Headscarves and Hymens

by Mona Eltahawy

  At that time I began meeting and interviewing Egyptian feminists, drawing sustenance from the real women who led the struggles I had read about. I looked for them everywhere I could. Many of the older women practically adopted me, inviting me to their meetings, sending me their latest reports, and alerting me of important conferences they were holding. One of those mentors, Hala Shukrallah, became the first woman to lead a political party in Egypt when the social-democratic Dostour Party elected her its head in 2014.

  One day, I interviewed a veteran journalist who was doing exactly what I aspired to do: using her writing to fight for women’s equality.

  “Why are you covering your hair?” she asked me.

  For Shukrallah and the other feminists from the New Woman Foundation, my hijab had not been an issue. So when this journalist brought up my headscarf, she blindsided me. I wasn’t there to talk about myself, but I became Exhibit A as she explained the conservative forces at work against Egyptian women.

  “Can’t you see you’re destroying everything we’ve worked so hard for?” she asked me.

  At the time, I could not. I was such an enthusiastic self-identified feminist, and the thought that I was letting the sisters down horrified me.

  “But I’ve chosen to dress like this,” I replied.

  That word choice again.

  What finally helped me part ways with the hijab was an anecdote my mother relayed from a conversation about me she’d had with a physician who was a coworker of my father’s. It helped put to rest my conflict over that word, choice. The physician, asking after my brother and me, wondered if I was married. When my mother told him I wasn’t, he replied—as she conveyed to me—”Don’t worry, she wears a headscarf. She’ll find a husband.”

  Just like that, a piece of cloth had superseded me.

  Then I understood—as this man’s patronizing confidence in my scarf had shown—that I wasn’t the Hijab Poster Girl I thought I was. I was just a hijab.

  When I so quickly replied, “But I’ve chosen to dress like this,” I had not considered men, such as that physician, for whom my choice was irrelevant (just as my choice was irrelevant to the journalist). I realized that the journalist and the physician were on opposite sides of a struggle, and I knew that I did not want to be on the physician’s side.

  The week I finally decided to stop wearing a headscarf, I had just finished my graduate studies in journalism at the American University in Cairo. You could count on maybe two hands the number of women in headscarves at AUC during the time I studied there, from 1988 to 1992. In those years, I was in the headscarf-wearing minority off campus as well.

  My two biggest challenges on the day I parted ways with my headscarf were, first, telling my family, who had pressured me to keep it on during those eight years of struggle; and second, getting a bad haircut. I did not want anyone to think I’d taken off my headscarf for vanity’s sake or to attract men. My feminism at the time meant I did not wear any makeup, did not pluck my eyebrows, and rejected “femininity” with a passion (except for skirts and color-coordinated headscarves).

  So the last thing I wanted was to “look good” after I took off my hijab, and the best way to guarantee that was to go to a female hairdresser. In Egypt, at least before the majority of women donned the hijab, hairdressing was considered a profession of ill repute for women, and was dominated by men. So I went to a local hairdresser and asked for a woman. They asked if I was sure, but I was adamant.

  Wonky haircut secured, and wearing my headscarf just halfway up my head, I went to pick up my sister from school, where I knew my mother would join me. As we waited for the girls and boys to dash out, I told my mother nervously what I’d done.

  Those final days of my struggle with the headscarf took place during a heat wave, and I used the weather as an excuse to hide at home for a few days, putting off the delivery of my news to friends and peers. I finally forced myself out of the house, convinced that everyone I passed on the street and on the transportation I took to get to AUC knew that my bare head was a new thing, that I had just that day finally stopped wearing a headscarf. It didn’t get any better at AUC, where my friends were split between the “You look so much better!” camp and the “What have you done, you’ve made us look so bad!” camp. To a friend from the latter camp, I replied, “I’m not the Qur’an in motion.” But it didn’t do much good.

  Guilt clung to me for several years. I assuaged it somewhat by continuing to wear my old hijab-appropriate clothes, minus the headscarf. I was so ashamed that I’d taken it off that I would never tell new acquaintances that I used to wear the hijab. I didn’t wear makeup, my hair remained short, and I had to reckon with a new body consciousness. Wearing the hijab for nine years had allowed me to put off defining what femininity meant to me. The hijab had been my way of trying to hide from men, but in the end it had only hid my body from myself.

  One morning in 2002, a click on a Human Rights Watch e-mail ignited all that I’d left unspoken and unchallenged, all that I had tried to forget.

  The fire was a tragedy that could have struck anywhere. Fifteen girls between ages thirteen and seventeen were trampled to death, and fifty-two others were hurt, when a blaze swept through their school.

  Parents and journalists angrily demanded the resignation of education officials they accused of incompetence and corruption. There was plenty to be angry about. Some 800 schoolgirls were crammed into a building designed for only 250. The main gate to the school was locked. There were no emergency exits, no fire alarms, and no fire extinguishers in the building. Yet a far more sinister detail in this particular tragedy shows that it could not have happened anywhere but in Saudi Arabia.

