One of the most inspiring things about teaching is that you learn so much from your students. Whilst reading UAL student Aalimah’s account of a discussion of her work with her tutor and fellow students, in SoN’s The Little Book of Big Case Studies: Faith (04.07.2017), I was struck by how disinterested they seemed to be in her ideas and perspective. Aalimah had presented artwork that promoted the notion that wearing a hijab can be a positive act for an Islamic feminist. Instead of engaging with this proposition, the group fell back on racist stereotypes, assuming that she was forced to wear the hijab and holding (in Aalimah’s words) “a full-on debate about terrorist attacks.”
Faiza Hassan, a contributor to the Guardian article ‘Faith communities are not welcome in Europe’: views on the headscarf ban ruling(2017), clearly articulates the misconceptions held by people on both the left and right of the political divide about the wearing of the hijab. She says:
“I am a European Muslim and my headscarf is also an integral part of me. Some of those who welcomed the court ruling said that the headscarf is a “political statement of oppression”. I find that deeply offensive. Wearing a headscarf is between God and myself. To me, it’s an act of worship, a choice I made, that has no impact on anyone other than myself. I don’t expect others to understand my reasoning, but I find it strange that people who have very little understanding of my faith feel they have a right to tell me how to interpret it or what to do.”
The 2017 ruling by the European Union’s highest court that allows employers to ban staff from wearing visible religious symbols followed the French law to ban full-face coverings in 2010 and seems the antithesis of the multiculturalism defined by Tariq Modood, which I discussed in my previous blog.
In a Guardian opinion piece (24.06.15) Hannah Yusuf argues that far from being a sign of oppression as many men or non-hijabi women might argue, the hijab is a feminist statement. In a world where women’s value is often reduced to her sexual allure (in advertising for example), rejecting that notion is an empowering act. For Yusuf, the empowerment is in the choice. She asks that if pressure to wear the Hijab is seen as oppression (and rightly so), why is social or legal pressure to not wear it excused as female emancipation? “For many women, the Hijab allows them to reclaim their bodies and have full control over them, and that makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable.”
We need to be sensitive to our students’ positions and beliefs and create supportive spaces for them to articulate their ideas and tell their stories. We need to remember that one of our biggest assets is the diverse knowledge, perspectives and experience of our students and that allowing them to share that knowledge and those perspectives safely and with agency is at the heart of the art school experience. The SoN article has good advice on creating safe spaces for discussion and debate: asking students to set the ground rules and to introduce guidelines at the start of the course. In addition, the list of artists of colour is an invaluable resource to which I might add the work of Kuwaiti painter Shurooq Amin (see image above), whose work I was introduced to by MA Painting student Shuaa AlRasheidi (graduated 2019) through her research into masking and the function of the veil in Kuwaiti society.