Eyes

By Karima Vargas Bushnell

“Say to the believing men that they lower their gaze and restrain their sexual passions. That is purer for them. Surely Allah is Aware of what they do. . . . And say to the believing women that they lower their gaze and restrain their sexual passions . . . .” (Surat an-Nur, ayats 30 and 31).

Has anybody else tried to do this in a modern professional or social context? While it seems obvious to me now that the two parts of the passage are inseparable, meaning, “Don’t look somebody in the eye if it’s going to create a problematic sexual attraction,” as a new, hyper-conscientious Muslim I read it as “Don’t make eye contact with a man unless he’s in your family.” After six months of attempting this, I decided my choices were between being a bad, bad Muslim and becoming one of the biggest neurotics on earth.

Eye contact is a strange phenomenon, handled differently in different cultures and potentially carrying all kinds of contradictory implications. Sometimes in cross-cultural training I ask people, “What does it mean when you look somebody in the eye?” and we generate two lists. List One, favored by the modern or western(ized), says it means you’re honest, open, interested, self-confident, respectful and paying attention. List Two says it means you’re challenging, threatening, disrespectful, staring rudely or making sexual advances. We can see this in expressions like, “What’re YOU lookin’ at?” and “Don’t you eyeball me, boy!” (used by an older, more powerful man to a younger, less powerful one).

You can see right away that these two groups are going to have problems with each other. If List One people are correct, those who ‘lower their gaze’ are dishonest, bored, unfriendly and unsure of themselves. They won’t want to do business or make friends with such people, any more than List Two people will want to deal with the rude, disrespectful, pushy, lecherous troublemakers they assume their opposites to be.

I spent six peculiar months being seen by my fellow westerners as a shy, repressed, unfriendly person who was not paying attention. This was my hijab period, too, so I was also treated to loud inquiries as to whether I spoke English.

If it hadn’t been for the racial side of things I might have stuck it out, but that was just too much. There’s a long history in the U.S. of eye contact issues between Black and White. The 1960’s epic novel Five Smooth Stones talks about things Black children were taught for their own protection, “(I)n dealing with white adults he was to keep his eyes to himself and never on them, and he must never look a white woman squarely in the face. Once his business with any white person was over he was to get out of their company . . .” Having lived as part of a Black community, it’s natural to me to give the people I pass on the street a nod and a smile--“How you doin’?” Every time I averted my gaze from an African-American man’s face, I could feel my action being misinterpreted. Since my priority in life after seeking Allah Most High is multicultural community building, this just didn’t work.

That’s Eye Contact 101—but what is eye contact really? If you start talking about eye contact in a small group, you can watch them get really, really nervous, because what was automatic has suddenly become conscious. People don’t know how long to hold the gaze or when to look away. Suddenly every choice seems wrong.

To the average westerner, the idea of men and women avoiding eye contact with each other just seems silly. Men and women look at each other all day long in the office, in elevators, in stores and on the street, and not a whole lot of mad passion results. But a western poet—Blake?—said that, “The eyes are the windows of the soul.” If this is true, you obviously don’t want to make eye contact with just everybody, allowing them into the center of your being.

It recently occurred to me that the cultural ‘architecture’ of people’s minds may vary in respect to eye contact. Some people have a sort of screen they can put up just behind the eyes; it enables them to invite people onto the porch of their souls but not the living room, or the living room but not the bedroom. You can signal with your eyes that you’re paying polite attention to a total stranger, or that you like someone in a merely friendly way, or that you feel a soul connection and are inviting them to come nearer. In cultures where men and women meet constantly, the subtle manipulation of these various screens is automatic and semi-conscious. (I believe there’s some support for this eye behavior in Islam, where a hadith says, “The best veil is in the eyes.”)

But what if you’ve lived in a society where the sexes are rarely together, where it wasn’t necessary to construct such screens, at least for the management of male/female interactions? You’d be wide open. You would need to lower your gaze to prevent the whole world from driving through your private consciousness like rush hour. The Hmong people were like this when they first came to Minnesota in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Their eyes were wide open, no defenses, and even without a common language, you could fall right into those eyes, experiencing something of the complexity and wonder of that human being. They changed after a while. I still don’t know if this is the way the Hmong are at home or if it was a reaction to thinking they’d finally arrived in a safe and wonderful place.

A few years ago I had an interesting experience at a parking garage. The parking attendant was a good-looking young Muslim man, and since I was feeling very good that day, I smiled directly into his face. I wasn’t flirting—it was just a beautiful day. He smiled right back, and we made a non-physical contact that was joyous and open. (You can do this with an astonishing variety of people. It’s like an affirming and energizing current that passes between you as souls open to each other in mutual trust and confidence. But not everybody can or wants to do this, and you can’t do it with some people--somebody who looks down on you, for instance--or when you’re feeling weak or unsure of yourself, when an attempt of this kind will just get you a really funny look.) So this man and I had a kind of meeting of the minds. But what made the experience particularly interesting was the contrast with what happened next. Immediately another Muslim man stepped up behind him, and I automatically made eye contact with him too. To judge from how it felt, this was a full-bore encounter with ‘Salafabism’ in all its suspicious, bitter condemnation. “Who are you and why are you looking at my friend, you depraved woman?” said that glance. I hadn’t heard of Wahhabis back then, but his horror and look of utter rejection wasn’t hard to interpret.

So, are those who think eye contact is very important and sometimes dangerous just a bunch of paranoid nutballs? Well, no. A glance can be friendly and neutral; it can also charm and ravish and make love. A glance can express the solidarity of a comrade in this battle of life, or it can, speaking from a feminine perspective, sweep you up in its arms in your long, white nightgown with your hair hanging down and carry you off to somewhere quite, quite magical. A glance can convey love and beauty and passion and desire, and people can be awfully susceptible to these things, especially when they’re single or alone or the only thing their spouse’s glance ever says is, “Hi, honey, what’s for lunch?”

I used to think this kind of eye contact really did mean a soul connection. It can, but it can also mean you’ve just met someone who knows how to use this powerful tool consciously and effectively. (Young ladies, beware. Parents used to warn about this kind of thing, but now they mostly just say, “Don’t be too late and have a good time!”) My best Somali brother, someone I work with, is liberal and progressive in all the good ways, yet sincerely believes that if men and women pray in the same space there should be a curtain separating them. Otherwise the men and women would be constantly checking each other out instead of thinking about Allah Most High. (A recent article in MWU! seems to support this theory.) My friend might be right, and I don’t mind—I’d just really like to get out of that basement and away from that crackling loud speaker.

Karima Vargas Bushnell (M.A., intercultural relations) has studied world religions all her life and formally embraced Islam in 1993 through her teacher, the much loved Sheikh Nur al-Jerrahi. She's been a hippy, a court reporter, a fiddle player, a college instructor and long ago sold beer and hotdogs at the Santa Cruz auto races. Her play, “Voices on the Waves,” was published in MWU!