A Quiet Revolution (15 page)

Both El Guindi and Williams maintained that, at least to begin

with, the spread of the hijab and Islamic dress represented, above all, a women’s movement: a movement that both favored and advanced women’s interests. Explaining her reasons for coming to this conclusion, El Guindi pointed out that Islamic dress was clearly being adopted specif- ically by university students. Moreover, the largest proportion of women adopting this dress were students in sciences and in such fields as med- icine and engineering. It was being adopted by students in the liberal arts, too, but in smaller numbers. The women who were preponderantly adopting it, therefore, were those intending to become professionals, not stay-at-home wives.

Given the conditions in which they lived and worked and the crowded conditions in lecture rooms and on public transport, where ha- rassment of women was routine, El Guindi further argued, Islamic dress imbued women with a kind of moral and religious authority that might discourage such harassment. In El Guindi’s words, a woman in public space had a choice “between being secular, modern, feminine, and frus- tratingly passive (hence very vulnerable), or becoming
mitadayyina
... (religieuse) hence formidable, untouchable, and silently threatening.”
47
The young women who are out in public in the zia Islami, El Guindi concluded, had made the choice, “and the choice . . . became a movement.” By invoking Islam and declaring herself to be grounded in Muslim ethics, “this new Egyptian woman,” El Guindi wrote, “is liber- ating herself . . . by choosing to veil and not to be molested or stopped”

as she assertively enters public space.

Williams (who, like El Guindi, was a U.S.-based scholar) was also convinced by his research that, initially at least, the Islamic dress trend represented a women’s movement. While Williams was clearly aware from the start that there were a variety of factors besides women’s own desires influencing the trend toward Islamic dress—as his reports of ru- mors on the role of Saudi money and other pressures indicated—he nev- ertheless also believed that Egyptian women were “no sheep,” and that no one was likely to “persuade them to exchange the cooler, more com- fortable modern dress for zia shar‘i unless they wish to do so.”
48

Furthermore, the responses Williams received when he asked women why they had adopted Islamic dress convinced him that they had taken it up at their own initiative. Women also indicated that this dress

solved the problems they were confronting on a personal level. One young woman, for instance, explained that now that she had taken on this dress she felt “very happy and had a real sense of peace with herself.” Previously she had felt “pulled this way and that” in her effort to be like others, but now “she had taken her stand; she knew who she was, a Mus- lim woman, [and] men would not now mistake her for an easy mark.” In this instance, Islamic dress had evidently both solved the problem of harassment and resolved, as Williams put it, “some sort of personal iden- tity crisis.”

Williams gives other examples of how women’s adoption of Islamic dress had led to the resolution of problems. One woman, for instance, ex- plained that the events of
1967
had been a “rude awakening.” Then, she went on, “in
1973
, it seemed that God was answering our prayers. We had become too careless. Now we want to respond to God with faith.” Another woman similarly stated that until
1967
she had accepted the “way our country was going,” believing that Nasser “would lead us all to progress. Then the war showed that we had been lied to; nothing was the way it had been represented. I started to question everything we were told. I wanted to do something and to find my own way. I prayed more and I tried to see what was expected of me as a Muslim woman. Then I

put on shar‘i dress.” Another woman suggests that taking on Islamic dress represented a fundamental shift in her understanding of the direc- tion her society had taken and of the new direction that it now needed to take: “Once we thought that Western society had all the answers for successful, fruitful living,” she said, and that “if we followed the lead of the West we would have progress.... Now we see that this isn’t true: they (the West) are sick societies; even their material prosperity is break- ing down. America is full of crime and promiscuity. Russia is worse. Who wants to be like that? We have to remember God. Look how God has blessed Saudi Arabia. That’s because they have tried to follow the law. And America, with its loose society, is all problems.”

These responses suggest that adopting hijab sometimes at least connoted a turning away from and even an outright rejection of the West and its ways. Such responses clearly mark a dramatic shift that had occurred by the
1970
s from the views that had prevailed in the early century and the

hopes and aspirations that the idea of emulating the West had engen- dered among the forebears of these women. Casting aside their veils had been a symbol for that generation of their longing for the day when Egypt would be an unveiled society pursuing the exhilaratingly hopeful ideas and ideals—equality, democracy, the right to work for equal pay—of modernity and the West.

Williams concluded, as El Guindi had done, that what was afoot in Egypt with the spread of Islamic dress was in some important way a “women’s movement.” And yet in the very last paragraph of his article he also observes—without offering any further evidence or explanation

—that just as his article is going to press (in early
1979
), there were clear

signs that “what had been a women’s movement was now being exploited by men for their own purposes.”

A study that appeared a couple of years later confirmed some of Williams’s findings. In this case the study was undertaken by Zainab Radwan, an Egyptian academic based at the National Research Center in Cairo. Radwan’s research, comprising questionnaires for university students, was also conducted with the object of understanding why the hijab was gaining ground among university women. Radwan’s research found that the response Williams cited from one of his interviewees, that donning the hijab had brought her inner peace, was the commonest re-

sponse given by women who wore hijab:
50
percent of the hijabi women

chose this response from multiple possible responses. Other reasons attested to by Williams’s research also figured in the responses to the Radwan questionnaire:
19
percent of hijabi women responding to the questionnaire reported that they wore hijab to avoid being harassed in public, and
20
percent said that people treated them with new respect after they put it on.
49

The occurrence of similar responses in Williams’s and Radwan’s research suggests that there were by then a number of stock responses in circulation—responses perhaps specifically intended to be offered to en- quiring scholars, anthropologists, and others—explaining women’s feel- ings and motivations as to their decision to don the hijab. Indeed, the very fact that a questionnaire asking women why they had chosen to don hijab featured “inner peace” or “decrease in sexual harassment” as pos- sible responses suggests that the questionnaire had been devised to in-

clude responses that the researchers had identified as being already in circulation.

