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

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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