A Quiet Revolution (34 page)

Schock subsequently established a global network called Scarves for Solidarity to “support the right of Muslim women to choose their headgear without fear of retaliation.”
22
The Feminist Majority Founda- tion also issued the Scarves for Solidarity call to “action” for December

16
–
18
,
2001
, saying, “All women, regardless of faith, are wearing scarves

covering their hair during Eid, Muslim celebratory days. . . . This simple gesture of solidarity is to communicate love and peace for women who wish to dress in a modest fashion. Our global days of solidarity speak volumes to women who have been afraid to wear traditional hijab since the horrific tragedy of September
11
th.”
23

Similar campaigns in support of women in hijab were reported to have taken place across the globe, in Indonesia, for example, and in the United Kingdom and Australia.
24
For it was not of course only in Amer- ica that
9
/
11
had precipitated such strong reactions against Muslims and a new level of suspicion and hostility toward them, including to women in hijab. Some of the negative responses would take the form, in Europe,

of new government policies. In
2004
, for example, France banned wear- ing the hijab in French public schools. In parts of Germany, public school teachers are banned from wearing hijabs at work.

The reactions to
9
/
11
and the dangers in which wearing hijab placed

women would lead some Muslim women, as was widely reported at the time, to stop wearing this dress. (In response to the attacks, some Mus- lim authorities, among them Sheikh Ali Gomaa of Egypt, issued a fatwa allowing women to forgo hijab if wearing it placed them at risk.) Con- versely, the attacks in fact spurred other women to take up hijab, as news stories from all over America as well as Europe and elsewhere reported. The interviews and reports of journalists, like the findings of the an- thropologists in Cairo in an earlier time, are richly illuminating as to the reasons that Muslim women living in the West gave for taking up hijab at this historic moment.

A reporter in San Francisco interviewed Azadeh Zainab Sharif, a student at San Francisco State University, who decided to wear hijab after
9
/
11
. For Sharif, the reporter (David Ian Miller) wrote, “putting the scarf

on coincided with her spiritual awakening as a devout Muslim, but it was also a reaction to what she perceived to be a growing fear among Muslims in this country.” Too many women, she said, “were afraid to wear one because they were worried about discrimination, and it hurt me to see that.”
25

Another reporter, in Austin, Texas, interviewed two women—one of whom had decided to stop wearing hijab while the other had chosen to embrace it. Khataw, who had stopped wearing it, had done so, she ex- plained, in order to “protect herself,” and because she felt that doing so would be “better for me and my family.” Simultaneously the very con- ditions which led her to abandon it, and most particularly her son’s being harassed at school for being Muslim, had also, she said, transformed her from “a shy and introverted” person into “an activist.” She now threw herself into the task of educating people about Islam. She began speak- ing at churches and synagogues. Teaching people about Islam now be- came her “mission.”
26

Other Muslim women, this journalist also reported, similarly thought that after September
11
, “wearing the veil is like stamping the scarlet letter on your chest.” However, Annia Raja—a student at the Uni-

versity of Austin in Texas—had taken up the hijab after
9
/
11
precisely as a way of “negating” the widespread stereotypes about the hijab and Mus- lims. “It [wearing hijab] really made me more self-aware,” Raja said, “as far as when I am in public I am representing Islam. And that I need to do all that I can to really show people what Islam really is. Through that [wearing hijab] people are more invited to ask me about it.” Raja said that the veil had “liberated her and helped her create a strong Muslim American identity on campus.”
27
Raja’s use of the word “liberated” here is arresting: Raja felt “liberated,” presumably by wearing hijab, from hav- ing to passively acquiescence in the face of negative stereotyping.

The same themes of affirmation of identity and community in the face of prejudice and of embracing the dress to counter false stereotypes and instruct people about Islam that emerge in these reports—including the account of the woman who stopped wearing hijab while simultane- ously embarking on a new path of visibility as an activist Muslim—recur in many such reports. Emily Wax, for example, reporting for the
Wash-

ington Post
on the perceptible increase in
2002
of women wearing hijab,

noted that Muslim student leaders and professors on a number of college campuses—Georgetown University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Virginia—had all noticed such an increase. Investigating why this was happening, Wax reported that Muslim women were saying that “by putting on the hijab, they are showing increased faith, their pride in being Muslims and their support for the Palestinian cause.” One stu- dent said, “I wanted to show pride in being a Muslim. It gives me an iden- tity and lets people know, here is this regular girl who does everything everyone else does and is also a Muslim. I also feel a sense of closeness to other Muslim sisters. And since I studied the religion before I made my choice, I also feel like I can explain Islam to other non-Muslims.”
28

Another woman who took up the hijab after
9
/
11
and who had a

degree in engineering said, “I felt this is my culture and my heritage. This is something I have to represent.” She continued, “I have changed so much after
9
/
11
, and I think a lot of young Muslim women who felt we were being called terrorists really found ourselves researching our own religion and wanting to wear hijab.” A third woman explained that the hijab was not about “just covering your hair.” The “tragedy of
9
/
11
and the Palestinian cause,” she said, “made me think about all the propa-

ganda out there about Muslims. And I really thought about what my re- ligion meant.”
29

Some of the professors Wax interviewed pointed out that in the past groups subjected to the “sting of prejudice” had reacted precisely by affirming that scorned identity. “Think of the expression ‘Black is Beautiful’ during the late
1960
s.”

