A Quiet Revolution is a highly effective example of how academics could advance public understanding of religion in general and Islam in particular. Ahmed uses controversies surrounding the practice of veiling as a window onto the modern history of Islamic activism and as a pathway to more informed and nuanced public discussions of Islam. The book asks how this article of clothing has come to play such a central role in the processes by which Muslims and non-Muslims, nation-states, and Islamist associations negotiate the public role of Islam in the modern era.
Avoiding wrong-headed questions often posed by policy makers, some social scientists, and many Islamists—Is the veil good or bad for modern women or modern societies? Is the veil Islamic?—Ahmed engages in a more humanist inquiry: How did this article of clothing come to carry the burden of defining a global religion's place in relation to modern ideas of progress and equal rights? Additionally, the book asks the feminist question of how the veil came to represent Muslim women in the public square to such a degree as to muffle the actual voices of Muslim women. How did the veil become a metonym for Muslim women and their public roles and private desires?
Through a careful and nuanced history of the veil in Egypt and the United States, A Quiet Revolution illustrates how variously the veil has been understood and interpreted in modern times and shows its diverse relation to empire, Islamism, piety, and feminism. It demonstrates how the veil has come to objectify Islam for non-Muslims and Muslims alike, reducing a rich and diverse tradition to an article of clothing. However, the book also rejects this singular objectification of Islam by demonstrating the transformations in the meaning of the veil both for Muslim women and the societies to which they belong. Ahmed's account of the veil thus reveals it as a marker of the adaptability and dynamism of Islam in the past century.
Ahmed looks to the gulf between ideas and actions, suggesting that actions are often more dynamic and telling than ideologies. One chapter explores the experience of Egyptian university students in the 1970s who, by adopting the veil, complicated the image of pre-professional women because their dress starkly contrasted with the European clothing of the previous generation. Another examines the increasing presence of the veil and the rising influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1980s, and it shows that the veiling of Egyptian women went hand in hand with their larger presence in universities and the workplace.
Through an analysis of the practices of women in Islamist movements that promoted the veil, Ahmed argues that the veil has helped Muslim women become more active in Islamic organizations and advance new interpretations of the Qurʾan. She reminds the reader that this is not what Islamist ideologies anticipated. Nonetheless, the experience of occupying public spaces and becoming politically active as hijabis, she states, led to egalitarian interpretations of the Qurʾan and Islam more generally.
In her conclusion, Ahmed shows how a preoccupation with the symbolic significance of veiling rather than with the experience of veiling and its social consequences has limited scholarly understandings of the public role of Islam in the modern world. More specifically, she shows how this blind spot has obscured the central role Islamism has played in adapting Muslim activism to America to the point that today it is Islamists and Americans arising from Islamist backgrounds who stand at the forefront of the struggle for women's rights and social justice.
Ahmed ends on this optimistic note. She doesn't emphasize a more depressing fact—that embedded in her “surprising” conclusion is a damning critique of the scholarship on Islam: How have so many scholars for so many years missed or misunderstood the role of Islamism in the public sphere? How did this revolution come to pass quietly under constant political and scholarly scrutiny? One wishes that in her conclusion this eminent scholar of women and gender in Islam would lay out her methodology in a way that could be emulated by others in order to prevent future misunderstandings of religion in public life. She is, however, too much of a humanist for that. In place of a methodological discussion, Ahmed leaves her reader with a telltale postulate: Religions enable change by appearing as though they don't change. As Islamists adopted veiling as an essential, or unchanging, Islamic practice, they objectified Islam while simultaneously and surreptitiously adapting it and making it manifestly relevant to changing social and political circumstances.
