Headscarves and Hymens (5 page)

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.”

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 the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait, along with the ultraconservative Salafis, opposed the emir’s plans to give women the right to vote and run for office, he—Akef—had written to them to remind them Islam did not forbid women’s political participation.

Pleased that he’d introduced women’s issues so early in our conversation, I asked Akef if the Muslim Brotherhood, should it ever govern Egypt, would change anything in the Egyptian constitution to curb women’s rights, such as making the veil mandatory.

He insisted once again that the Muslim Brotherhood believed in pluralism and inclusion, and told me this:

“And as proof, you are here interviewing me and you are naked,” Akef said.

“I am not naked.”

“Your hair is naked, your arms are naked; according to God’s law you are naked.”

“The verses in the Qur’an regarding women’s dress have been interpreted differently,” I said.

“Don’t listen to those who try to say hijab is not mandatory. There are no different interpretations. There is just one interpretation and according to that interpretation, you are naked.”

So much for pluralism.

I only had to leave the Muslim Brotherhood’s headquarters and take a look around me to understand why Akef wouldn’t have to change anything in the constitution to make veiling mandatory. The Muslim Brotherhood had already won that battle. The veil, be it the hijab or the niqab, is a white flag raised to signal our surrender to the Islamists and their conservatism. Almost a decade after that interview, with the majority of women in Egypt covered by one form of veil or another, it is clear the Islamists have achieved region-wide social control.

When I talk about the need for a social revolution in order for our political revolution to succeed, I have this Islamist victory over social mores—as well as the definition of modesty—in mind, not just the regime’s oppression.

I have never before written at length about my experience of either wearing or giving up the headscarf. It’s always been a difficult subject, and for many of the years following my decision to stop wearing a headscarf, I was so ashamed that I preferred not even to mention to new
acquaintances that there was a time when I wore the hijab. I wore a headscarf for nine years. It took me eight years to take it off.

When I lived in Egypt as a young child, none of my female relatives wore any kind of veil, and the only headscarves I saw were the casual handkerchiefs worn by rural Egyptian women. During the 1970s and ‘80s, however, women began to cover up more and more—this is noticeable when I look through old family photos. Aunts who thirty or forty years ago were getting married or attending weddings in sleeveless and knee-length dresses—and often posing next to belly dancers clad in sparkly, jangly bras, bikini bottoms, and flimsy, see-through skirts—are in today’s weddings almost uniformly veiled. The majority of their daughters, my cousins, are also in the hijab.

In 1980, I returned to Cairo—my family’s first trip back to Cairo since we moved to London in 1975—to find that my mother’s youngest sister had decided to wear an especially austere kind of veil that consists of a head-to-toe tentlike cloak. This aunt is only four years older than me; we’d been very close as young children and practically grew up together. When we now walked down the street side by side—I was thirteen; she was seventeen—strangers would stop in their tracks and hurl abuse for the way she was dressed. Egyptians are generous with social commentary—my hair was so short back then that one young man walking behind us told his
friend, “That girl used to be a boy and they gave her a sex change.” But my aunt was on the receiving end of even worse vitriol.

“What the hell are you doing?” “What is that tent you’re wearing?” (Now in Cairo, thirty-four years later, such abuse is hurled at women like me, who don’t veil.)

Saudi Arabia changed everything for me. It was soon after my family arrived in Jeddah, when I was fifteen years old, that I first wanted to wear a headscarf. Religion was everywhere. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—the official Kafkaesque title of the morality police, also called the Mutaween or the Haya’—badgered shopkeepers and shoppers alike to attend prayers, and chased after women, urging them to cover up. None of this, of course, protected my body from men’s roving eyes and hands. I needed something to defend myself, and I thought the hijab would. When I told my parents of my decision, they said I was too young to start wearing the hijab and suggested I wait a year or so.

