The sexual politics of the head: the legal history of the veil

Abstract

To trace the origins of legal provisions pertaining to the veiling of women, Mesopotamian legal documents of the early second and first millennia BCE are scrutinized in order to determine their first entries regarding the veil, the specific intentions of the legislator, and the cultural background of the legislation. Were the investigation to reveal only the material detail of the first legislation on veiling, the historical impact of patriarchy would remain obscure. Consequently the introduction of the veiling laws is evaluated against the background of a tradition of patriarchy which had a total disregard for the equality of women and reified their sexuality. The importance of this aspect lies in the fact that this inculcated degradation of women persists, even without the veil, in contemporaneous patriarchal societies. However, marked  changes in the “sexual politics of the head” are currently discernible nationalist movements within Muslim countries and communities.