A Plea for Truce in the Hijab Wars

By Mohja Kahf

My dear friend Mona, salam alaiki. While I have long admired your writings and your principled stands on many issues, I read your two recent columns on the Shabina Begum case in Britain with dismay. I know your opinions come from love of truth and justice, and I do not countenance the attacks that have been made on your integrity and sincerity, from the same quarters that attack us all. You are dear to me.

I share your belief that hijab is not a requirement of Islam, that contemporary Muslim culture is obsessed with hijab and riddled with sexist assumptions posing as religious absolutes, and that non-Muslim liberals too often buy into sexist conservative Muslim apologetics. I also want to share with you my deep concerns about the reasons you give for not supporting Begum’s right to wear a jilbab to school. I am not so much interested in the specifics of Begum’s case as the principles involved in your reasons, and I want to go from there to criticizing the support for the hijab bans that have been expressed here on MWU!

You and I both were muhajjaba teens in Western countries. How would you have felt at sixteen if someone had told you that your beliefs were not your own, but just a product of familial pressure? I would have said ‘How dare you!’ I argued with my family on everything. In fact, they weren’t conservative enough to suit me, in one phase. I asserted myself and developed my character through my conservative Islamist identity.

And yeah, my folks, like Begum’s brother, were sympathizers of Islamist groups that are banned in Arab countries. It is a criminal offense against the state in Syria to side with the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan, and my family sympathized with this group. (As well they should, for my grandfather Sheikh Muhammad al-Mubarak, rahmat allahi alayh, was the co-founder of the Syrian Ikhwan.) For heaven’s sake, my dear, we’re talking about authoritarian Arab states, where it doesn’t take much to be a banned party. Who isn’t banned? Ya azizati Mona, surely on this you will agree.

It doesn’t make my family ‘sinister,’ nor does membership in the rather more obtuse Tahrir party make this girl’s brother sinister. They are entitled to having views which offend me and other Muslims without being—it almost seemed as if you were borderline criminalizing his views. Forgive me if I understood that wrong but that is how it read to me. Please-please don’t help along the blurring that is happening in the West where all Islamists are conflated with terrorist fringe Islamists.

Having extremist views does not take away your civil rights. That is a sure way to create an atmosphere fraught with even more extremism. Among Arab states, those countries that have allowed Islamist groups to function within the system, such as Jordan, have diffused them and forced them to begin a dialogic process of modifying their views to deal with the practicalities of a real electorate, while countries which criminalized Islamists, such as Algeria, saw the further radicalization and polarization of sides and breakdown of all civil dialogue and co-existence even.

Being Tahrir doesn’t necessarily make him the author of her jilbab, either. I wore a jilbab in high school, from tenth grade onward. It was my choice to wear it and I aspired to it for a long while before I had the nerve to do it. The day I came to school in a jilbab, I felt graceful and strong and protected and proud of my decision. It was my armor. It was the place where I located my empowerment. Yeah, I agree, that’s way too much emphasis to put on a woman’s garment, but it happens a lot anyway, and for the girl who feels that way, it’s real.

The step from hijab to jilbab is almost as big in a girl’s life as the step from not wearing hijab to wearing it. The sensations are similar to those of wearing initial hijab: You feel as if you have reclaimed your entire body this time, even more sweepingly. When you put on hijab, you have extended and defined your body space sharply and strongly, but with the looser one-piece garment of jilbab this is intensified. You feel you’ve tented it off from the appropriating gaze of—everybody.

It is a visceral feeling, located in the gut and chest (this makes chakra sense too, by the way, although that would not have occurred to me at the time). It is so powerful that sometimes it moves up into the throat and emboldens you to speak. You can’t take this away from a person. Especially not a teenaged girl.

(Next we could talk about the step from jilbab to niqab. Which I also support the right to wear. But not in one’s i.d. photo. I’ll leave that one for another day!)

I have heard the ‘she doesn’t really know her own mind and we know her needs better’ argument, usually from conservative parents arranging marriages for their daughters. I find it wrong there, and I find it wrong here. It infantilizes teen women. It condescends to them and does not acknowledge who they are.

As a former sixteen-year-old girl and the mother of one now (who does not, as you know, have the conservative Islam I had at her age), I believe in the will and agency of sixteen-year-old girls—even when it results in decisions I consider wrong.

To find out who they are, listen to them. Here is an obviously high-spirited girl, this Shabina Begum. I don’t know much more about her case than the headlines and am more interested in the larger issue than her case. But she is clearly strong willed or she would have gone any number of routes that don’t involve her taking the spotlight, speaking articulately, and demanding the attention she has demanded (she could have changed schools, changed clothing, allowed her brother to speak for her, made her case but more quietly; I can think of a bunch of ways this could have unfolded).

You have to look not at content but at process, my dear. As a feminist, I mean. As a feminist who cares about women’s freedom but who is dealing with women with whose ideology you totally disagree, you have to listen to what empowerment is to them.

There are two issues: One is, do you recognize that a sixteen-year-old girl has a will, which I’ve dealt with. The second is, do you see conservative, seemingly anti-feminist women (whether Muslim or not, really, but here we’re concerned with the Muslim ones), as having a will of their own.

Writing off Shabina’s agency over her decision seems to me to imply writing off adult conservative Muslim women, too. We’d have to conclude that they are just too dumb to know what’s good for them, label them self-hating women, patriarchally identified women, brainwashed pawns. Some people do that. In one discussion I had on the shariah law debate in Canada, for example, my interlocutor asserted—you were on the same e-list and may recall this—that conservative Muslim women really have no free choice, they are non-entities dominated by their men. I am not willing to write off their agency like that, Mona. Because I know them better than that. Well, for me, also because I am closely related to too many of them and love those relations too much just to dismiss, despise, infantalize, or condescend to conservative Muslim women.

A lot of Muslim women are conservative. You and I just have to face that reality, and deal with them as they are, in an effectual way, one that brings us to the common ground of women’s empowerment and autonomy. To them, their conservative decisions maximize their empowerment in the Islamist circle. They gain a respected place with their hijab and a notch higher with its more conservative form of jilbab. It may be a respected place that is too little, and too hierarchical, for you and me to countenance, but it is where they are. We can’t take what leverage they have away from them by siding with forces that don’t recognize their agency as Muslims and as women.

I haven’t even got to MWU!’s alarming support of the hijab bans and how grievously offensive that is to me. Hijab bans hurt women. I’ll have to leave that for another article.

I agree with you that there’s way too much hype about what Muslim women wear, in Muslim culture worldwide and also in the Western media, which even at this late date still eats up images of forced veiling. (But never acknowledges forced unveiling, which has a far longer history and affects millions more Muslim women today than forced veiling.) Yeah, so Western liberals are starting to acknowledge that some Muslim girls and women actually choose veiling and to understand the implications of that. It’s not Muslim apologetics—it’s true. Some women do find empowerment in hijab, and the Western press should recognize it, and the legal system should protect that right. And once you agree to that, you cannot balk at jilbab. Yes, or niqab, either, I’m afraid—same principles apply.

If we were talking about a case of forced jilbab in Iran or Saudi Arabia, or Afghanistan under the (initially U.S. sponsored) Taliban, I would be up there in the ranks fighting against forced hijab, for the same reasons of women’s empowerment and free choice. If we were addressing some venue within conservative Muslim families and communities, I would be arguing against the hijab-is-an-absolute-in-Islam mentality, the misogyny in placing the burden of the moral order all on women’s dress, and how appalling it is to socialize girls into hijab at age eleven, ten, nine. And I’m in there slugging away at their little merit ladder of hijab that valorizes the celestial glories of
jilbab once they’ve got her sold on hijab.

But I don’t go after the girl. Her fragile forming self is at stake and she is making her way as best she can amid a dizzying set of propositions. Her, I support. I give her that support even if I find her decisions bizarre. If my daughter for some unforeseeable reason decided to wear hijab or even jilbab or niqab, I’d keep my blanching to myself and say to her, ‘let’s go get you supplied with good fabric, then, and have a conference with your school.’ I’d clear the way for her. (I’d do the same if she got all goth and Nietszche on me and wanted to wear a black ‘God is dead’ t-shirt. I’d keep my sighs to myself and fight for her right to free speech.) Validation fosters her strength. After all, Mona, you and I grew from hijabed girls to the impassioned critics of the modern Muslim hijab subculture we are today.

Only after everyone gets out of the way of hijab going or hijab coming—in all its garments and manifestations—, only after Muslim women are free of imposed hijab requirements and imposed hijab bans, only after people stop freaking out about hijab and jilbab and niqab, will we get your wish, and mine, that people on all sides stop obsessing over Muslim women’s dress.

With love, respect, and salam, from
Mohja