Headscarves and Hymens (7 page)

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 host 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.

Egypt and Tunisia provide two interesting and opposite examples of the impact of the revolution on veiling, and give intriguing hints to which way the pendulum will ultimately swing.

I have heard from and read about several women in Egypt who stopped wearing the headscarf or the niqab after the revolution that began in January 2011. The feminist activist and blogger Fatma Emam wrote an impassioned blog post on how she decided to stop wearing the hijab because she concluded that in order to liberate Egypt, she first had to liberate herself. Emam told Bloomberg News that her mother accused her of wanting to be a man and threatened to disown her if she joined the protests in Tahrir Square. (Emam was twenty-eight years old at the time.) She went anyway.

“There are so many women who like me defied their families,” Emam told Bloomberg. “The revolution is not only taking place in Tahrir, it is taking place in every Egyptian house. It is the revolution of fighting the patriarch.”

Another Egyptian woman told me she had removed her hijab while chanting “Liberty” as she marched along with thousands of others in January 2011, because at that moment that was what liberty felt like for her.

Two women who belong to a support group for women that I started in Cairo soon after I moved back in 2013 stopped wearing the hijab after the revolution. One of them, a thirty-five-year-old, told me:

“I took off my headscarf and I began to demand rights. The revolution has made me much bolder. I’m now much more likely to speak and know I’m entitled to demand my rights, especially when it comes to men. It’s
my right to have men respect me as an equal and not as a follower. What the revolution changed was our mind-set; it empowered us to say, who am I, who am I in this country and when am I going to get my rights?”

Another woman in the support group made the decision to leave home—still a huge taboo in Egypt—at the age of nineteen because her mother threatened to lock her up at her home if she removed her hijab.

It remains to be seen if these women, emboldened to unveil, will inspire more women. I hope so. I still get e-mails and messages on social media from women distressed by their struggles with their families over their hijabs. One woman I know removed temporarily her headscarf at a doctor’s suggestion to treat a scalp infection. Her outraged mother contacted a cleric and asked him if she should disown her daughter.

In Tunisia under dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, women were prohibited from veiling in state-owned schools and institutions. Fatoum Alaswad, from the Ennahda Party, told me that during her law school days she would wear a beret so that she could observe hijab but still attend university. But after Ben Ali fled Tunisia the pressure against veiling reversed. Reports began to surface that Salafists were pressuring and at times attacking women who didn’t wear the hijab. Tunisian feminist activists such as Amira Yahyaoui, who founded Al Bawsala (a first-of-its-kind watchdog in the region that monitored the writing of the constitution and threatened to
name and shame constituent assembly members who tried to derail the clause on equality between men and women), explain that even though Tunisia might be more progressive than neighboring countries, it is conservative and patriarchal, especially in the smaller towns and rural areas.

Yahyaoui told me (for my BBC World Service radio documentary
Women of the Arab Spring
) that when she first asked a Salafist member of the constituent assembly a question, he refused to answer because, he said, he did not speak to women who were “naked.” I laughed and told her the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood also had called me naked. Enraged at the Salafist’s description and the way he ignored her, Yahyaoui began to undress. Horrified, he asked her what she was doing.

“I’m showing you what a naked woman looks like,” Yahyaoui answered. The man pleaded with her to stop and took her question. She told me that when the constitution passed, she looked for the Salafist and hugged him in celebration.

I met Lina Ben Mhenni, a linguistics teacher at the University of Tunis and a blogger who was active in the revolution, at a coffee shop from which she could see the Interior Ministry, where her father was tortured under the Ben Ali regime. For the previous six months, Ben Mhenni, thirty, had been under round-the-clock police protection because her name was found on an assassination list of a well-known Islamist group. They
targeted her because she defends women’s rights, is secular, and doesn’t believe in mixing politics and religion.

I asked Ben Mhenni how she felt about the lifting of the ban on veiling in state schools and institutions and about the increase in veiling that followed.

“I consider this as personal freedom,” she said. “I know under the regime many women used to be arrested and even some beaten by police just because they were wearing a veil. I have an aunt who wears the hijab and she had been arrested several times. She’s not extremist, and she’s wearing it just because she wants to wear it. It’s personal freedom but those people don’t have to interfere with my freedom.”

How has it impacted women’s lives?

“One of my female students said her roommates were trying to force her to wear the niqab. She was wearing black clothes and the veil, almost the burqa. She said, ‘I didn’t used to wear this thing and now they forced me to do this.’ ”

In Ettadmun—one of the largest working-class neighborhoods in all of Africa—I met Fatma Jgham, a university professor and women’s rights activist who established Tahadi (Challenge), an arts center that teaches young men and women graffiti, rap, and dance in order to advance their activism. She told me she had been threatened by some of the Salafist students on campus because she does not wear the hijab.