Abstract
No one can speak of religion in contemporary Europe without mentioning the hijab. The image of a Muslim woman with a tightly wrapped scarf covering her hair, head and neck has become one of the main symbols of Islam in public society. Associated at the same time with modesty and with fashion, oppression of women and feminist activism, segregation and multiculturalism, conservatism and liberalism – the Muslim headscarf is the emblem of controversy in European socio-religious and intercultural discourses. We can find similar images in Christian Europe today in depictions of Mary and other saints in churches, in the habits of nuns, and in Eastern Orthodox churches where many women wear scarves over their heads. The image of an Orthodox Jewish married woman who covers her hair with a scarf, wig or hat is less familiar in Europe than in the U.S. and Israel, but is at the center of an international movement of rediscovering, reinventing and reclaiming hair covering practices that is going on within and across a multitude of religious traditions. To trace the roots of hair covering practices in the authoritative texts of the religious traditions, believers and scholars alike usually search for passages that refer to the practice itself. With the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, this leads to the scrutiny of a small and fragmented collection of ambiguous passages. The arguments and conclusions of such studies are unconvincing and seem insufficient to explain the extensiveness, significance and relevance that these practices have in the religious traditions. Is it possible to trace the roots of hair covering to other texts in the scriptures? Which texts would they be? My suggestion is that by looking at ‘Covering’ as an image schema in line with cognitive linguistic theory, and analyzing the concepts that are structured on it in the authoritative texts, we can understand something about the meaning of hair covering practices in the religious traditions today. To identify concepts that are structured on the Covering schema, I have chosen to focus on three powerful covering images in the sacred scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: the veil of the Tabernacle, the womb of Mary and the Night of Destiny, attempting to shed light on why the Covering schema is so effective in embodying the identified concepts and what it is about women’s head hair that makes it particularly relevant for expressing those concepts within a contemporary European context. In the end, I will propose that such an analysis can produce useful insights for the promotion of interreligious dialogue and ‘diapractice’.