Headscarves And Hymens

Mona Eltahawy

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781443437974
• eBook ISBN:
  9781443437981
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian woman who wrote an article for Foreign Policy entitled "Why Do They Hate Us?"; "they" being Muslim men, "us" being women. The piece sparked controversy, of course, making it clear that misogyny in the Arab world is something that engages and enrages the public.

In Headscarves and Hymens, Eltahawy takes her argument further. Drawing on her years as a campaigner and a commentator on women's issues in the Middle East, she explains that, since the Arab Spring began, women in the Arab world have had two revolutions to undertake: one fought with men against oppressive regimes; and another fought against an entire political and economic system that treats women in countries from Yemen and Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya as second-class citizens.

Eltahawy traveled across the Middle East and North Africa, meeting women and listening to their stories. Her book is a plea for outrage and action on their behalf; it confronts the "toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend." A manifesto motivated by hope and fury in equal measure, Headscarves and Hymens is as illuminating as it is incendiary.

BLACK VEIL, WHITE FLAG

At Cairo station one spring day in 1923, a crowd of women with veils and long, black cloaks descended from their horse-drawn carriages to welcome home two friends returning from an international feminist meeting in Rome. Huda Shaarawi and Saiza Nabarawi stepped out on to the running board of the train. Suddenly Huda—followed by Saiza, the younger of the two—drew back the veil from her face. The waiting women broke into loud applause. Some imitated the act. Contemporary accounts observed how the eunuchs guarding the women frowned with displeasure. This daring act signaled the end of the harem system in Egypt. At that moment, Huda stood between two halves of her life—one conducted within the conventions of the harem system and the one she would lead at the head of a women’s movement.

—FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY MARGOT BADRAN TO
HAREM YEARS: THE MEMOIRS OF AN EGYPTIAN FEMINIST,
BY HUDA SHAARAWI, TRANSLATED BY MARGOT BADRAN

One 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:

And tell the believing women to reduce [some] of their vision and guard their private parts and not expose their adornment except that which [necessarily] appears thereof and to wrap [a portion of] their headcovers over their chests and not expose their adornment except to their husbands, their fathers, their husbands’ fathers, their sons, their husbands’ sons, their brothers, their brothers’ sons, their sisters’ sons, their women, that which their right hands possess, or those male attendants having no physical desire, or children who are not yet aware of the private aspects of women. (sura 24:31)

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.

So what changed? What made the pendulum swing back to veiling?

Islamist influence grew throughout the Arab world following Israel’s humiliating defeat of the Arabs in 1967. In 1979 the Iranian Revolution tantalized the region with the vision of an Islamic state. Also, worsening economies throughout the Arab world drove many workers to seek employment in Saudi Arabia, where they were influenced by Wahhabism. When the workers returned to their homelands, they brought these new conservative beliefs back with them, including more stringent expectations of female modesty.

Anwar Sadat coddled the Islamists in Egypt, using them against internal political enemies. After Islamist army officers assassinated Sadat in 1981, the Mubarak regime, which claimed to be secular, fought its conservative rivals—including the Muslim Brotherhood, Mubarak’s most organized opponents—with a conservatism of its own. This is a popular pattern that governments—especially those close to the United States and Europe, such as Egypt’s under Sadat and Mubarak—use to protect themselves against charges of being godless or faithless. Conservative clerics appeared on television and other media in a flexing of fundamentalist muscle designed to show that the Muslim Brotherhood did not hold the copyright on piety. A drove of clerics, some state-approved, others not, used cassette tapes and later satellite television channels to get their conservative messages across.

When it came to women, their main message was “Cover up.” In the 1990s the populist cleric Omar Abdel Kafi produced cassette tapes advocating the hijab that were bought by Cairo’s upper-class women. (Cassette tapes were a way to reach a wide audience while avoiding state censorship, much in the way that social media operate today.) Omar Abdel Kafi is said to have single-handedly “converted” several popular actresses away from the “sinful life” of the screen to the piety of the veil, thereby setting an example for their fans.

With the advent of satellite television in the late 1990s, a televangelist called Amr Khaled took to the airwaves to preach that Islam did not conflict with “modern” ways. But he, too, made veiling his main message to women. A woman I know who was a regular follower of his shows told me she began to wear the hijab after listening to him talk so movingly about the importance of veiling. “I was in tears. I ran to my mother’s closet and took out a headscarf and decided to start veiling,” she said.

Some of Egypt’s neighbors, under similar influences, wrote the hijab into law at this time. In Sudan, under Article 152, enacted in the country’s criminal code in 1991, the state imposes flogging sentences of up to forty lashes on women charged with violating the “Immoral Dress Provisions.”

Whoever commits, in a public place, an act, or conducts himself in an indecent manner, or a manner contrary to public morality, or wears an indecent, or immoral dress, which causes annoyance to public feelings, shall be punished, with whipping, not exceeding forty lashes, or with fine, or with both.

Such language allows Sudan’s “morality police” to punish women for going unveiled or even for wearing trousers. Yet misogyny reflects hierarchy: Sudanese women who are arrested for “indecent dress” but who are from affluent or connected families can often get out of the flogging punishment altogether, or pay a fine to escape the pain and humiliation. Less advantaged women, and Christian women from the south—what became South Sudan—are often the most affected by the notorious Article 152.

In countries where Islamists have pushed for veiling, the types of veils they promote are new. Unlike traditional forms of dress, which often had a much looser, more flowing aspect, the veils that Islamists promote are worn tightly around the head, often accompanied, in more conservative circles, with buttoned-down coats and cloaks in black and dark blue. Conversely, as the veil has become more prominent, many younger women, in Egypt and especially in Western countries, subvert the new austerity with neon-colored headscarves and formfitting clothes that defy the modesty that is supposed to underpin veiling.

In 2005, I was assigned to interview the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader at the organization’s headquarters in Cairo. Although the Brotherhood had been officially banned, it was “allowed” to contest parliamentary elections that year. Its literature, banners, and flyers were visible in many neighborhoods across Cairo. I had stopped wearing a headscarf in 1993, and I fully expected to be asked to cover up for this interview; whenever I’d interviewed any Brotherhood leaders in the past, I’d been handed a scarf before being allowed to enter the room where the interview was to take place.

I was dressed in a short-sleeve T-shirt and trousers. This time the person who ushered me in did not hand me a headscarf; I was pleasantly surprised. My first interview was with Mohamed Akef, then the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood. I told him that I’d heard that the Muslim Brotherhood was sounding more pluralistic than usual and that I’d come to see if it really was embracing diversity of opinion.

He told me the Brotherhood embraced pluralism and inclusion. To illustrate his point, he mentioned that after...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• CONTENTS
• WHY THEY HATE US
• BLACK VEIL, WHITE FLAG
• ONE HAND AGAINST WOMEN
• THE GOD OF VIRGINITY
• HOME
• ROADS THROUGH THE DESERT
• SPEAK FOR YOURSELF
• EPILOGUE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• A Note About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher