Loving and Leaving the Head ScarfWhat hijab's revolving door says about the religious mobility of American Muslims.
Posted Monday, May 12, 2008, at 7:03 AM ET
For most teenage girls, rebellion involves a tongue piercing or sneaking out to a beer-soaked party. But Suraya Ali, the daughter of unobservant Muslim immigrants from India, shocked her parents and her classmates by donning a Muslim head scarf. "It was my way of flipping the world off, saying, 'I can be what I want,' " says Ali, now 31, who grew up in a Chicago suburb.
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StumbleUponBut a decade and a half later, Ali had a "strange feeling" of no longer fitting in with her Muslim community; she was constantly set up with potential suitors who assumed her scarf symbolized a certain submissive attitude toward marriage; and her elite education had prompted her to question the traditional roles for men and women laid out in classical Islamic law. "I realized [wearing hijab] is not who I am anymore."
Ali's decision was visible only to those who knew her (and because of her family's sensitivities, she did not want her real name used). But her experience reveals how very modern American Muslim life can be. Hijab in America is not a social norm of ages past, unquestioningly handed down; rather, it has become a tool of self-expression. Just as Americans frequently change jobs, leave marriages, and switch religious affiliations, American Muslim women choose to love, and sometimes leave, the head scarf.
When Yale anthropologist Carolyn Rouse studied African-American Muslim women for her 2004 book Engaged Surrender, she observed that the hijab (and, in some cases, niqab, or face-covering) was primarily about group identity. Many female converts, for example, started veiling themselves immediately—the two were seen as inseparable. Wearing hijab "signified belonging to the ummah," or the broader, idealized Muslim community, she said. But this voluntary expression of citizenship doesn't always last. By the time Rouse wrote her epilogue, several of the women she had followed no longer wore the scarf. One convert, Rouse wrote, "believes she used hijab to prove to herself the depth of her faith. Now that she feels more secure with her faith she does not feel she needs it."
When I first put on the head scarf eight years ago—starting off with a horrible tan-and-white polyester square I purchased before I realized hijab could be stylish—I felt that I was daring to follow my beliefs, come what may. What I believed at that moment, as I pinned the polyester beneath my chin, was that God wanted me to cover, to simultaneously hide my beauty (such as it was) and proclaim my faith. I had become Muslim two years earlier while living and working in East Africa. As a journalist and "honorary male," I had mixed with more Muslim men than women in my travels and therefore gave little thought to hijab before converting. It was only when I returned to the United States for graduate school that I begin to notice my fellow muslimahs wearing head scarves. Had I missed something?
A turning point came one day at a cafe (OK, it was Starbucks) in Harvard Square, when a scarf-wearing woman walked in. Some customers gave her uneasy glances, and I felt sharp regret that she had no idea a fellow believer was sitting right there, silently supporting her. After that, I researched classical Islamic law as best I could and concluded that covering everything but your hands, face, and feet was, indeed, "required" for believing Muslim women.
The Quran actually has just two verses dealing specifically with women's dress. Chapter 33, verse 59, tells women to wear outer garments so they'll be recognized as Muslims and left alone. A longer verse, Chapter 24, verse 31, instructs women to guard their modesty, to cover their breasts, and not to display their beauty to males except their brothers, husbands, fathers, eunuchs, male slaves, etc. To the modern reader, the words can appear maddeningly ambiguous and painfully out of date, and they require not only translation from classical Arabic but a grasp of seventh-century historical context. Both passages are hotly debated. For hijab apologists, however, the verses, along with prophetic endorsement and scholarly rulings, prove that full covering is obligatory. This opinion is mainstream among Muslims in the United States; according to a 2007 study, 51 percent of American Muslim women wear hijab all or some of the time.
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Notes from the Fray Editor
The article's author, Andrea Useem, came into the Fray to join the first thread featured below, and was welcomed by readers—the discussion is a long, fascinating one.
Comments from the Fray
To me, any discussion of the Hijab in a free society begs the question: how do free women who practice a form of veiling square their personal choice of expression with the fact that it is a tacit endorsement of an oppressive system?
I think there has been a lot of discussion on veiling, but this question gets tiptoed around. I think it is the question for women who exercise that choice. I find the lack of examination of this issue somewhat disappointing, because it tends to get replaced with talk about how "interesting" it is how women make these choices in this country. In my view, it should focus on how "complicated" or "contradictory" it is that they defend their doing so as a matter of choice; a concept that has been largely foreign to the institution of veiling for thousands of years.
--jwschmidt
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The fact of the matter is that veiling women is a form of objectification. In societies where such nonsense goes on, the underlying assumption is that women are "property" of their men, and one veils them for the same reason one puts valuables in a safe-deposit box--to keep others from getting at your stuff, What's being protected is not the safety or "honor" of women, but the decidedly male-dominant social order. Furthermore, veiling women has the additional "advantage" of marking and maintaining them as such--which is to say, it's a form of social control over them.
--O Hellenbach
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I wrote my senior thesis on a very similar topic, why young American Muslim women decide to put on and take off the Hijab. This subject was compared with the Victorian Corset and how social expectations of femininity have influences western standards of beauty and sexuality from the Industrial age to the present. My research for the Hijab portion of my thesis consisted of interviewing 15 young Muslim women who attended my University. As the 9/11 generation, I was not surprised to find that many of the young women had decided to wear Hijab because they wanted display their sense of solidarity for their fellow Muslims at the time. It was an effort on many of their parts to try to break stereotypes that existed in the Western world about how Muslim women were supposed to behave. Some, after a few years of wearing the Hijab felt stronger than every in their mission and their faith, others felt that after a few years with the Hijab they no longer felt compelled to wear it.
While the above examples made up the majority of the group, there were a few Muslim women who had not yet made the decision to wear the Hijab. These ladies were torn, their families did not expect it of them, many of their parents discouraged it, rather the pressure was coming from their peers in the close knit Muslim community that existed at our University. As a minority religion, the Islamic groups that existed at our school could often be demanding of their female members because of the visible nature of the Hijab. Some young women wore the Hijab because they felt comforted that they did not have to be viewed in a sexual nature in Western society. They were removing the option of being viewed as a sex object, thus making themselves creatures of a purely intellectual nature.
The parallel of the two parts of the thesis was interesting, as Western women attempted to become liberated by removed the restrictive corset, lessening their clothing and declaring their sexuality to the public world, Muslim counterparts found it more liberating both religiously and sexually to cover themselves and remove that factor from the equation. I think it's a great subject and I loved your article. Thanks for making me think about my thesis again!
--kingrose
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