Feminine Attire - Islam & the West

Vermeer. Western women once looked like this. 

Sentiment contrary to the Saracens is currently at fever-pitch in the West, although matched – strangely - by the recent embrace of the political Left for all things Mahometan. The present author – who lectured in Islamic/West relations for well over a decade – remembers very well the days when Leftists sneered at the Mooselmens for being patriarchial and sexist and anti-modern. But this was before the Left shifted to a globalist agenda and decided upon mass immigration and open borders and the dissolution of the nation state as the new progressive standard. The change was signalled by new fixtures in the Arts curriculum such as compulsory core subjects like ‘Transition to Globalism’ and similar. At the same time the Left abandoned the traditional working class and regrouped around a conglomerate of victim groups: homosexuals, feminists, refugees and so on. On the Right this polarisation has taken the form of a reinvigorated nationalism and a renewed sense of the Western tradition: unfortunately for Mahometans they are now deemed ‘Other’ and antithetical, a threat to the cogency of European civilization. With hindsight, these can be seen as inevitable reconfigurations of very old tensions and it was foolish to ever think that we had somehow by-passed those historical patterns. These are deep antipathies. There is going to be trouble. 

Anti-Saracen hostility takes an obvious form in campaigns against overtly Mooselman attire. Specifically, people are troubled by the burqa (full covering of the female) and to a degree by the heejab (the female head scrarf). It is widely felt that these norms of female garb for female Mahometans are out of place in European society and represent a specific refusal to integrate to European standards. This is an entirely understandable viewpoint and, these days, one with which the author has much sympathy. The failure – refusal – of Mahometans to adapt to Western norms invites hostility. Previous waves of immigrants (speaking of Australian society) integrated quite successfully, and without rancour, but the Mahometans are a different case. This is especially so among those who are now deeply infected by Wahhabi literalism, specifically Arabs but increasingly other ethnic groups as well. Mahometanism is totalizing. It presents itself as a “total way of life” in which a Divine Law (Sharia) governs every aspect of a Mooselman’s behaviour. No other group of immigrants (except perhaps ultra-orthodox Jews) present so many stubborn obstacles to the compromises required to find a commodious place in Western society. Mahometans set themselves apart and are treated with suspicion accordingly. Several matters make the problem acute, two especially: halal foods and religious attire. Halal food regulations mean that Mahometans cannot (will not) eat with others while also taking the form of a surreptitious food tax that is imposed upon the non-Mahometan community. Religious attire means that Mahometans, especially women, are conspicuous and, when it comes to the burqa, positively confronting. These are real barriers to constructive integration. Objections to them are not based merely in “racism” and xenophobia. They are matters of real substance. As intimated elsewhere on these pages, Islam is only an esoteric (occult) potentiality in Western civilization. It is entirely healthy if Western civilization finds the externalist manifestations of the Mahometan creed difficult to stomach and if “bigots” rebel against cultural surrender and rise up against the settlement of Mahometan ghettoes in Western cities. 

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Even so, they are not simple matters and as well as historical Islam/West tensions, and the Left/Right battles of universalism versus particular localisms, globalism versus nationalism, there are also issues that divide along the far deeper fault lines of tradition versus modernity. In this context, many of the criticisms made of the Mahometans are misplaced and often ill-conceived. This is so because in some important respects the Mahometans – though ossified by the Wahhabi heresy - remain closer to tradition than do their occidental counterparts who, for the most part, have been more thoroughly consumed by the decadence of modern deviationism. This is plain to see in the issue of feminine attire. We might sympathize with accounts of Mahometanism as ‘sexist’ and bemoan the downtrodden place of women in the Mahometan social order, but conversely the decadence of Western feminism is simply barbaric. The Mahometan order makes stark binary distinctions between men and women, but when we are confronted with the genderless perversity of the contemporary West we can only ask ‘What is wrong with that?’ In its supposed ‘backwardness’ there are ways in which the Mahometan order remains more integral and intact. 

