A Quiet Revolution (2 page)

So for me the sight of women in hijab now in America—in styles directly reminiscent of the hijabs of the Muslim Brotherhood—was an arresting and, frankly, given my memories of the Brotherhood, a dis- turbing sight: disturbing in any case if it was part of a growing trend, which, by the late nineties, it distinctly appeared to be.

My memories of the Muslim Brotherhood also dated back to child- hood. They included a strong if vague impression of them as people who bombed places, including cinemas—a memorable detail for me since I enjoyed going to the movies. But most particularly I remember the

Brotherhood for the assassination of Nuqrashi Pasha, prime minister of Egypt. His death cast a tremendous pall over our home, as he was also a friend of my father’s. Needless to say, this was not a home in which the Brotherhood and its goals and actions were viewed with even the slight- est sympathy. The Brotherhood women’s style of veil remained for me forever charged with these negative associations and memories. Its style was distinctive enough to cause me to ask, as a child, “Why are they dressed like that?” Because, was the answer, they are women of the Mus- lim Brotherhood.

I left Egypt in the late
1960
s, by which time the Muslim Brother-

hood had almost disappeared, many members having gone into hiding or fled the country because of the Nasser regime’s systematic attempt to eradicate the group. In the late
1960
s hardly anyone in such cities as Cairo or Alexandria wore hijab.

By the later
1990
s other events were fueling my sense of wariness

and unease with respect to the hijab’s spread—and its incipient spread seemingly now even to the West. By this time the Islamic Resurgence had made extraordinary gains across Egyptian society. Even by the early
1990
s, seemingly in direct correlation with the gains of the Resurgence, an escalating number of acts of militant Islamic violence were occurring in the country in a growing atmosphere of intellectual repression.

Just following the news coming out of Egypt was disturbing. In
1992
a well-known journalist, Farah Foda, a critic of Islamism, was murdered. The following year Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, a professor at Cairo Univer- sity, was tried on the grounds that he was an apostate. He was declared guilty and had to flee the country with his wife. In
1994
Naguib Mah- fouz, the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate, was stabbed, and, al- though he survived, he was seriously injured. Mahfouz was in his eighties at the time, and his novels had been appearing freely in Egypt since the
1940
s. The attack—by an Islamist on the grounds that Mahfouz’s works were blasphemous—seemed a shocking gauge of the country’s drastic descent into intolerance with the spread of Islamism and always, along with it, its signature dress, the hijab.

Through the
1990
s the life of my colleague Nawal el-Saadawi, an Egyptian feminist, was repeatedly threatened by Islamists. Then, in
1997
, an Islamist group perpetrated a horrific massacre at the temple of Hat-

shepsut (the only woman in ancient Egypt to rule as pharaoh) in Luxor, killing fifty-eight tourists. I was not at the time making a study of the veil’s resurgence or of these events, but cumulatively such news seemed reason enough to make one exceedingly wary about the spread of the hijab as part of a trend now also growing in the West.

All of this then, and the possibilities, fears, and questions that these associations opened up for me, were instantly brought to mind by the sight of this distinctively modern-looking hijab. At some point in the en- suing months, as I continued to think over the questions that the hijab’s presence inevitably raised for me (and always paying attention now when I saw women in hijab in the street or in the malls or in Harvard Yard— women who were, strikingly, almost always young), I found my ques- tions growing more and more compelling. What history was this that I was living through and witness to? Was some kind of extremist, militant Islam taking root in the West, including in the United States? Was that what the presence of the hijab signified? Could the Muslim Brotherhood have somehow managed to establish a foothold here and in other West- ern countries? Where were these young women getting their ideas that they should wear hijab? And, most intriguingly, since they lived in a free country where it was quite ordinary for women to challenge patriarchal ideas, why on earth did they feel bound to accept whatever it was that they were being told?

I soon learned from my readings of various studies of Muslims in America, among them Jane Smith’s book
Islam in America,
that the Mus- lim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups had indeed played key roles in the founding of many prominent Muslim American organizations, among them the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and the Islamic So- ciety of North America (ISNA).
1
To get a sense of what was happening as this evidently Islamist form of Islam gained dominance in America and elsewhere in the West, I began visiting mosques and listening to ser- mons, I interviewed women who wore hijab, and I began to attend the open meetings of major Muslim American organizations, including ISNA.

