With the ability to capture a moment in time, photography became a widespread tool for both artistic and observational purposes. However, photographers, subjects and viewers also used photography to create and shape ideas about different cultures.
As Western empires colonized more nations and grabbed more influence, travelers to previously distant regions like Africa and West Asia sent back rapidly reproducible images that made them accessible to the Western public eye and mind. The Great War further accelerated technological development, travel and tourism – and so commercial and personal photographs flooded back home.
To Westerners unfamiliar with these very real geographic areas and cultures, the photographs transformed them into imagined fantasy spaces populated with mysterious characters practicing social and religious customs supposedly out of the Middle Ages. The word “exotic” became synonymous with West Asia and North Africa.
No one personified this exoticism more than Muslim women. As Edith Wharton wrote in her 1917 travelogue “In Morocco,” when she first saw a Muslim woman: “All the mystery that awaits us looks out through the eyeslits in the grave-clothes muffling her.” Photographs of these women – often reproduced outside of context and disregarding any personal meaning to their human subjects – were representations of the exotic that travelers could take back home. Every image produced and shared further entwined ideas of mystery with ideas of Muslim women, Islamic cultural practices and the West Asian/North African geographic region known as the Middle East.
Muslim women wearing niqabs
Not dated
From the service of Walter Hamilton Lillie
The clothing worn in public by many Muslim women at this time, including a niqab, was a hallmark of this mystery. As Wharton evocatively described, and as viewers can see in the photograph, a niqab is a piece of fabric which covers the face but leaves the wearer’s eyes exposed. The niqab was and is (depending on region, time and custom) understood as part of hijab in Islam – clothing to maintain propriety and privacy.
The Qur’an instructs Muslim women and men to dress modestly, though Muslim scholars and practitioners have debated the extent of the required modesty since the beginning of the faith in the seventh century. Hijab and its interpretation still vary by country, region, family and individual. For women, it can mean many types of dress: from a headscarf, to a niqab, to the all-covering burqa.
Many contemporary Muslim scholars do not view face veiling as a requirement of Islam; however, a minority of Muslim scholars (mainly those of the Sunni Salafi and Wahhabism movement) understand Islamic law as requiring women to cover their faces when outside of the home and in the presence of non-related men.
Walter Lillie photographed the women wearing niqabs. He lived in a time and location where most people had this idea of an “exotic” Middle East and few contested it. Born in England to American parents in 1895, Lillie left Yale to serve during WWI as an ambulance driver with the French Army on the Balkan Front (Greece, Albania and Serbia), before serving on the Western Front at Verdun. In the album containing this photograph, Lillie notes the women as “Turkish women.”
We cannot know what Lillie was thinking while he took the photograph any more than we can know what the three women were thinking; however, based on social norms of the time he would not have had any sort of friendship with them. Viewers can guess that the photo serves not as a snapshot of friends, but as a souvenir to record time spent in an unfamiliar land. The women, in their cultural and religious dress, are turned into evidence of exotic travels: subjected into becoming icons of mystery within the expanse of an imaginary Middle East.