  Firefighters told the Saudi press that morality police had forced the girls to stay inside the burning building because they were not wearing the headscarves and abayas that women must wear in public in that kingdom. One Saudi paper reported that the morality police had stopped men who tried to help the girls escape the building, including firefighters, saying, “It is sinful to approach them.” Girls died because zealots at the gate would rather have seen them burn than appear in public dressed inappropriately.

  You are your headscarf. Your headscarf is worth more than you.

  I could not stop crying as I read through the HRW report. Those girls could have been my younger sister, who was at a school in Jeddah at that time. Whose Islam is it that allows men to condemn little girls to death?

  That school fire and the Saudi state’s complicity in the deaths of those girls should have sparked protests—a revolution, even! Every year, their deaths should be commemorated and reflected upon as the fatal consequence of misogyny. Yes, misogyny can kill you. Those schoolgirls should forever be commemorated as victims of a hate crime—the crime of hating girls and women.

  But they are not commemorated or honored, and the revolution in Saudi Arabia is still far off.

  The closer you are to God, the less I see of you—so goes the thinking behind the niqab. I find this idea extremely dangerous. It comes from an ideology that wants to hide women. Many people say that they support a woman’s right to choose to wear the niqab because it’s her natural right. But what they’re doing is supporting an ideology that does not believe in a woman’s right to do anything except cover her face. In Saudi Arabia, for example, Salafi ideology ensures that women cannot travel alone, cannot drive, cannot even go into a hospital without a man’s permission. Yet some claim that the right that Muslim women are fighting for is to wear the veil, to cover their faces. I’m outraged when people say that as a feminist I must support a woman’s right to do this. To claim that the wearing of the niqab is a feminist issue is to turn feminism on its head.

  What disturbs me about the discussion of veiling in Europe is that the headscarf and niqab bans there are driven almost solely by xenophobic right-wingers. They’re hijacking an issue that they know is very emotional and very easy to sell to Europeans scared about immigration and the economy, Europeans who don’t unde
rstand people who look and sound different from them. As a result, the bans fail to find support among those who see them as a form of Islamophobia rather than what they really are: a women’s rights issue.

  The racism and discrimination that Muslims face in many countries—such as France, which has the largest Muslim community in Europe—are very real. But we must not sacrifice women at the altar of political correctness, or in the name of fighting the powerful and growing right wing in countries where Muslims live as a minority. I’m disappointed with the left wing in Europe for not speaking up and declaring that the niqab ban has everything to do with women’s rights; we are fighting against an ideology that does not believe in women’s rights. This is why I support the bans on the face veil that have been imposed in France, Belgium, and some parts of Barcelona, Spain. It is why I question why so many Muslim men jump to defend the niqab and the right to wear it.

  Witness my own run-in with one such Muslim man, the well-known academic Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-raised grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna. Ramadan has written extensively on being Muslim and Western, and has often been looked to as a positive influence helping young European Muslims navigate their multiple identities. I personally find several of his positions too conservative.

  During an appearance on the BBC television program Newsnight in which we were asked to react to the French ban on the niqab, Ramadan went to great lengths to explain that he believed that the conversation about the niqab should remain within the Muslim community. I find that argument disingenuous. Although on the surface it sounds quite reasonable, women have little room to dissent within that community.

  Perfectly on cue—I could not have orchestrated it better myself—when the Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman saw me shake my head in dissent to Ramadan’s words and commented that I seemed to disagree, Ramadan would not let me have my turn to speak and interjected with the outrageous claim “Of course you disagree. We all know that you are a neocon.”

  He was referring to the neoconservatives of U.S. politics, whose positions I have never identified with. He understood—especially because of neocon support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which I marched against when I lived in New York City—that by saying this, he was maligning me.

  After Ramadan interrupted several of my attempts to explain why I disagreed with him that the conversation on the niqab must remain strictly within the community, I yelled at him to stop talking because it was my turn and went on to explain that his behavior perfectly exemplified the hazards of insisting the community alone take care of an issue: the men spoke for everyone.

  It was, as a friend described it, as if he were saying “Shut up woman, and let me fight for your right.” Since that run-in with Ramadan, the term mansplaining has become popular for describing a man’s insistence on explaining a woman’s experience to her.

  Niqab bans continue to gain ground in the European Union. In July 2014 the European Court of Human Rights upheld France’s 2010 law that says that, in a public space, nobody can wear clothing intended to conceal the face. The penalty for doing so can be a €150 fine (about $205). The court ruled that the ban “was not expressly based on the religious connotation of the clothing in question but solely on the fact that it concealed the face.” This ruling is exactly how the issue should be considered: the effects of concealment must be considered before religious connotation.

  Arguments against the niqab can be made on grounds of security: for example, a person in a mask cannot enter a bank, and the niqab can be considered a type of mask. I prefer a more philosophical argument. We are social creatures, and nonverbal communication is an important part of our daily interactions. If I were sitting in front of you now, our interaction would be very different depending on whether you could see my face. When we leave our homes, we enter into a social contract with the community we live in. Face veils, I believe, violate that contract by diminishing the ability to interact fully because of the way they impede nonverbal communication.

