A Rainbow of Headscarves on the Cairo Metro
By Mona Eltahawy
CAIRO – I wore a headscarf for 9 years. I was 16 when I chose to start wearing hijab – a form of clothing that covers up the body with the exception of the face and hands. At the time I believed it was a requirement from God of all Muslim women.
Because it was a decision I’d made myself, I never thought of the hijab as something men forced women to do. In fact, I became a feminist three years after I began wearing hijab and I never felt that being a headscarved feminist was a contradiction in terms. The way I saw it was that I chose which parts of my body to reveal and which parts to conceal. Just as a woman could choose to wear a mini skirt and still call herself a feminist, I could wear a headscarf and still be one.
But as I grew older, I felt more uncomfortable wearing a headscarf. The best way to describe that discomfort was a growing distance between the internal me and the external me. It troubled me greatly that I felt that way about the hijab but the harder I tried to fight the realization that I wanted to take my headscarf off, the harder the compulsion to remove it.
I found salvation in the writings of Muslim women scholars whose work helped me to realize that I could remain a good Muslim woman without a headscarf. Writers like Fatima Mernissi, the Moroccan sociologist, and the Egyptian-American Leila Ahmed, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School, were like a window thrown open to allow in the breeze of grace and mercy that I needed to gather up the courage to take off my headscarf.
I eventually did in 1993 at the age of 25.
I stopped wearing hijab at the time when many women in Egypt began to wear it. The reasons behind the increasing numbers of headscarves in Egypt are as varied and as diverse as the women on whose heads they sit. Some women wear it out of religious conviction – just as I used to. They include my mother, a physician with a Ph.D in medicine and my sister, who just graduated with a degree in English and comparative Literature. And believe me, they don’t come more feminist than those two fabulous women!
For others though, social and peer pressure are the reasons they took up the hijab.
Despite my difficult experience with the hijab, I’ve always defended a woman’s right to choose to wear it. What’s the point of feminism if it’s the kind that supports only the choice I would make?
But as social and peer pressure have increased in Egypt due to a growing conservatism in the country, it distresses me to think of all the young women who feel they have no choice but to cover their hair just so that they can be left alone and free of disapproving looks or conservative preachers who reject the plurality of views on the hijab. Many scholars believe it is a requirement, others leave it up to the individual woman or say it isn’t an obligation.
You notice things only when you’ve been away for a while and so it took my move from Egypt to the U.S. in 2000 to make me realize how widespread hijab had become. I’ve been returning to Egypt two or three times a year and this last trip brought me back for two weeks to train journalists and to give lectures.
Every morning and evening as I rode the Cairo metro to the American University in Cairo – my alma mater and the host of my training and lectures – it was clear that up to 80 percent of Muslim Egyptian women wore hijab. During the past few years of return, the increasing numbers of women donning the hijab would distress me because I knew of the strong social and peer pressure they’d faced.
But during this trip, my thinking switched. It happened one day as I was riding the metro and my eyes bounced from one brightly-colored headscarf to the next. Young women were wearing headscarves and clothes of every conceivable color and design. These weren’t the austere blacks of Iranian chadors or Saudi Arabian cloaks known as abayas that all women must wear in public there.
As I admired the meticulous care that each young woman had put into her outfit I thanked God for the human drive for self-expression and beauty. These young women might’ve felt pressured to cover their hair and bodies but nothing was going to quash their individuality.
They inspired me to remember that people always find a way to fight back.