My on-the-ground research confirmed what I had learned from my readings, but it also opened up new questions. The first time I at- tended Friday congregational prayers at a local mosque I found myself

listening to an impassioned sermon delivered in praise of “the Martyr” (al-shaheed) Hasan al-Banna. Al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Broth- erhood, had been killed (“martyred”), probably by Egyptian government agents in
1949
in retaliation for the murder of Nuqrashi Pasha. Praising al-Banna in particular for his stand against Western imperialism, the preacher delivered his address in the vehement Arabic anti-imperialist rhetoric familiar to me from my youth. I had not heard such speech since I left Egypt. I could not help wondering as I listened—we had already had, after all, the
1993
bombing of the World Trade Center—whether the CIA was paying attention to such mosques and sermons.

At the same time, my experiences at the mosque that day also led to new conundrums. I had listened to the sermon in the basement room assigned to the women members of the congregation, while the men oc- cupied the main hall upstairs. The majority of the women were almost certainly not Arabic-speakers: many were dressed in the styles of South Asia, and some, as I could tell from their greetings and exchanges, were African American. One or two were Caucasian American, and three or four or so appeared to be Arab. During the sermon, which was in Ara- bic, most of the women had sat seemingly lost in thought—a natural enough response if they did not know the language. Others were keep- ing a watchful eye on their children, who ran in and out of the adjoin- ing playroom or came to sit beside their mothers on the somewhat dingy beige-carpeted floor.

Since I seemed to be one of the very few people in the room who actually understood what the preacher was saying, it clearly was not the sermon that drew these women to attend mosque. Nor could one as- sume that the women attending this mosque—or any mosque—neces- sarily shared the political interests or even the broad general and presumably Islamist goals and commitments of the mosque’s officials. Understanding what brought women to this mosque, and what
their
goals and interests were in attending mosque, would clearly entail care- ful observation well beyond just listening to sermons.

Besides specific questions such as these that were posed for me by what I was observing, there was always also the nagging question of why Islamism and veiling were apparently continuing to gain ground. Was that a sign of growing anti-Western feelings among Western Muslims?

What kind of Islam was this, exactly, that was gaining ground here, and how had it gained institutional dominance? And how would it evolve and develop in American society? Would it move toward blending and accommodation, or were we heading toward clash and collision?
2

My first impressions of ISNA’s conventions similarly confirmed my worst expectations even as they opened up new questions. Even though I knew of the Islamist foundations of the organization, I was still startled to see, as I arrived at the Convention Center amid a vast sea of people, that apparently every single female head was covered. It was hard to be- lieve that I was in Chicago and not, say, in Saudi Arabia or Iran, although the scene was too colorful for either of those places, in particular because of the wonderfully vivid dress of the South Asian women. I think that I had expected, since we were, after all, in America, that there would be some women defying the hijab rule. But as far as I could see, mine was the sole uncovered female head in sight—a situation I quickly remedied with the scarf I had brought along “just in case.” As an outsider and ob- server I obviously did not want to stand out.

Everything else about ISNA and the entire spectacle of the con- vention confirmed what the veil seemed to imply: that male dominance and gender hierarchy and separation were the ground rules here. Seating was gender segregated, and doorways, wherever possible, were gender segregated as well: one set of the double doors into the main auditorium was marked “women only,” and the other was left unmarked. Young people manned the doors and firmly redirected one to the appropriate door should one approach the wrong one, even if no one else was pass- ing through and there was no chance whatsoever of breaking the taboo of improper contact—that is, any physical contact—between the sexes. Overwhelmingly, too, it was men who were the speakers at most of the panels and plenary sessions. But there were some women speakers, and there were even a couple of heavily covered women—clad in long, loose robes and strictly concealing hijabs—who appeared on the podium as members of ISNA’s predominantly male board. There were also panels

—often made up of female speakers addressing “women’s” issues, among them divorce and domestic violence—which presented view- points that sometimes seemed “feminist,” or as much so as those I had

heard voiced by conservative women of other religious traditions, Chris- tian and Jewish, for example.
3
There was evidently ground here for fur- ther observation.

