Veil

The article considers the changing meanings of the Tuareg veil, or taglmust, that have appeared due to the political marginalisation of the Tuareg, changes in relations between the social categories of Tuareg society, settlement in urban environment and tourism. The author confirms that the taglmust represents a symbol of Tuaregness to the outside world as well as for the Tuareg themselves. In everyday uses its regulating function of relations between affines is becoming smaller, while its function as a symbol of ethnic identity and its related aesthetic function are obtaining primary importance. Like the clothing in general, the taglmust also has a dynamic function of communicating identity in different contexts.

My paper raises questions from the point of view of an art and architectural historian, offered in the spirit of genuine inquiry – and also in truth, in some perplexity, at the gulfs that continue to divide –- even to drive apart -- the fields of architectural history and historical musicology. Thus while architectural history might gesture towards the location of musicians, and while much musicology scrupulously indicates where musical performances took place, scholarship in both fields rarely interrogates the inter-relationship of music and architecture in material and productive terms. Thus—and this is admittedly something of a caricature—musicology insists on an architecture which is merely passive container, an indifferent locus for music, while architectural history evokes silent spaces and mute places. That is also why this conference is so important in its call to think urban history through music.  Its emphasis on the urban is important. I urge a consideration of the urban that is also specifically architectural. And I want to advance the claim that a consideration of urban history is necessarily also concerned with architectural interiors.

My paper examines nuns’ conventual churches, choirs and bodies in relation to their song. To open the question of the nuns’ voice and gender as a possibility. Not as a given. Indeed, as a possibility that is a political potential and thus crucial to urban history. Thus gender is not already decided and determined, something that can simply be posited --as the scholarship tends to --as if the consideration of nuns’ singing is necessarily a consideration of gender. And thus of music made by the nuns as gendered by pitch or simply because nuns make it. I want instead to think about architecture, music and gender as inhabiting a complex inter-relation thought in terms of the veil.

This paper argues that international human rights law is inadequate in understanding the complexities of Muslim women’s headcoverings and that it has failed to protect Muslim women from prohibitive and punitive measures of the liberal State. Through a review of the relevant cases from the European Court of Human Rights as well as a review of prohibitive laws from Muslim-majority Turkey, the paper argues that international human rights law is prejudiced to say the least, and, heeding Janet Halley’s advice, needs to take a break from feminism in order to fully protect Muslim women’s dignity as defined by Muslim women themselves.