As
Muslim women, we actually ask you not to wear the hijab in the name of
interfaith solidarity
by
Asra Q. Nomani and Hala Arafa
Last week, three female
religious leaders — a Jewish rabbi, an Episcopal vicar and a Unitarian reverend
— and a male imam, or Muslim prayer leader, walked into the sacred space in
front of the ornately-tiled minbar, or pulpit, at the
Khadeeja Islamic Center in West Valley City, Utah.
The women were smiling widely, their hair covered with swaths of bright
scarves, to support “Wear a Hijab” day.
The Salt Lake Tribune
published a photo of fresh-faced teenage girls, who were not Muslim, in the
audience at the mosque, their hair covered with long scarves. KSL TV later
reported: “The hijab — or headscarf — is a symbol of modesty and dignity. When
Muslim women wear headscarves, they are readily identified as followers of
Islam.”
For us, as mainstream Muslim
women, born in Egypt and India, the spectacle at the mosque was a painful
reminder of the well-financed effort by conservative Muslims to dominate modern
Muslim societies. This modern-day movement spreads an ideology of political
Islam, called “Islamism,” enlisting well-intentioned interfaith do-gooders and
the media into promoting the idea that “hijab” is a virtual “sixth pillar” of
Islam, after the traditional “five pillars” of the shahada (or proclamation of
faith), prayer, fasting, charity and pilgrimage.
We reject this interpretation
that the “hijab” is merely a symbol of modesty and dignity adopted by faithful
female followers of Islam.
This modern-day movement,
codified by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Taliban Afghanistan and the Islamic State, has
erroneously made the Arabic word hijab synonymous with “headscarf.” This
conflation of hijab with the secular word headscarf is misleading. “Hijab”
literally means “curtain” in Arabic. It also means “hiding,” “obstructing” and
“isolating” someone or something. It is never used in the Koran to mean
headscarf.
In colloquial Arabic, the word
for “headscarf” is tarha. In classical Arabic, “head”
is al-ra’as and cover is gheta’a.
No matter what formula you use, “hijab” never means headscarf. The media must stop spreading this misleading
interpretation.
Born in the 1960s into
conservative but open-minded families (Hala in Egypt
and Asra in India), we grew up without an edict that
we had to cover our hair. But, starting in the 1980s, following the 1979
Iranian revolution of the minority Shiite sect and the rise of well-funded
Saudi clerics from the majority Sunni sect, we have been bullied in an attempt
to get us to cover our hair from men and boys. Women and girls, who are
sometimes called “enforce-hers” and “Muslim mean girls,” take it a step further
by even making fun of women whom they perceive as wearing the hijab
inappropriately, referring to “hijabis” in skinny
jeans as “ho-jabis,” using the indelicate term for
“whores.”
But in interpretations from
the 7th century to today, theologians, from the late Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi to UCLA’s Khaled Abou El
Fadl, and Harvard’s Leila Ahmed, Egypt’s Zaki Badawi, Iraq’s Abdullah al Judai and Pakistan’s Javaid Ghamidi, have clearly established that Muslim women are not
required to cover their hair.
Challenging
the hijab
To us, the “hijab” is a symbol
of an interpretation of Islam we reject that believes that women are a sexual
distraction to men, who are weak, and thus must not be tempted by the sight of
our hair. We don’t buy it. This ideology promotes a social attitude that
absolves men of sexually harassing women and puts the onus on the victim to
protect herself by covering up.
The new Muslim Reform
Movement, a global network of leaders, advocating for human rights, peace and
secular governance, supports the right of Muslim women to wear — or not wear —
the headscarf.
