Unveiled: A Flashback
07/10/2011 12:53:00
Nacim Pak-Shiraz recalls some words spoken 'out of love' by her grandmother.
It was not until I came across a curious fifteenth-century Persian manuscript painting of the Prophet Muhammad’s mi‘raj (ascension) recently that I remembered one of my grandmother’s stories. Like Scheherazade of The 1001 Nights she always has a story to tell. She was born to be a performer, her talent of doing excellent impressions of other people the source of much mirth in the family. She chooses, however, to spend most of her spare moments in prayer and rolling her tasbih (rosary) while murmuring the praises of God. In the midst of family discussions, we could always count upon her to invoke a story, a Qur’anic reference or hadith, a few verses of poetry or a proverb that would neatly summarise her perspective of the situation at hand. Like Scheherazade, it was sometimes difficult to assess whether she was just a narrator of these axioms or whether she played a more active role in their creation or embellishment. One of these stories, which she repeated ‘out of love’ during my teenage years concerned my unveiled hair and her attempts at ‘guiding’ me to the straight path and securing my salvation. The story in brief was as follows:
"They say in Hell there is a well atop which women are hung from every strand of their hair that they have exposed to a namahram (unrelated man). The walls of the well are filled with gnawing mice; the bottom, covered with snakes. It is because I do not want you to face that fate that I am asking you to veil yourself when a namahram comes to your house!"
I would smile in disbelief. She would look displeased and return to her murmurs on the beads, this time probably praying for my soul. As she always started these anecdotes with ‘They say ...’, it was difficult to ascertain the origins of her story. For all I knew, it might have been used to teach her the significance of the hijab when she was young or a more recent invention she had come across in some religious gathering to justify the mandatory veiling in Iran. Whatever its origins, to my Ithna ‘Ashari grandmother, this was the absolute truth and literal account of the fate of unveiled women. It was thus, that my chance encounter with the fifteenth-century manuscript brought back her story.
Like most other manuscript paintings from within the Muslim tradition on mi‘raj, this illustration depicted the Prophet Muhammad riding Buraq with the angel Gabriel by his side. It was the location and the presence of a particular figure that made it a strikingly different depiction from all other mi‘raj illustrations that I had seen before. Muhammad was not in Jerusalem or the Heavens, but at Hell with Satan guarding its gates. Burning in the overwhelming flames of hellfire were women hanging from their hair. I could hear my grandmother’s warnings ringing in my ears, as though they were a voiceover to the illustration. The caption to the manuscript read: ‘During his Night Journey, Muhammad visits hell, where he views women being hung by their hair and tormented by a demon for the sin of showing their hair in public. The details varied slightly, but the fundamental principles of my grandmother’s (now clearly age-old) story remained unchanged: women were duty-bound to veil and severe punishment awaited those who disobeyed. ■
Nacim Pak-Shiraz is the author of Shi'i Islam in Iranian Cinema, of which this is an extract from. More details of the book can be found here.
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