Although the cover blurb of The Veil in Kuwait suggests Thorsten Botz-Bornstein and Noreen Abdullah-Khan will take on the phenomenon on re-veiling in Kuwait, the text deals mostly with attitudes towards veiling more broadly by students at the Gulf University of Science and Technology (GUST). The authors argue that the respondents viewed hijab as a religious duty, but also experienced pressures between conforming to the modesty demanded by hijab and remaining fashionable. The authors argue that unlike other areas in the Middle East where hijab has become secularized in order to conform to fashionability, in Kuwait it retains its religious importance and the students struggle with the contradictions. Although brief and occasionally poorly grounded in literature, this book is nonetheless an important contribution. It will benefit historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists of Middle East Studies or other fields including fashion, identity, and performativity studies and deserves to be read.
The authors distributed an anonymous, online survey in April 2013 and received 1662 responses, a response rate of 53%, 1236 from female students and 426 from male students. Although they distinguished five groups for analysis: Hijab-wearing girls, Abaya-wearing girls, Niqab-wearing girls, uncovered girls, and male students, they most often divided the respondents into covered women, uncovered women, and men. Questions included both free response comments, ranked choice questions, and yes/no answers; the authors provided the surveys in their appendix.
The Veil in Kuwait has five chapters. The introduction contextualizes the survey within the literature, Kuwaiti society, and GUST itself. The second chapter introduces the survey, its limitations, and the authors’ preliminary conclusions. Chapter 3 analyzes the survey's responses to the central question: why do you/they veil? The authors test these against the prevailing explanations for women's veiling found elsewhere in the Middle East including the idea that veiling protects women from men and the issue of its relationship to feminism. Chapter four addresses the culture of guilt and shame that surrounds veiling because of the stigmas associated with not veiling and with the question of fitna or disorder. The final chapter offers a very short conclusion.
The survey found that most covered women indicated their decision to veil was based on their desire to obey their religion's appeal to modesty, while most uncovered women and men concluded that their peers veiled either because their family told them to wear it or because they wanted to obey their religion (30, 34, 41–42). The authors were surprised to find that few gave credit in this survey to the idea that it provided protection and that even those students who were critical of veiling remained respectful and mindful of Islam overall.
The authors explore the primary criticism aimed at the veiled women: that veiling concealed other forms of immodesty. The authors conclude that perhaps “by wearing the religious hijab they [the students] hope to obtain a moral justification of their (non-religious) engagement in fashion. . .they emphasize their religious motivations in order to compensate the guilt they seem to feel for wearing non-religious clothes able to attract men” (53).
The book has many strengths. Functionally, the book is a relatively quick read. It is short and the authors thoughtfully provide the reader with chapter abstracts and preliminary conclusion sections throughout.
Methodologically, the authors are transparent in their methods, responses, and questions. They provide twenty-three tables of statistical analysis and a discussion of their methods, in addition to the textual explanations of their data. This material makes this book a wonderful source for anyone doing research on attitudes towards veiling in the Middle East. Their data analysis is problematized and the authors maintain their positionality throughout. For instance, in the conclusion they recognize the problematic nature of their survey, namely that the students provided positive images of Kuwait as a place of “liberty, beauty, and religious peace of mind” (72). Despite this tendency, they maintain the validity of their conclusions because their question of veiling's place in Kuwait requires an understanding of these types of idealized and positive presentations.
Although it is an important contribution, it suffers from a significant weakness. This book is an extended discussion of survey results. While I have no doubts that the authors were aware of the connections their survey had to the wider fields of sociology, anthropology, political science, and history, the brevity of this contribution made it difficult for them to fully explore these connections. This is a particular problem with regard to their assertions that Kuwaiti students’ attitudes towards veiling are different from other countries’ attitudes in the Middle East. The formal literature discussion is limited to two paragraphs and scattered references throughout the remaining text. Although they include some of the important works on veiling's position and interpretation in the region including those by Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Leila Ahmed, Nilüfer Göle, Mary Ann Tétrault, Fatima Mernissi, and Fadwa El Guindi, they miss entirely Deniz Kandiyoti, Saba Mahmood, Marilyn Booth, and miriam cooke, to name a few. Most concerning, they ignore completely Noor Al-Qasimi's 2010 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies article, “Immodest Modesty: Accommodating Dissent in the ʿAbaya-as-Fashion in the Arab Gulf States.” Al-Qasimi's argument that abaya-as-fashion constitutes a form of passive resistance or dissent against the patriarchal societies in the Gulf complements the assertions of Botz-Bornstein and Abdullah-Khan that the Kuwaiti students in this study viewed hijab primarily religiously and struggled with its connection to secular fashion by providing a regional example to reinforce the seriousness of fashion as a serious social and political issue.
Despite its lack of context, this book is a strong contribution to the literature of veiling from the Arabian Peninsula, an area that is largely understood through the veil itself. These authors provide a measure of granularity to the discussion that will help anyone working on the issue of veiling in the Middle East, gender, or social relations more broadly.