Unfortunately, the idea of
“hijab” as a mandatory headscarf is promulgated by naïve efforts such as “World
Hijab Day,” started in 2013 by Nazma Khan, the
Bangladeshi American owner of a Brooklyn-based headscarf company, and Ahlul
Bayt, a Shiite-proselytizing TV station, that the University
of Calgary, in southwest Canada, promotes as a resource for its
participation in “World Hijab Day.” The
TV station argues that wearing a “hijab” is necessary for women to avoid
“unwanted attention.” World Hijab Day, Ahlul Bayt and
the University of Calgary didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In its “resources,” Ahluly Bayt includes a link to the notion that “the woman is awrah,”
or forbidden, an idea that leads to the confinement, subordination, silencing
and subjugation of women’s voices and presence in public society. It also
includes an article,
“The top 10 excuses of Muslim women who don’t wear hijab and their obvious
weaknesses,” with the argument, “Get on the train of repentance, my sister,
before it passes by your station.”
The rush to cover women’s hair
has reached a fever pitch with ultraconservative Muslim websites and
organizations pushing this interpretation, such as VirtualMosque.com
and Al-Islam.org,
which even published a feature,
“Hijab Jokes,” mocking Muslim women who don’t cover their hair “Islamically.”
Last week, high school girls
at Vernon Hills High School, outside Chicago, wore headscarves for an activity,
“Walk
a Mile in Her Hijab,” sponsored by the school’s conservative Muslim
Students Association. It disturbed us to see the image of the girls in scarves.
Furthermore, Muslim
special-interest groups are feeding articles about “Muslim women in hijab”
under siege. Staff members at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which
has pressed legal and PR complaints against U.S. companies that have barred
employees from wearing hijabs on the job, has even called their organization
“the hijab legal defense fund.”
Today, in the 21st century,
most mosques around the world, including in the United States, deny us, as
Muslim women, our Islamic right to pray without a headscarf, discriminating
against us by refusing us entry if we don’t cover our hair. Like the Catholic Church
after the Vatican II reforms of 1965 removed a requirement that women enter
churches with heads covers, mosques should become headscarf-optional, if they
truly want to make their places of worship “women-friendly.”
Fortunately, we have those
courageous enough to challenge these edicts. In early May 2014, an Iranian
journalist, Masih Alinejad, started a brave new
campaign, #MyStealthyFreedom,
to protest laws requiring women to wear hijabs that Iran’s theocracy put in
place after it won control in 1979. The campaign’s slogan: “The right for
individual Iranian women to choose whether they want hijab.”
Important
interpretations of the Koran
The mandate that women cover
their hair relies on misinterpretations of Koranic verses.
In Arabic dictionaries, hijab
refers to a “barrier,” not necessarily between men and women, but also between
two men. Hijab appears in a Koranic verse (33:53), during the fifth year of the
Prophet Muhammad’s migration, or hijra, to Medina,
when some wedding guests overstayed their welcome at the prophet’s home. It
established some rules of etiquette for speaking to the wives of Prophet
Muhammad: “And when ye ask of them anything, ask it of them from behind a
hijab. This is purer for your hearts and for their hearts.” Thus, hijab meant a
partition.
The word hijab, or a
derivative, appears only eight times in the Koran as an “obstacle” or “wall of
separation” (7:46), a “curtain” (33:53), “hidden” (38:32), just a “wall of
separation” (41:5, 42:52, 17:45), “hiding” (19:14) and “prevented” or “denied
access to God” (83:15).
In the Koran, the word hijab
never connotes any act of piety. Rather, it carries the negative connotation of
being an actual or metaphorical obstacle separating the “non-believers” in a
dark place, noting “our hearts are under hijab (41:5),” for example, a wall of
separation between those in heaven and those in hell (7:46) or “Surely, they
will be mahjaboon from seeing their Lord that day
(83:15).” Mahjaboon is a derivate verb from hijab.
The Saudi Koran translates it as “veiled.” Actually, in this usage, it means,
“denied access.”