Affirmations of identity and community, of pride in their religious heritage in the face of the “sting of prejudice” and of negative stereotyp- ing, all elements threading these American Muslim responses, were sim- ilarly in evidence in responses that were articulated in Europe. Shiasta Aziz, for example, a British Muslim, explained on the BBC that while she had already been on a quest to deepen her knowledge of Islam, it was

only after
9
/
11
and “when the Muslim community around the world and

in the U.K. were under intense scrutiny by the politicians and the media” that she felt “that I wanted to be a visible Muslim.” She wanted people to know, she said, “that I am a Muslim and that I am proud of my reli- gion, heritage and culture.” Wearing hijab was for her “an act of soli- darity with Muslim women all around the world. Here I am an educated Muslim woman in the West, and even though I have no idea what it’s like to be an Iraqi, Bosnian, Somalian, or Palestinian woman, I know that we share an identity through Islam and through the hijab.” Wearing hijab had given her strength and had made her visible not only to the major- ity community but also to the handful of other women in hijab she saw on her way to work. “When I see another Muslim woman on the street we always smile, sometimes we nod at each other and other times we ex- change greetings: Asalaam elekum Walikum Asalaam.”
30

The reasons the women offer in explanation for taking up hijab are ob- viously specific to the conditions in America and Europe. At the same time, these reasons and explanations are also clearly resonant in their underlying themes with those that women gave to enquiring anthropol- ogists in the quite different context of Cairo, particularly in the
1970
s and
1980
s. This context was profoundly different in many ways, politically and socially, except for the fact that in those decades women in hijab made up at first only a minuscule number, and later still a small and dis- tinctly marginal minority, as they do today in the West.

There are clear continuities in the meanings that wearers give in these quite different societies: as affirmation of identity and commu- nity, of pride in heritage, of rejection or resistance to, or even of protest against, mainstream society. In Cairo, it was resistance to mainstream society’s perceived materialism and moral corruption, in America it was resistance to perceived discrimination and prejudice and to being seen as “terrorists.” In these situations the hijab’s capacity to signal resistance or protest against the views of the majority arises from and even de- pends on the fact that it is the dress of a minority. Similarly, in the West today, just as in Egypt in the
1970
s and
1980
s, wearing hijab makes vis- ible to the dominant society the presence among them of a dissenting minority who are affirming their heritage and values and taking a stand in challenging the inequities and injustices of mainstream society: ma- terial and economic injustices in the case of Egypt, racial and religious in the West. Thus in both societies wearing hijab became sign and ban- ner of a call for justice. In both contexts, wearing hijab enables this hi- jabi minority to recognize and silently signal support to each other in their difference.
31

The community that Western Muslims typically affirms is implic- itly and sometimes explicitly the global Muslim community. The list of Muslim women with whom Aziz in particular affirms a sense of con- nection and community—“Iraqi, Bosnian, Somalian, or Palestinian”— is telling too in that it is constituted of people perceived to have been the targets of violence fueled by Western prejudices against Muslims—the very prejudices that they themselves are attempting to resist by taking up hijab. On another plane, Aziz’s words also bring home how success- ful the Islamist project had been—launched in the
1960
s with Saudi funding and disseminated in the Middle East and across the world by the Muslim Brotherhood—in persuading Muslims to anchor their iden- tity not in ethnicity or nation but in Islam alone and in the transnational Muslim community.

As some of the media accounts indicated, Palestine and solidarity with the Palestinians loomed large among the reasons given for donning the hijab. Wax reported that “support for the Palestinian cause” was one among three explanations that women typically gave in response to her enquiries as to why they had decided to wear hijab. As one respondent

succinctly put it, “The tragedy of
9
/
11
and the Palestinian cause made me think about all the propaganda out there about Muslims.”
32

Solidarity with the Palestinians was among the meanings of wear- ing hijab that I encountered in interviews with hijabi women in
2002
–
3
. One of the women I interviewed told me that she had starting wearing it

“after I returned from a visit to my relatives in Palestine. I don’t believe the Quran requires it,” she said. “For me, wearing it is a way of affirm- ing my community and identity, a way of saying that even as I enjoy the comforts we take for granted here and that people in Palestine totally lack, I will not forget the struggle for justice.”

More surprising to me at the time had been the responses I received suggesting that the veil essentially often functioned as a way of signaling a call for justice in whatever aspect of it was in the foreground for the wearer. As I described in my introduction, one of my interviewees told me she wore it in the hope of raising people’s consciousness about gen- der bias and injustice, while another said wearing hijab for her was a way of silently saying that Muslims, like other minorities, had the right to be treated equally. When I first received these responses, early in my re- search, I could not fathom by what process of transformation and re- forging in the crucible of history the veil, widely viewed as the emblem of Islamic patriarchy and oppression, had come now to signal a call for gender justice (of all things) and a call for equality for minorities. It was only as I pursued my research on the veil and Islamism in Egypt and learned of the critical role of activism in the service of those in need in the Islamist movement, and the emphasis that the movement placed on social justice, that the veil’s emergence as a call for justice no longer seemed so mysterious.

The meanings cited here that were offered by the hijab’s wearers, whether in Cairo in the
1970
s and
1980
s or in European and American cities in the
21
st century, are striking in that they are at once often highly specific and personal yet generically similar, often implicitly invoking a notion of justice and deliberately signaling differences from the major- ity. These are elements of its meanings that are notably persistent across both time and space in the post-
1970
s era.
33

All of these meanings are distinctly post-
1970
s meanings, mean-

ings, that is, that the veil began to have only following the rise and spread

of Islamism. As this fact in itself implies, the veil’s meanings are not fixed or static across histories and societies. The veil of the post-
1970
s era is distinctly not the veil of pre-colonial times, a veil which signaled both gender hierarchy and an understanding of society as necessarily and properly grounded in gender segregation. With colonial times and the rise of the Western world’s interpretations of the world and its signs and meanings to global dominance, the veil would come to signify the Other to be subjugated and brought under the control of Europe, a project that was rhetorically cast in terms of the veil as emblem of Islam’s civiliza- tional inferiority and its “oppression of women.”