Headscarves and Hymens (4 page)

Why do those men hate us? They hate us because they need us, they fear us, they understand how much control it takes to keep us in line, to keep us good girls with our hymens intact until it’s time for them to fuck us into mothers who raise future generations of misogynists to forever fuel their patriarchy. They hate us because we are at once their temptation and their salvation from that patriarchy, which they must sooner or later realize hurts them, too. They hate us because they know that once we rid ourselves of the alliance of State and Street that works in tandem to control us, we will demand a reckoning.

The battles over women’s bodies can be won only by a revolution of the mind. Too often women are scolded
for daring to bring up “identity politics,” and are urged to lay aside “women’s rights” for the larger goal of solidarity or fidelity to the revolution. This is a mistake. Huge swaths of the Arab world are being remade now, with far-reaching and unguessed-at repercussions, and women and men both have an unprecedented opportunity to confront, and root out, the systemic hatred of women that reduces us to little more than our headscarves and our hymens.

We might have removed Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, but until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes—unless we topple the Mubaraks in our mind, in our bedrooms, and on our street corners—our revolution has not even begun.

O
ne afternoon in the early 1990s, when I was in my mid-twenties, I sat in the women’s carriage on the
Cairo metro. I was wearing one of my favorite skirts: flowers in vivid red and green on a brown background with a matching brown blouse and a beige headscarf with red trim. I took great pride in matching my headscarves to the clothes I wore, and I would have none of the austerity that stamped itself on women in Saudi Arabia, where headscarves and cloaks, known as abayas, were black. My mother and I both refused to wear black headscarves in Saudi Arabia, and I continued that tradition in Egypt, where, thankfully, black was not de rigueur among those of us who wore the hijab, a form of dress that covers everything but the face and hands.

A woman wearing a niqab (a veil, usually black, that covers all of the face apart from the eyes) struck up a conversation with me. “Why aren’t you wearing a niqab?” she asked me. Her question was chilling; I’d always found the niqab terrifying in the way it rendered the face and the individual invisible.

“Isn’t what I’m wearing enough?” I asked the woman.

“If you want to eat a piece of candy, would you choose one that is in a wrapper or an unwrapped one?” the woman in the niqab asked me.

“I’m a woman, not a piece of candy,” I replied.

Candy in a wrapper, a diamond ring in a box—these analogies are commonly used in Egypt and other countries to try to convince women of the value of veiling. They compare women to objects that are precious but devalued by exposure, objects that need to be hidden,
protected, and secured. When it comes to what are described as the Islamic restrictions on women’s dress, women are never simply women.

There are various explanations for why women veil themselves. Some do it out of piety, believing that the Qur’an mandates this expression of modesty. Others do it because they want to be visibly identifiable as “Muslim,” and for them a form of veiling is central to that identity. For some women, the veil is a way to avoid expensive fashion trends and visits to the hair salon. For others, it is a way to be left alone and afforded a bit more freedom to move about in a public space that has become increasingly male-dominated. In recent decades, as veiling became more prevalent throughout the Arab world, the pressure on women who were not veiled began to increase, and more women took on the veil to avoid being harassed on the streets. Some women fought their families for the right to veil, while others were forced to veil by their families. For yet others, it was a way to rebel against the regime or the West.

So the act of wearing the hijab is far from simple. It is burdened with meanings: oppressed woman, pure woman, conservative woman, strong woman, asexual woman, uptight woman, liberated woman. I chose to wear the hijab at the age of sixteen and chose to stop wearing it when I was twenty-five. It is no exaggeration to say that the hijab has consumed a large portion of my intellectual and emotional energy since I first put on a
headscarf. I might have stopped wearing one, but I never stopped wrestling with what veiling means for Muslim women. Because I have been open about the fact that I wore the hijab for nine years, I often hear from younger women who are struggling with their veil, and frequently with their families, who insist they continue to wear it: “How did you take it off?” “How did you handle family pressure?” “Do you think it’s an obligation?” “Would you ever wear it again?” “My mother has threatened to lock me up at home if I ever take mine off.”

Hijab
is an Arabic word meaning “barrier” or “partition,” but it has come to represent complex principles of modesty and dress. The argument for the hijab begins with this passage from the Qur’an:

This interpretation of the Qur’an’s instructions on modesty is supported with Hadith literature in which Muhammad is said to have instructed women to cover all of their body except for the face and hands. The Hadith (meaning “tradition”) is a collection of sayings and stories attributed to Muhammad and based on oral narratives collected a few centuries after his death. The Bukhari Hadith, considered to be the most authoritative, shows women responding to the Prophet’s teaching by covering themselves, supporting the conviction that veiling is Muhammad’s direct command.

But veiling has never and will never be as simple as these passages seem to suggest. I didn’t realize this when I first began to wear the hijab. It was when I began to struggle with the hijab that I found alternative interpretations—I did not at first have the power or courage simply to stop wearing my headscarf. I needed allies whose religious knowledge I could use against those scholars who maintained that the hijab was religiously mandated.