The most cited verse to defend
the headscarf (33:59) states, “Oh, Prophet tell thy wives and thy daughters and
the believer women to draw their jilbab close around
them; this will be better so that they be recognized and not harmed and God is
the most forgiving, most merciful.” According to Arabic dictionaries, jilbab means “long, overflowing gown” which was the
traditional dress at the time. The verse does not instruct them to add a new
garment but rather adjust an existing one. It also does not mean headscarf.
Disturbingly, the government
of Saudi Arabia twists its translation of the verse to impose face veils on
women, allowing them even to see with just “one eye.” The government’s
translation reads: “O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women
of the believers to draw their cloaks (veils) all over their bodies (i.e.
screen themselves completely except the eyes or one eye to see the way). That
will be better, that they should be known (as free respectable women) so as not
to be annoyed, and God is most forgiving, most merciful.”
Looked at in context, Islamic
historians say this verse was revealed in the city of Medina, where the prophet
Muhammad fled to escape persecution in Mecca, and was revealed to protect women
from rampant sexual aggression they faced on the streets of Medina, where men
often sexually harassed women, particularly slaves. Today, we have criminal
codes that make such crimes illegal; countries that don’t have such laws need
to pass them, rather than punishing women for the violent acts of others.
Another verse (24:31) is also
widely used to justify a headscarf, stating, “… and tell the believing women to
lower their gaze and guard their chastity, and do not reveal their adornment
except what is already shown; and draw their khemar
over their neck. . . .”
In old Arabic poetry, the khemar was a fancy silk scarf worn by affluent women. It
was fixed on the middle of the head and thrown over their back, as a means of
seducing men and flaunting their wealth. This verse was revealed at a time,
too, when women faced harassment when they used open-air toilets. The verse
also instructs how to wear an existing traditional garment. It doesn’t impose a
new one.
Reclaiming
our religion
In 1919, Egyptian women
marched on the streets demanding the right to vote; they took off their veils,
imported as a cultural tradition from the Ottoman Empire, not a religious
edict. The veil then became a relic of the past.
Later, Egyptian President
Gamal Abdel-Nasser said in a speech in the early 1960s that, when he sought
reconciliation with members of the Muslim Brotherhood group for attempting to
assassinate him in 1954, the Supreme Leader of the Brotherhood gave him a list
of demands, including, “imposing hijab on Egyptian women.” The audience members
didn’t understand what the word hijab meant. When Nasser explained that the
Brotherhood wanted Egyptian women to wear a headscarf, the audience members
burst out laughing.
As women who grew up in modern
Muslim families with theologians, we are trying to reclaim our religion from
the prongs of a strict interpretation. Like in our youth, we are witnessing
attempts to make this strict ideology the one and only accepted face of Islam.
We have seen what the resurgence of political Islam has done to our regions of
origin and to our adoptive country.
As Americans, we believe in
freedom of religion. But we need to clarify to those in universities, the media
and discussion forums that in exploring the “hijab,” they are not exploring
Islam, but rather the ideology of political Islam as practiced by the mullahs,
or clerics, of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the
Islamic State.
In the name of “interfaith,”
these well-intentioned Americans are getting duped by the agenda of Muslims who
argue that a woman’s honor lies in her “chastity” and unwittingly pushing a
platform to put a hijab on every woman.
Please do this instead: Do not
wear a headscarf in “solidarity” with the ideology that most silences us,
equating our bodies with “honor.” Stand with us instead with moral courage
against the ideology of Islamism that demands we cover our hair.
Asra Q. Nomani is a former Wall Street
Journal reporter and the author of “Standing Alone: An American Woman’s
Struggle for the Soul of Islam.” She is a co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement, a new
initiative of Muslims and their allies, advocating peace, human rights and
secular governance. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com. Hala Arafa is a retired
journalist who worked for 25 years at the International Bureau of Broadcasting
as a program review analyst. She was a news editor at the Arabic branch of the
Voice of America.
Posted
February 23, 2016 with the author's permission. This article was initially
published in the Washington
Post on December 21, 2015