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Loving and Leaving the Head ScarfWhat hijab's revolving door says about the religious mobility of American Muslims.

By Andrea Useem
Posted Monday, May 12, 2008, at 7:03 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

" 'Hijab is beautiful, hijab is what God wants, hijab is a Muslim woman's duty'—that's become a mantra among Muslim communities," says Fatemeh Fakhraie, a graduate student, blogger, and co-founder of the Facebook group "Just Because I Don't Wear Hijab Doesn't Mean I'm Not Muslim."

These theological arguments, while important in their own ways, sometimes seem little more than a patina atop more primal social urges, however. Wearing hijab or not wearing hijab—just like owning a gun or driving a Prius—says something fundamental about your beliefs and aspirations. And in America, at least, beliefs have a funny way of changing.

My own fervent attachment to the scarf gradually faded. Two years after first donning it, I was married and no longer needed the scarf to broadcast my unavailability to non-Muslim guys. I had also moved to a Persian Gulf country where hijab was not a personal choice but a cultural system of sex segregation: On the beaches there, men in shorts played soccer and swam, while women in layers of black polyester dipped their toes in the water and shook sand from their shoes.

Like spouses who know they are headed for divorce but still go through the marital motions, many hijabis continue to wear the scarf in public long after its inner meaning has dissipated. They wait for a natural break in their lives to make the transition. I took it off on my return flight from the Persian Gulf to the United States. Ali removed it after finishing a summer internship. Another woman I know literally moved across the country to make the change, simultaneously leaving the tight-knit Muslim community she felt was suffocating her and the scarf that pledged her allegiance to it. Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur, author of the 2005 essay collection Living Islam Out Loud, found that taking off hijab was about breaking up with not only her Muslim community but also her childhood assumptions. After she divorced an abusive husband, Abdul-Ghafur found herself judged and isolated by her fellow Muslims. Feeling burned by community norms that rushed her into marriage with the wrong guy, she questioned the hijab. "Taking it off expanded my identity—it was exciting, like a new haircut," she says.

But if you start pulling at the thread of doubt, how do you keep the whole sweater from unraveling? When religious scholar Karen Armstrong left her convent in the late 1960s, she proceeded to leave Catholicism, and today she says even the label of "freelance monotheist" feels restrictive. Ali still prays five times a day, fasts for Ramadan, and remains attracted to a somewhat-traditional religious outlook. "I don't think Islam is untrue in any way. But I did get very stuck in a way of looking at things that made Islam feel untrue, and I had to separate those things."

While many American Muslims dwell contentedly within the limits of modern Islamic orthodoxy—miniworlds where hijab can be taken for granted—others avoid it or pass through en route to more spacious destinations.

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Andrea Useem is a freelance religion writer and editor. Her Web site is www.ReligionWriter.com.
Photograph of a woman wearing a head scarf by Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images.
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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

(To reply, click here)

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

(To reply, click here)

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

(To reply, click here)

(5/13)

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