The accounts and analyses cited thus far regarding the spread of the prac- tice of veiling through the
1970
s are those of contemporary observers and scholars, American and Egyptian, who were studying the phenomenon. I will complement these accounts with one from the perspective of a woman of that era—Ekram Beshir—who took up the hijab and Islamic dress in the
1970
s. The narrative of experiences that Beshir offers both resonates with and weaves together themes that had emerged in the find- ings of El Guindi, Williams, and Radwan. But it weaves these together into a new kind of coherence, the coherence that these trends and facts take on when viewed and experienced from the other side of the great cultural divide of that era—the divide between mainstream society and Islamists.

Beshir was a medical student at Alexandria University in
1971
, an era, she tells us, when the miniskirt was at the height of fashion. “The university,” writes Beshir, “was flooded with Egyptian women wearing painted faces and western-style hair—and then there was me, I wore hijab. I wasn’t the only one in Alexandria wearing hijab at the time, but out of several million people, it was a very rare sight.”
50

Besides disapproval from an aunt who would often ask her why she was “acting so silly,” and an uncle who wondered how she would ever find a husband dressed like that, Beshir notes that one of her professors regularly commented on her dress. On one occasion, on a particularly hot day, he asked her why she wore “that thing” on her head. As she began to respond, “Because I am a Muslim and Allah asks Muslim women to . . .” the professor interrupted her furiously saying, “I’m Muslim, my wife’s Muslim, they’re Muslim!” He motioned to people in the busy campus. “So you’re questioning how faithful we are too?” Almost reduced to tears, Beshir returned home and found consolation in the Quran.

Soon after, Beshir met and married her husband and immigrated to Canada. There her husband became heavily involved in founding the first Muslim Student Association chapter at Carlton University in Ot- tawa. Both she and her husband would become involved in organizing Islamic children’s camps and
halaqa
circles and youth conferences, and

Beshir would go on to become a founding member of the first full-time Islamic school in their district in Ottawa.

Beshir gives an account of how she found herself awakening to Islam and to a new sense of obligation to awaken others to Islam (that is, to perform da‘wa). Her account affords invaluable insight into the process of inner transformation that, as El Guindi surmised, young peo- ple who were drawn to the movement found themselves undergoing.

A medical student at the time, Beshir experienced family illnesses and was living in a time of political turbulence in Egypt—a time, she writes, when “Israel kept declaring war on Egypt and other surrounding countries.” She found herself feeling “confused and scared” and felt that she “couldn’t go on living with this feeling that something pivotal was missing in my existence.” Searching for meaning, she attended a Thurs- day-evening class on Islamic education taught by a professor who was the father of one of her close friends. From that day forward the class, she wrote, became a “basic necessity for me”:

It nourished and fostered me, but most of all it enlightened me. It was as if I had woken up one day with my mouth parched, my body dehydrated and my heart yearning. Yearn- ing for what I didn’t know. Until I sat in the lecture hall full of curious students that first Thursday evening and the aching began to disappear. I had found it. Every Thursday after that I took a sip and I kept taking sips until my lips were no longer dry and my body was no longer drained. I began to learn the real meaning of life.

This experience critically informs Beshir’s subsequent sense of commit- ment to working for Islam. “There’s a lot more to Islam,” she writes,

than locking yourself up in the local mosque and praying
24
/
7
. Prayers and pure rituals are not ends in themselves, but they are prescribed to train and prepare us to fulfill our responsi- bilities in life. Islam is about community, cooperation, and support. . . . I believe that da‘wa is a big component of wor- shipping in Islam. For if all the knowledgeable Muslims out

there isolated themselves for worship, how could they ever pass on their knowledge? How would I have ever discovered the true Islam? . . . My thirst was quenched after a rigorous se- quence of trial and error. Now it seems undoubtedly clear to me that I had to help others find what they are looking for, help show them what they are missing out on. In my mind, it was simple really—if everyone passes on the message, every- one will be happy. It was then that I adopted a new lifestyle: that of a Muslim committed to action.

Beshir also considered the hijab to be an important part of the work of da‘wa. The hijab, she wrote, is “a great form of da‘wa, whether in Egypt or in Canada: when you wear the hijab, you’re no longer just represent- ing yourself, you’re representing Islam. No matter where you live in the world, people will always question what is different. Wearing hijab defi- nitely makes me different. I learned not to get offended when asked about my way of dressing: people are just trying to understand, and it’s every Muslim’s job to help them understand.”

Besides exemplifying how the elements of Islamism and veiling identified by academics come together in the life lived, Beshir’s story is also illuminating concerning how the Islamist movement would begin to seed itself in North America and elsewhere in the Western world, devel- opments that I discuss in subsequent chapters. I return to Beshir’s life story in the final chapter of this book when I examine how Islamist ideas and commitments, whether brought over by immigrants or as they emerge among American- and Canadian-born children of Islamists or among converts, are coming to blend in with quintessentially North American ideals of activism in pursuit of the goal of a just society.

Over the next three chapters, I trace the process, means, and meth- ods by which the Resurgence, and with it the veil, spread in the seventies and ensuing decades in Egypt, the country which first underwent this process and forged the methods, strategies, and ideas that the Resurgence would take across the world.

First, though, I continue my exploration of this critical decade of the
1970
s, the decade when a variety of galvanizing forces came together to propel the rise and spread of Islamism.

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4
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The New Veil

Converging Influences

he
1970
s was a critical decade with respect to the emergence and spread of the Resurgence. In this chapter I continue my