What is the most constant thing in the Middle East?

What is this thing called "new veiling" that is occurring in the Middle East now?

• I know what the veil means in the Middle East but i have a test tomorrow about this thing called "new veiling." I dont get what this means. Also, where in the Middle East is this "new veiling," occuring?

• Answer:

  The Veil Becomes a Movement In Egypt the contemporary veil represents a movement that has passed through several transitional phases since the 1970s, spreading all over the Arab world and among Muslims worldwide. Today the Islamic movement continues to grow strong as it enters its third decade. Dress has played a pivotal symbolic, ritual and political role in this dynamic phenomenon. The new vocabulary and dress style embodies a moral/behavioral code. Islam has struggled to position itself vis-a-vis the Islamic veil. The response of secularists and feminists shows how threatening this trend is to their ideological positim. But by 1997, a quarter of a century later, Egypt (and other Arab countries) had accommodated the new movement and put effort into integrating it politically, despite initial attempts by the state to suppress it. Nevertheless, the veiled and unveiled continue to interact normally in daily life. Some mothers who originally objected to the veil have adopted it. The Islamic ziyy (dress) goes almost unnoticed in Cairo by the local population. Islamic veiling in Egypt is somewhat different from the situation of the chadbr in Iran. In Iran the chadbr, a black head-to-toe wrap, is the body cover worn by rural and urban traditional women before the Revolution. The Shah, to Westernize the country, banned it, and the Islamic Revolution,to indigenize tradition, enforced wearing it. In Egypt, the Islamic dress worn after the mid–1970s by women replaced modem secular clothes and is part of a grass-roots activist movement. Unlike Egypt, both Iran and Turkey have long traditions of State-legislated dress reform for both se>es. Although State discouraged in Egypt, veiling initially met with phenomenal success and spread throughout the urban centers. The authorities of Al-Azhar were silent about it. As some young Egyptian women took up veiling in the mid–1970s, the government increasingly felt the threat of Islamic militancy and looked for solutions. In 1993, the education minister (Husain Kamal Baha’ al Din) sought to combat the spread of Islamic activism by imposing changes in the area of education, such as the transfer or demotion of teachers with activist leanings, a revision of the curriculum, and restrictions on the wearing of the veil is becoming more accepted and are being allowed especially by women who work in the professional areas of work. Currently, veiling and unveiling phenomena coexist in Egypt, but the trends have differed according to socioeconomic conditions and the influence of Egyptian government policies. At times, the number of unveiled women has surpassed the number of veiled women and, at others, the trend has been reversed. Therefore, an understanding of the practice requires an understanding of the social and political circumstances of Egyptian society. Egypt was colonized by the British in the late 19th Century and the colonizers had a very negative perspective about Muslim society and culture; they saw Arab Muslim society as uncivilized, attributing its backwardness to Islam and its customs. Westerners criticized the Islamic treatment of women and regarded it subhuman, especially its customs of sexual segregation and polygamy, the veiling tradition, and the maintenance of harems. It was during this period that a reconsideration of gender roles in Muslim society began to emerge, not only at the cultural level but also at the political and social level. This also marked a starting point for the western attack on women's veiling customs in Egypt and the Arab people's defense of it. To the West, the veil served as a symbol of women's lower position in Muslim society, while for the Arabs, it was a tradition that carried ideas of morality, protection, and association.