  Some have argued against a ban on the niqab by claiming that the state must not play a role in people’s choice of wardrobe. I find this a disingenuous argument that ignores the fact that the state already does this by banning nudity in public, for example. The state of New York, where I lived for ten years before I moved back to Egypt to write this book, forbids the wearing of masks in gatherings of three people or more.

  An interesting and necessary tension in the discussion over veiling has developed over the past decade with the growing visibility of Muslim communities in the “West.” I spoke earlier of how in Egypt, for example, the push and pull on the hijab was often articulated as a tug-of-war between “Islam” and the “West.” Well, then, what happens when you are a Muslim who lives in the West? What happens when you are both Islam and the West? These increasingly visible identities will, I hope, help push us out of the binaries of Islam versus the West.

  Ironically, the bans on the niqab could force a much-needed argument over the face veil that too many Muslim communities are scared to have. We must take apart the idea that the niqab is the pinnacle of piety for women—I have heard some religious scholars even say that if a woman is “too beautiful,” she is obliged to cover her face. We must examine how the niqab contributes to the promotion of a “purity culture”—to borrow a phrase that feminists in the United States have began to use against Christian conservatives there who obsess over women’s “modesty”—and how such a culture directly contributes to the dangers girls and women face in public space. Also, we need to hear more Muslim women’s voices. After I stated my support for niqab bans—and clearly condemned the racism and xenophobia of the political groups behind those bans—I heard privately from Muslim women who opposed face veils of all kinds but who were reluctant to speak out because of the avalanche of attacks I was subjected to after I so publicly supported the bans and opposed face veiling.

  Often when I speak in various Western settings, such as on university campuses or on television shows with a studio audience, a Muslim woman will challenge me on my opposition to the niqab and my support for its ban. I relish the back-and-forth we end up having because it’s an important reminder that Muslim women disagree—we are not monolithic in our views. It’s also a healthy lesson in challenging what we’ve been taught is accepted scholarly interpretation. When I was younger and I would hear from men and women around me that it was the responsibility of an especially beautiful woman to cover her face so that she would not tempt men (again, the idea that the onus is on women to save men from themselves), it made me very uncomfortable, but I was timid in struggling with my headscarf and didn’t have the language or the ability to challenge the absurdity of such a line of thought.

  An Egyptian American woman who wears the niqab was featured along with me on a public radio discussion about the face veil, as well as on a CNN segment that has since gone viral on YouTube. On the public radio show, she explained that she began to wear the niqab after she worked on an oil rig as a chemical engineer and had been subjected to sexual harassment by male colleagues. Again, that “choice” to hide behind a veil, as I had done in Saudi Arabia. But in her case it was the full veil, which covered her face, which I consider an erasure of her identity. Over and over, because of men’s sexual transgressions—in her case, here in the United States—women conceal their bodies. When the presenter of the radio show asked her if the niqab had affected her work life at all, the woman confessed that it had made it difficult to continue as a chemical engineer and that she had resigned from her job. That is an important point to remember. When I make the argument that the niqab erases a woman by concealing her face, I am often met with howls of disagreement from those who claim that women who cover their faces are as active as anybody else. That is clearly false.

  Another encounter I had with a woman who wears the niqab was during the filming of the Al Jazeera English television show Head to Head. Filmed at the Oxford Union, the show has a debate-style format in which hos
t Mehdi Hasan grills the guest on the subject at hand—in my case, my essay “Why Do They Hate Us?” and gender equality in the Middle East and North Africa—after which a panel of experts and then the audience pose questions.

  One woman in a niqab chided me for not allowing her to struggle with her niqab in the way I had with my hijab. By supporting a ban on the face veil, she claimed, I was preventing her from completing her own journey. I told her I respectfully disagreed with her and wished her the best but that I still supported a ban on the niqab.

  At the postshow reception, where men and women mingled, the same woman approached me without her niqab. I was shocked and asked her to explain why she wasn’t covering her face. She said that it was complicated and that she covered her face depending on the situation. I told her that women in the Middle East and North Africa did not have such a privilege.

  I maintain that Muslim women who live in Western countries—and are themselves both Western and Muslim—can help lift us out of the Islam-versus-the-West dichotomy. But I implore them to recognize the privilege that allows them to make vocal and impassioned defenses of the hijab. It is easy to forget that there are women with less privilege than they who have no true choice in veiling. I understand the need to defend one’s headscarf—I did it for years, even as I was privately struggling with it. It’s an important defense in the face of Islamophobes and racists. I get that. But if it’s done without cognizance of the lived realities of women who do not have the privilege of choice, then my interlocutors end up doing exactly what they accuse me of doing with my support of a niqab ban: silencing other women. Why the silence, as some of our women fade into black, either owing to identity politics or out of acquiescence to Salafism? The niqab represents a bizarre reverence for the disappearance of women. It puts on a pedestal a woman who covers her face, who erases herself, and it considers that erasure the pinnacle of piety. We cannot continue to don the black veil and raise a white flag to Islamist misogyny.