Is the full veil a relatively new thing? Did it come with the rise of salafism and the Islamic revolution in Iran or was it always there? How conservative was the view during say the Islamic golden age of science and philosophy? Was it always mandated by law like it is now in many Islamic countries?
Thanks :)
Only one historical moment, and that a recent one, comparatively - Lady Montagu writes of veiled women in the 1700s.
Lady Mary Wortly Montagu thrilled audiences with exotic tales of her travels. A somewhat unreliable narrator with so few able to contest her accounts, yet a masterful satirist and impressive intellectual, Montagu wrote letters back to England from Constantinople, in the Ottoman Empire, between 1716 and 1718. ‘The Turkish Embassy Letters’ were published to wide acclaim in 1763.
Montagu writes of women wearing veils and dresses that cover their bodies comprehensively.
Montagu relished the idea this gave women the opportunity to live without having to perform, and the freedom of anonymity, “You may guess then how effectually this disguises them, that there is no distinguishing the great lady from her slave, and ’tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her, and no man dare either touch or follow a woman in the street”, though she could also see constraints with this approach.
In Merve Senan Arkam’s, ‘Lady Montagu and the Representation of the Oriental Woman’, Arkam notes Montagu challenges the then prevailing Western depiction of Middle Eastern women as sexual slaves, ‘enslaved women under the tyranny of the men’. Montagu portrayed the women she met and witnessed as independent individuals with economic liberty. However, Arkam points out Montagu does still support in some ways the then current stereotypes.