Even my interviews with young women who wore hijab prompted more questions. For example, one young woman, an African American, told me that she wore hijab as a way of calling for gender justice. “When people stare at me when I am on the T,” she said (the T is the Boston underground transport system), “I find myself thinking that if there’s just one woman out there who begins to wonder when she looks at me why she dresses the way she does and begins to notice the sexism of our society—if I’ve raised just one person’s consciousness, that’s good enough for me.” Another interviewee told me that she wore it as a way of calling for justice for minorities. Of Arab-Caucasian descent and a convert to Islam, she explained that she wore hijab “for the same reason as some of my Jewish friends wear a yarmulke: as a way of openly iden- tifying with a group that people have prejudices about and as a way of saying ‘yes, we’re here, and we have the right to be here and to be treated equally.’”
4

By what means, I wondered, had this emblem supposedly of Is- lamic patriarchy and oppression of women emerged today in America as an emblem of a call for justice, and even for gender-justice, no less? I would eventually find an answer to this question—most directly in the details around the reemergence of the veil in the first place in the Mid-

dle East, and in the new meanings of the veil that began to be hammered out there, specifically in Egypt, in the
1970
s and
1980
s.

For, as I pursued my research on what was happening with Is- lamism and women and the veil in America (while also always following developments around the veil and Islam in Europe) I had simultane- ously begun researching the story of the veil’s resurgence, from the time of its emergence in the Middle East to its spread to the West. Why, after nearly disappearing from many Middle Eastern and Muslim-majority societies, had the veil made a comeback, and how had it spread with such remarkable swiftness?

The veil had reappeared during the Islamic Resurgence, a resur- gence spurred into being in the
1970
s by a variety of forces, among them, most importantly, the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization today con-

sidered a major force in the history of Islam globally. As Fawaz Gerges, a prominent expert on Islamic movements, wrote, the Brotherhood is today the “most powerfully organized movement in the world of Islam.”
5
Often referred to in Arabic as “al-Sawha al-Islamiyya,” the Islamic Awakening, or simply as al-Sawha, the Awakening, the Islamic Resur- gence brought into being the form of Islam now most commonly re- ferred to in English as “Islamism.” In the early
1990
s this term began to replace other terms—among them “fundamentalism,” “radical” Islam, “political” Islam, and Salafism—which had all been used to refer to var- ious aspects of the Islamic Resurgence and the spectrum, or “continuum of movements” it comprehended, some radically militant while others,

by far the majority, moderate and nonmilitant.
6
The attribute all Is- lamists share, as Azza Karam wrote in her work on Islamism, is the com- mitment to the “quintessentially political agenda” of Islamizing society. The “sine qua non of being an Islamist,” she notes, is that of being ac- tively engaged in the work of bringing about social and political change in society—people and structures of government. To be an Islamist, she continues, “it is by no means sufficient to be a Muslim.” Rather, “an Is- lamist must be committed to active engagement in the quest for a more Islamic and just society. All Islamists will share this ultimate aim.”
7

How and why had women come to be drawn to this movement, and how and why had they been persuaded to adopt the veil, first in the Middle East and then globally? What was in it for women? What exactly
was
Islamism from the point of view of women? There were a host of further questions, too. For example, what role, if any, had women them- selves played in the Islamist movement and in spreading the resurgence of Islamism and the veil? As I would discover—and as I describe in the following pages—women had in fact been and continued to be key par- ticipants in the movement. Indeed, one woman, Zainab al-Ghazali, had been of such importance to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Resurgence that she is viewed by some today as the “unsung mother” of the Muslim Brotherhood.
8
Other questions that I pursued included men’s views of women’s roles in the movement, and what men’s roles had been in strategizing around women’s involvement, as well as around methods of spreading the veil. All of these and more were key questions for which we had no answers. There had been a number of studies on the