I found one such alternative in the writings of the Moroccan sociologist and feminist Fatima Mernissi, one of the first intellectual mentors of my feminism. She offered a different interpretation of the Qur’anic verses that contain the word
hijab,
in which she takes the word to mean “a curtain.” Reading her books
The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights
in Islam
and
Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Societies
offered a lifeline that emboldened me in my independence of thought against the male-dominated mainstream of religious teaching.

Mernissi believed that the “hijab” the Qur’an mentions is meant to indicate a curtain hung to provide privacy for the Prophet and his family. The verse was revealed, Mernissi wrote, after an incident in which guests lingered during a visit to the Prophet and a new wife and Muhammad was too shy to ask the guests to leave his small home. Hijab was never meant to segregate men from women—just to provide privacy for the Prophet and his family—and it was not about concealing women behind veils, either, according to Mernissi. To a young woman struggling with forces she believed she could not stand up to, Mernissi’s words were much-needed ammunition.

“All the monotheistic religions are shot through by the conflict between the divine and the feminine, but none more so than Islam, which has opted for the occultation of the feminine, at least symbolically, by trying to veil it, to hide it, to mask it,” Mernissi writes in
The Veil and the Male Elite.
“This almost phobic attitude toward women is all the more surprising since we have seen that the prophet has encouraged his adherents to renounce it as representative of the jahiliyya (pre-Islamic period, literally age of ignorance) and its superstitions … Is it possible that the hijab, the attempt to veil women, that is claimed today to
be basic to Muslim identity, is nothing but the expression of the persistence of the pre-Islamic mentality …?”

I learned from reading the work of Leila Ahmed, an Egyptian American scholar and chair of the Harvard Divinity School, that veiling was prevalent in pre-Islamic society, and not just in Arabia but also in Mediterranean and Mesopotamian civilizations that predated Christianity. It was used, among other things, to differentiate between free women (who veiled) and enslaved women (who did not).

Ahmed further bolstered my ammunition against the hijab by explicitly differing with the opinions that claim the Qur’an mandates veiling. “It is nowhere explicitly prescribed in the Qur’an; the only verses dealing with women’s clothing … instruct women to guard their private parts and throw a scarf over their bosoms,” Ahmed wrote in
Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate.

Ahmed emphasizes that during the Prophet’s time, veiling was practiced mostly by his wives, as a way of differentiating them from other women. Known as Mothers of the Believers, they were taken as role models of “purity” and decency, and that is one way that veiling became associated with Islamic identity and those virtues in particular. Reading Mernissi and Ahmed was a balm that emboldened me in my struggles with the hijab, and to this day, I often recommend them to younger women undergoing their own struggles.

But the headscarves in the title of this book and the headscarves in this chapter are not simply religious symbols. These days I am less interested in debating the religious necessity of veiling and more interested in asking what the widespread adoption of the hijab has done to the perception of women and to women’s perceptions of themselves. Are we more than our headscarves?

Though comprehensive statistics on veiling have not been tabulated, observation suggests that more women in the Middle East and North Africa wear the veil now than at any time since the early decades of the twentieth century. In a 2007 article,
The New York Times
claimed that up to 90 percent of Muslim women in Egypt wear some kind of headscarf. A recent study from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research surveyed the Muslim-majority countries of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey and found that a median 44 percent of respondents preferred that women cover their hair in public. A median 10 percent preferred forms of veiling that covered the body from head to toe, and almost completely covered the face, such as the burqa and the niqab. In Saudi Arabia, that figure rose to 63 percent.

The prevalence of veiling in the Middle East and North Africa today is the latest swing of a pendulum. These shifts from conservative to liberal dress and back again have often been described as motions between “Islam” and the “West,” a dichotomy that makes it especially
hard to talk about veiling or to critique it without having to choose one or the other. But we must find a way to talk about the hijab that does not frame it as a choice between cultures.

Huda Shaarawi’s historic unveiling in 1923, which began a decades-long movement away from the hijab in Egypt, is usually framed in this Islam-versus-the-West dynamic. Shaarawi belonged to the upper class—affluent, and conversant in more languages than just Arabic—which along with a growing middle class, admired European ways and considered them a “modern” blueprint.

Europeans had served as liberal models for the Egyptian intelligentsia since the nineteenth century. In 1899, reformer Qasim Amin wrote a book called
Tahrir al-Mar’a
(
The Liberation of Women
) in which he controversially argued that the veil stood in the way of women’s progress and, by extension, Egypt’s. Muslim scholars reacted strongly to Amin’s polemic and demanded that women who removed their veils be imprisoned or at least fined. They positioned the veil as the “traditional” and “authentic” dress for women, making it the uniform for the less-advantaged for whom education, foreign languages, and European ways were not options.

When Amin’s ideas were championed by Evelyn Baring, the British consul general of Egypt, a terrible dynamic was set in place in which women’s rights became the cat’s-paw of imperial power, making it almost impossible for those opposed to the occupation and to European
influence to critique the veil without looking as if they were taking the side of the West.

After the 1952 coup—in which a group of military officers overthrew the king—put an end to the monarchy in Egypt and ended British occupation, unveiling became less associated with the former rulers and closely identified with Egypt’s urban female workforce, employed by an expanding public sector. By the 1960s, headscarves were mostly worn only by members of the Muslim Brotherhood movement and in smaller towns and rural parts of Egypt.