The burqa and purda are confronting – especially on the streets of London or Paris – but the heejab is only out of place because Western women have become masculinized and feminine attire has become inelegant and utilitarian. Indeed, the vestimentary arts in the West are generally in a state of advanced decay. Contemporary clothing is horrible, and – arguably – women’s clothing especially so. The decline is easily documented. While the styles of the 1940s maintained a timeless elegance and still spoke somewhat of an inherent nobility in the human form, subsequent styles drew further and further away from such ideals. The 1960s were an historical low-point and nothing has improved since then. Far from being a matter of small consequence, vestments speak directly of inner states; the decay of the modern West (spiritual, intellectual, political, social) is reflected most obviously in the decline in standards of public dress. The invasion of workwear and sportswear, denim and the T-shirt, into acceptable fashion speaks volumes. And today, designer fashion, like modern art, has gone beyond decadence into outright obscenity. 

The dowdy and masculinized state of Western women was especially noticeable to the present writer during his recent travels through the Hindoo sub-continent and Northern Asia. It is very evident that Western women are both hardened and drab compared to women of those other civilizations. They are coarse and unattractive, defeminized, by comparison. Even the hardworking low caste women of Asia have retained a greater share of feminine grace than the over-intellectualized women one sees among European tourists who are, as it were, hardened from the head down. One can see it in their unhappy eyes and the mechanical pallor of their faces, and above all in the tasteless vulgarity of their clothing. Compared to this, a Hindoo woman in her saffron sari, or a Nipponese woman walking the promenades of Kyoto in a kimono, or indeed a Mahometan woman in her heejab is a perfect delight. 

One is reminded that it was not always the case. There is nothing, in fact, distinctly Mahometan about the head scarf and the full-length standards of the heejab. In former times, Western women conformed to these same standards. These were not merely matters of public modesty and shame but rather a proper calculation of femininity in its essence. It is certainly wrong to think that the function of heejab – and other modes of traditional feminine attire – is to hide a woman’s beauty. One hears this said among modern Mahometans, but it is itself a decadent moralism. It is plainly untrue. On the contrary, the heejab enhances a woman’s beauty both in its accentuation of certain features – such as the eyes – and, above all, by imparting the qualities of mystery and interiority, qualities that are essential to woman but conspicuously lost in the modern ‘liberation’ of masculinization. In the heejab, that is to say, less is more. If it is designed to make women unattractive and uninteresting to men, it fails utterly, just as the overtly sexualized garments of the ‘liberated’ woman (all cleavage and mid-rift and legs with a painted face) very quickly becomes tawdry and cheap and off-putting to all but the most vulgar of men.

In Australia, a campaign by social engineers has introduced the barbarism of 'women's football' as a means of further masculinising women. (As if you could make Australian women more masculine than they already are!) 

Rather than berating Mahometan women for wearing a head scarf in public, therefore, it is a pity that the self-appointed defenders of ‘Western values’ were not more sensitive to the ways in which those ‘values’ have declined into barbarism, especially in the last fifty years or so. Why, one wants to know, are they attacking a Mooselmen lady for covering her hair rather than denouncing the sub-human antics of a celebrity who arrives at a public event clad in a garment made of raw meat? Which poses the greater threat to Western civilization? The truth of it is, as even a brief tour through the latest fashion pages will show, that there is real beauty in contemporary Islamic fashion design while Western fashions rapidly decline into the ludicrous and the ugly. 

Modern Western womanhood in all its glory. 

One factor in sartorial decline. 1940 to 1980. The intrusion of sportswear. 

The complete masculinization of woman is now a cultural project of the decadent West, just as men are being feminized and emasculated. There are many unpalatable and inappropriate aspects of Mahometan culture that are rightly resisted by those who seek to defend Western civilization from the ravages of mass immigration, but defined binary distinctions of the masculine and feminine, especially as presented in feminine attire, is not one of them. We are not talking here about the ‘black sack’ of the burqa. We are simply noting the fact that a great many Mahometan women are better dressed, more elegant and more beautiful than their Western sisters. They retain sartorial standards that it is a pity the West has lost. Again: this is not a question of standards of modesty (although the commercial sexualisation of Western women – and young girls, is a phenomenon in itself) but of aesthetic standards: beauty, charm, elegance, mystery, refinement, grace, pulchritude. 

Rather than concealing, traditional garments often accentuate. 

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Here is a simple exercise that readers might like to try:

The next time you are confronted by a Mahometan woman in heejab, in a shop, on a bus, on a train, take out your cell phone and, turning to Google, summon a photograph of Hillary Clinton in one of her ‘power suits’. Honestly, which would you prefer? 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black