurred after Sheikh Osama al-Rifai delivered a sermon that accused women of having “misleading ideas” about their freedoms and beliefs. He suggested that these misconceptions spread due to women’s work in education, food provision, and development in conservative environments that adhere to the veil and have adopted Islam as legislation. The sermon, which caused controversy and criticism from both men and women, was perhaps intended to address the West’s use of women’s bodies and rights as political propaganda. However, it resulted in harming already-vulnerable women living in Islamic societies. According to Yazbek, those working in these “shattered environments” — conservative women who lived in tents and destroyed homes — were accused of collaboration and treason and were subjected to calls from the Sheikh to pursue and fight them. At the time, Rifai’s sermon received criticism for deviating from the opposition’s more pressing priorities.

 

More recently, the issue of women’s rights surfaced again in the country and on social media after religious groups made speeches to “guide” women into wearing the niqab or full-body Islamic dress. Yazbek explains, “The current debate has gone beyond the conventional hijab to enter into a more profound discussion about the full Islamic dress, which has reignited differences between intellectual and social movements within Syria at a time when the country continues to experience highly complex and dangerous humanitarian and political conditions.” Campaigns led by these groups were accompanied by posters depicting a woman completely covered in black with only her back to the viewer, “as if the black color of the clothes alone were not enough and the features of the face must also be concealed.”

 

Though the actions of these religious groups do minor direct damage, Yazbek criticizes them for their role in potentially elevating these purported “issues” to the attention of those with the capability of exploiting women’s bodies with their authority. According to her, religious officials lay the groundwork for the dictator to intercept and use his authority under the threat of force to control the population.

 

Yazbek examines an equally pressing obstacle for women in another essay, “Syrian Women and the Long Shadow of Power,”** published in The New Arab, in which she tackles women’s erasure from post-revolution narratives. She states, “The home and the body are the spaces where symbolic power is reproduced.”

 

In this essay, Yazbek takes a look at the novel “Half of a Yellow Sun” by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a story following the lives and survival of Syrian women confronting war inside and outside of the home, whose voices are disregarded in favor of “a masculine language that redefines politics without acknowledging those who forged the conditions of survival.” She uses the novel as a jumping off point for her primary topic — the fact that although women are major actors in the country’s revolutionary confrontations against injustice, they “disappear when political and social meanings are rewritten.”

 

Yazbek points to current patterns in Syria. According to her, women who directly participated in street protests and rallies “when many others stayed silent” found themselves “trapped” in the aftermath. Personal freedoms within the home or over the body shrank, and with them, women’s roles in politics diminished. In her words, “It seemed the revolution opened a window to expand the spaces of freedom — but what happened after the regime’s fall revealed how quickly that window was shut.”

 

The issue, she stresses, goes beyond excluding women from decision-making positions and includes the ways their daily lives are reshaped according to new standards. She writes, “When regulations collapse, violence against women emerges as an easy act — one that goes beyond necessity to a lust for physical domination.” Yazbek discusses a surge in violence against women, citing recent reports on the abduction of Syrian girls belonging to the Alawite sect. She goes on to explain how the rise of these stories and the “muted reactions” to them poses a threat to all Syrian women that indicates the “fragility of supposed protections” and how “the female body is the first space to be violated when laws disappear and new balances of power redefine identity.”

 

“The female body, once a symbol of defiance during the revolution, has been redefined as an object of surveillance and control. Alongside it, politics has become a space closed off to men alone,” states Yazbek.

 

A seasoned writer on women’s issues and their history, Yazbek has frequently touched on the subject of women’s agency. Her novel “Clay” (Salsal) reveals how military power becomes a means of controlling the female body through physical violence, humiliation, degradation, and the restriction of movement in public spaces. “Clay” outlines the position of women as subordinate within a patriarchal society derived from a traditional value system. Lara Ziad al-Mohammad writes in “A Feminist Reading of the State’s Instrumentalization of Women’s Bodies in Syria,”*** an analytical review of the novel, that the Syrian state manipulates women’s bodies through “subtle forms of marginalization and exclusion that push women out of public life. These mechanisms are rooted in social norms that ignore women’s professional capabilities and confine them to secondary roles in society.”

 

In this context, Yazbek’s message in her essay “Syrian Women’s Veil and Niqab” holds truth: that to achieve a truly just society after finally liberating Syria from tyranny, the country must achieve individual freedoms and rights to choice — the matter on women’s rights cannot be ignored any longer and must be confronted; the conversation on achieving justice and settling politics cannot exclude the issue of women’s rights. Women’s rights must be included in the constitution, for only then will both Syrian men’s and women’s freedoms be protected from the grasp of tyranny.