If you believe you can change the World with money and bombs, read the story that follows and be prepared for a big surprise because you’re about to discover the power of the spit.
I lived in Canada 44 years and never saw anything like it before. I also lived about half as long in other parts of the World including the Horn of Africa and the North Eastern corner of that Continent before coming here, and I never saw anything like it either. That is, I never saw a woman wear a veil of this kind until now. What I saw the other day was a woman wearing a veil called the burka. This is the type that covers the entire face of the woman.
I saw her as she shopped at a supermarket together with another woman who was not veiled and who looked Southeast Asian. The bare faced woman was dressed like a modern Western woman, and this made her indistinguishable from the other women at the market but contrasted her sharply against the veiled woman with whom she picked fruits and vegetables.
My first reaction regarding the veiled woman was one of indignation because I felt there was something phony about her. I thought that a live woman wearing a burka in North America the way I saw women wear this thing in the movies was a phenomenon that did not evolve naturally. Someone could not have waken up one morning and decided it was better to lead a life wearing this veil than not wearing it. To my way of thinking, something artificial was injected into the mix and rendered this whole issue a phony one.
In fact, I remember a saying from the days when I lived in Egypt as a teenager. To put down someone we would call them backward and follow that by saying their women must be wearing a burka, never visualizing what such women might look like.
Moreover, the word hijab is an Arabic noun and it means cover. But it can also be used as a verb and thus, instead of saying their women must be wearing a burka, we sometimes said their women must be covering up. And this kind of talk was used equally by Christians and Muslims to put down a Christian or a Muslim. We did this as a matter of course during a casual conversation without giving the matter much thought.
And so as I stood in that supermarket half a century later, I was seized by the spirit of my teenage years and I psyched myself into believing I was about to do the right thing. This was to summon the courage to speak to the woman who was not wearing the veil. I spoke to her in English but she surprised me by answering in Arabic although it was a broken Arabic that betrayed her East Asian origin. She then switched to English which she spoke fluently with a slight British accent. After a dialogue that lasted a few seconds, I asked: why is your friend doing this? And the woman responded: why don’t you ask her?
I turned to the veiled woman and asked in English and in Arabic: do you speak English or Arabic? She responded in a youngish voice and in perfect Canadian English: Save your breath. I know what’s botherin’ you but like mom said, this is what I feel comfortable doin’ and this is what I’m goin’ to do.
I was blown away and I remained speechless so the girl rescued me from my embarrassment. She explained that her father is of Anglo-Saxon descent; she was born here and never left Canada except to travel to the United States and to make a short visit to Britain. Her father is comfortable with what she is doing and her mother is getting used to the idea. Only a few months ago her mother would not have walked with her into a supermarket such as this but that was changing as I could see.
But why? I still wanted to know; why do this at all?
The girl explained that she grew up looking at photographs in which some women were veiled and never thought there was something wrong with that. These were photographs taken in the Arabian Gulf states where her mother lived as a young woman. The grandparents who were from Pakistan had traveled to that region of the World where the father worked for an oil company.
Eventually the would-be mother met a young man who worked for the same oil company, and had roots in Britain and in Canada. The two married after a courtship that lasted a few months, went to live in Britain for a short while then came to Canada where they settled. They had a daughter who decided to wear the veil and with whom I was now speaking.
Neither the mother nor members of the immediate family were veiled in the pictures she looked at as a child but that was of no consequence to the girl who could imagine her mother wear a veil just the same. In fact, as a child, she fantasized wearing a veil herself but never did, not even on Halloween nights because it never occurred to her to fulfill the fantasy. As she explained, contrary to the current situation, this issue was not a burning one at the time.
What happened to change all that? I asked.
What happened, she said, was that for some perplexing reason the media over here decided to make an issue of the women wearing the veil over there. Like children in a schoolyard and without provocation they mocked the women, their culture, their religion and their way of life. But for what? she asked. The girl asked the question then attempted to answer it by asking another question: because we could not rob these people of their oil? Gimme a break!
This is when she started to argue in her own mind: you don’t like the veil? You mock these women because they are not here to defend or to explain themselves? Well, I am here and I am wearing the veil. Come mock me in my face and see what will happen.
What will happen? I hastened to ask. The girl thought for a moment then replied: "I’ll lift the veil long enough to spit in their faces." I was taken aback and so I exclaimed: "Spit in their faces!" And she replied that she did it before when she was 8 or 9 years old to a boy who made her angry.
She went on to explain that one day her mother drove her to school and, being darker skinned than herself whose father is Anglo-Saxon, the boy who used to be a friend asked if the mother was a Paki. This being a time when the word Paki was used derisively to put down people, the girl reacted instinctively by spitting in the boy’s face and kicking him.
I asked if she was tempted to spit in my face when I spoke to her mother about the veil. She said no but if I had mocked her she might have done it. At this point I decided it was time to thank the two women for educating me and I walked away thinking to myself how close I came to being spat on, having come close to mocking a feisty girl wearing the veil.
But this is a lesson that goes beyond what is apparent on the surface. We have in America an Administration that shocked the World but not awed anyone. It did so by exploding bombs over Baghdad and spending trillions killing countless Iraqis and thousands of Americans. But to what end did they do this? The Administration says to change the culture of Iraq and to drag the Middle East kicking and screaming into modernity.
Well, dear reader, the story I just related says they failed miserably. It says so because you can see that what was backward and primitive in the Middle East half a century ago and worthy of being mocked by teenagers in a schoolyard may well have become the wave of the future in North America half a century later. Welcome into the modernity of the veil, North America. Just don’t kick and don’t scream.
But why did this happen? Well, it happened because America’s bombs did not frighten the people of the Middle East, and America’s money did not buy their conscience. The bombs and the money only managed to revolt the locals and to revolt their descendants, including those who were born elsewhere. And together, like the mother and the daughter I met at the supermarket, these people have decided not to change themselves but to change those who came to change them.
No failure can be more colossal and more wrenching than this. Maybe, therefore, the Americans ought to call their misadventure a victory and get out of there before they get humiliated even more. After all, every defeat in history has been called a victory when the "victors" got bored listening to themselves and hearing their own lies repeated over and over without any shame and without equivocation.
The Americans went in to oust the Baathists from power and after seven years of horror, they surged the Baathists back into power to achieve the peace of the grave that even Saddam Hussein could not impose on his people. How much more victorious can one get?
Yes, this kind of victors always vanished into the night tail between their legs and the World said good riddance. But America need not wait this long if she wants to play a role in the World of tomorrow whether or not the veil will cover every woman’s face by then.