Where are the veils - and the non-veils - of my childhood? Where has their religious, geographical, cultural, social and political diversity gone? Into which grave of history? With what political consequences?
In Algeria alone, from north to south, one could see the veil of Algiers, a white piece of cloth, which, in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, the mischievous Algerian cartoonist Slim raised to expose stylish women’s legs in his drawings. It was worn with white, fluffy, laced fabric over the lower part of the face, covering the mouth, but highlighting irreverent eyes darkened with khol. In Kabylie, where women were never veiled, they wore colorful dresses and head scarves (imagine an attractive blossom of colors elegantly perched on the head, tied in various ways, depending on villages or families – a far cry from the Islamist nun outfit). The outspoken women of Ouarsenis, wore equally colorful dresses and were decked out with all their jewelry even while ploughing their lands. The black forever-mourning veil from Constantine hid women from head to toes. The secluded women from Mzab, making rare visits to their female relatives, turn their heads to the walls when they pass a man in the narrow streets. Their white woolen veils allow only one eye to peep out. The flowery, thin cotton cloth used on the northern border of Sahara, protects from the sun and occasional sand winds and is loosely worn over the head and shoulders, like the veils in Christian iconography, depicting women and men of the Bible. Veils, scarves, shawls were functional for men and women, regardless of their creeds, in the climate of the Middle East.
So many different veils, so many traditionally unveiled women, in one 99-percent Muslim country.
Clearly, if such diversity of dress appears in a single country, it should go without saying that there is even more variety in the whole of the