Headscarves and Hymens (6 page)

By the time we went for our second hajj, my mind was ready to surrender and my body was desperate for invisibility. It felt as if everything were
haram
(prohibited) in Saudi Arabia. I was descending into my first of several depressions; I felt I was losing my mind. So I struck a deal with God: They keep saying a good Muslim woman covers her hair, so I’ll cover my hair if you save my mind. I decided to wear the veil, and this time my parents accepted my decision.

But I found that the hijab did not make me invisible. I had decided to hide my body the way teenage girls, newly aware of male attention, sometimes take refuge in baggy clothing. Still, the garments I wore did not protect my body from wandering fingers and hands. If I were to use paint to indicate the places where my body was touched, groped, or grabbed without my consent, even while wearing the hijab, my entire torso, back and front, would be covered with color.

Although living in Saudi Arabia made me choose the headscarf, I wore it less frequently there than you might think. Covering up, the majority of scholars said, was required only in the presence of men who were not
relatives (although such interpretation has been challenged, as I mention above), and gender segregation at my school meant that I spent most of my day in the company of other women and could remain unveiled. However, when I returned to London with my family for vacations, the need to wear the headscarf—at least under the rules and regulations I had submitted myself to—presented itself at all times. I wore my hijab almost all day, and began to feel suffocated by it. It pulled at my throat. I felt constricted and confined, and missed feeling the wind in my hair. When I look at photographs of myself from that time, I see a girl who is cut off from the world, as though her headscarf sealed in the sadness she felt.

Despite the sadness, I was doing well in school. If wearing the hijab was causing or exacerbating my depression, no one would have guessed it. I wrote an essay about the ubiquity of women’s head coverings across different religious faiths, which argued that it was unfair to associate the veil exclusively with Islam. What about nuns, or ultra-Orthodox Jewish women? I asked. I was keen to defend my commitment to the headscarf, and to connect to other religions the notion of modesty to which I had submitted.

Then I discovered feminism.

At the age of nineteen, I stumbled upon those incendiary books at the university library in Saudi Arabia. What was most startling to me was to read arguments
by Muslim women—such as Mernissi and Ahmed—questioning the headscarf. Why were women alone responsible for sheltering men from the sexual desires women supposedly elicited in men? Why could men not control themselves? Why, if men were the ones being tempted, were they not the ones being policed? All these questions pressed themselves on me at a time when I was trying to push them away. They were both welcome and unwelcome, a sign that a reckoning between me and my headscarf was inevitable.

My escape route was to emphasize the idea of “choice.” If a woman had a right to wear a miniskirt, surely I had the right to choose my headscarf. My choice was a sign of my independence of mind. Surely, to choose to wear what I wanted was an assertion of my feminism. I was a feminist, wasn’t I?

But I was to learn that choosing to wear the hijab is much easier than choosing to take it off. And that lesson was an important reminder of how truly “free” choice is.

When I returned to Egypt at age twenty-one, the hijab became a full-time job, the duties of which I had not anticipated. Back then, in 1988, before neon-pink and orange hijabs and skinny jeans, there were more fixed ideas about what a woman in a hijab could and could not do. The strange combination that I represented complicated that equation: an Egyptian woman with a very English accent and broken Arabic, who danced along to music on campus in her hijab. Back then, that was not a
comfortable combination. But trying to persuade people that I could make it work became a bit of an obsession.

I’d ride the metro and think to myself, I can’t let the team down. What will people think about Muslims if I take my headscarf off after all I’ve said and done to prove you can wear one and still be an extrovert and a feminist?

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 understand 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.