Less than a month after we arrived in Jeddah, we went on hajj, or pilgrimage, one of the five pillars of Islam. Up until then, Mecca—the birthplace of Islam and the site of the Ka’aba, the cubical structure toward which Muslims pray five times a day—was a place I’d seen only in pictures hanging on the living room walls of family and friends. This trip was the first time I’d worn any kind
of veil outside prayer time. I looked like a nun dressed in my white pilgrimage clothes.

One of the first rituals of the pilgrimage is
tawwaf
: circling the Ka’aba in order to pay respect to this sacred place and signal your intention to perform the hajj. Watching from above the hundreds upon thousands of Muslim men and women circle the Ka’aba is like watching a turntable spin, smooth and breathtaking in its motion.

You’re supposed to circle the Ka’ba seven times, and as I slowly walked around it, reciting prayers along with my family, in a moment of great significance and sanctity, I felt a hand on my ass. I had never before been touched on that part of my body (or anywhere else, for that matter) by a man. I could not run, and even if I had possessed the courage, I could not turn around to confront the man who was groping me because the space was so crowded.

I could not put into words what was happening to me. I could not understand how, at this holiest of holy places, the place we all turned to when we prayed, someone could think to stick his hand on my ass and to keep it there until I managed to squirm away. He was persistent. Whenever I broke free, he persisted in groping my ass.

I burst into tears, because that’s all I could do. I did not have it in me to tell my parents the truth, so I told them the crowds were getting to me. We went up to an
inner level of the Grand Mosque, one story up, to complete our
tawwaf.
Then we returned to the lower level and the Ka’aba once more to kiss the black stone, another ritual of the pilgrimage. Muslims are taught that the stone was once translucent and white but that, over time, it has lost the allure of paradise and become tainted with the sins of humanity.

My mother and I had to wait for the women’s turn. A Saudi policeman who was standing there signaled to the men to wait while we kissed the stone. As I bent toward the stone, the same policeman surreptitiously groped my breast. Surreptitiously: I came to learn during my years in Saudi Arabia and then in Egypt that this was how most men did it. That’s how they got at your body—so surreptitiously that you ended up questioning your own sense of having been violated; your disgust at what happened; whether, in fact, fingers actually did poke through the underside of your seat on a bus or ever so lightly brush against your ass as the man to which those fingers belonged looked the other way.

If a policeman standing next to the Ka’aba in Mecca gropes my breast, what chance do I stand of complaining and getting anything done about it? Silence and shame are quick and early lessons. If a policeman who tells the men to stand aside so that women can kiss the black stone unhindered gropes my breast there, right next to the holiest site for Muslims, what chance do I or other women stand of fighting violations of our bodies?

It took me years before I could talk about being groped during hajj. I kept silent not only out of shame but so that Muslims would not look bad. Even now, when I do talk of being groped during hajj, I get accused of making it up or told that I’m maligning Islam. Yet several women have told me of similar violations as they performed holy rituals. How less likely would such violations of our bodies be if all the energy that went into trying to shut us up went toward stopping the men who grope us!

One evening, back in Jeddah, we took a gypsy cab for our weekly grocery shopping. The young man who dropped us off at the Jeddah mall where we shopped insisted on waiting so he could take us back home.

“Uncle, I want to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage,” the driver, who was in his twenties, told my dad, who sat next to him in the passenger seat on our ride home.

“But she’s fifteen.”

My mother, brother, and I were in the backseat trying very hard not to laugh.

“That’s okay. I still want to marry her.”

“In our family, no one gets married until they finish university, my son.”

“That’s okay. I’ll wait for her.”

We laughed a bit more when we got home, but the “she’s fifteen” followed by “that’s okay, I still want to marry her” was not the stuff of humor. Soon after, a much older man, who caught me browsing the notice board in a supermarket
while my parents were paying for their purchases, asked me if I was alone. After I told my parents what had happened, I was not allowed to go anywhere alone again. My brother had to be with me at all times—an early lesson in restricting a woman’s freedom of movement in the name of protection.