Personal Is Political

Now here's a fascinating and very moving article from The Times written by a young woman, Mona Elthahaway, who decided to stop wearing the Islamic veil or niqab.

I imagine there are plenty of Muslims who would dearly love to punish this young woman for her actions, but that just goes to show the scale of the problem with the conservative end of political Islam. 

The personal is political, so they say, and as Mona's book deserves to be widely read I think I'll buy a copy of "Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution'.

I hope Mona goes on to lead a happy and fulfilled life, but until I read her piece I didn't the word 'veil' is an anagram of 'evil'. 

Funny that.

Removing the veil

Mona Eltahawy and, left, woman wearing niqab Clayton Cubitt


Mona Eltahawy and, left, woman wearing niqab Clayton Cubitt

By Mona Eltahawy - The Times

When she moved from Britain to Saudi Arabia as a teenager, Mona Eltahawy began wearing a hijab in order to avoid being harassed by men. Here she talks about why, at 25, she decided to stop wearing it

Nothing prepared me for Saudi Arabia. I was born in Egypt, but my family left for London when I was seven years old. After almost eight years in the UK, we moved to Saudi Arabia in 1982. Both my parents, Egyptians who had earned PhDs in medicine in London, had found jobs in Jeddah, teaching medical students and technicians clinical microbiology. The campuses were segregated. My mother taught the women on the female campus, and my father taught the men on the male campus. When an instructor of the same gender wasn’t available, the classes were taught via closed-circuit television, and the students would have to ask questions using telephone sets. My mother, who had been the breadwinner of the family for our last year in the United Kingdom, when we lived in Glasgow, now found that she could not legally drive. We became dependent on my father to take us everywhere. As we waited for our new car to be delivered, we relied on gypsy cabs (unlicensed taxis) and public buses. On the buses, we would buy our ticket from the driver, and then my mother and I would make our way to the back two rows (four if we were lucky) designated for women.

It felt as though we’d moved to another planet whose inhabitants wished women did not exist. I lived in this surreal atmosphere for six years. In this world, women, no matter how young or how old, are required to have a male guardian – a father, a brother, or even a son – and can do nothing without this guardian’s permission. They cannot travel, open a bank account, apply for a job, or even get medical treatment without a man’s stamp of approval. I watched all this with a mounting sense of horror and confusion.

I would mention voting rights, but when I lived in Saudi Arabia, no one could vote. King Abdullah had said women will be allowed to vote and run for office in the 2015 elections, but it remains to be seen if clerics – such as the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, who believes that women’s involvement in politics “will open the door to evil” – will scuttle that promise as they did in 2009, when only men were enfranchised in Saudi Arabia’s first ever municipal elections.

When I encountered this country aged 15, I was traumatised into feminism – there’s no other way to describe it – because to be a female in Saudi Arabia is to be the walking embodiment of sin. The country follows an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam known alternatively as Wahhabism or Salafism, the former associated more directly with the kingdom, and the latter, austere form of Islam with those who live outside Saudi Arabia. The obsession with controlling women and our bodies often stems from the suspicion that, without restraints, women are just a few degrees short of sexual insatiability. Yet while clerics busy themselves suppressing female desire, it is the men who can’t control themselves. In too many countries in the region, sexual harassment is epidemic.

It was soon after my family arrived in Saudi Arabia that I first wanted to wear a headscarf. I was 15 years old. Religion was everywhere. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice – the official Kafkaesque title of the morality police, also called the Mutaween or the Haya’ – badgered shopkeepers and shoppers alike to attend prayers, and chased after women, urging them to cover up. I needed something to defend myself from men’s roving eyes and hands, and I thought the hijab, a form of dress that covers everything but the face and hands, would. When I told my parents of my decision, they said I was too young to start wearing the hijab and suggested I wait a year or so.

Less than a month after we arrived in Jeddah, we went on haj, or pilgrimage. Up until then, Mecca, the birthplace of Islam and the site of the Ka’aba, the cubical structure towards which Muslims pray five times a day, was a place I’d seen only in pictures hanging on the living room walls of family and friends. This trip was the first time I’d worn any kind of veil outside prayer time. I looked like a nun dressed in my white pilgrimage clothes.

One of the rituals of the pilgrimage is tawwaf: circling the Ka’aba in order to pay respect to this sacred place and signal your intention to perform the haj. As I slowly walked around it, reciting prayers along with my family, a moment of great significance, I felt a hand on my bottom. I had never before been touched on that part of my body (or anywhere else, for that matter) by a man. I could not run, and even if I had possessed the courage, I could not turn around to confront the man who was groping me because the space was so crowded.

I could not put into words what was happening to me. I could not understand how, at this holiest of holy places, the place we all turned to when we prayed, someone could think to stick his hand on my bottom and to keep it there until I managed to squirm away. He was persistent. Whenever I broke free, he persisted in groping me.

I burst into tears, because that’s all I could do. I couldn’t tell my parents the truth; I told them the crowds were getting to me. We went up to an inner level of the Grand Mosque, one storey up, to complete our tawwaf. Then we returned to the lower level and the Ka’aba once more to kiss the black stone, another ritual of the pilgrimage.

My mother and I had to wait for the women’s turn. A Saudi policeman who was standing there signalled to the men to wait while we kissed the stone. As I bent toward the stone, the policeman surreptitiously groped my breast. Surreptitiously: I came to learn during my years in Saudi Arabia and then in Egypt that this was how men did it. You ended up questioning your own sense of having been violated; did fingers actually poke through the underside of your seat on a bus or lightly brush against your behind as the man to which those fingers belonged looked away?

It took me years before I could talk about being groped during haj. Even now, when I do, I get accused of making it up. Yet several women have told me of similar violations as they performed holy rituals.

One evening, back in Jeddah, we took a cab for our weekly shopping trip. The young man who dropped us off at the Jeddah mall insisted on waiting so he could take us back home.

“Uncle, I want to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage,” the driver, who was in his twenties, told my dad, who sat next to him in the passenger seat on our ride home.

“But she’s 15.”

My mother, brother, and I were in the backseat trying very hard not to laugh.

“That’s OK. I still want to marry her.”

“In our family, no one gets married until they finish university, my son.”

We laughed a bit more when we got home, but the “She’s 15,” followed by “That’s OK, I still want to marry her” was not the stuff of humour. Soon after, a much older man, who caught me browsing the noticeboard in a supermarket while my parents were paying for their purchases, asked me if I was alone. After I told my parents what had happened, I was not allowed to go anywhere alone again. My brother had to be with me at all times – an early lesson in restricting a woman’s freedom of movement in the name of protection.

By the time we went for our second haj, a year later, my mind was ready to surrender and my body was desperate for invisibility. It felt as if everything was haram (prohibited) in Saudi Arabia. I was descending into my first of several depressions; I felt I was losing my mind. I didn’t talk to anyone about how I felt or get any help. I struck a deal with God: they keep saying a good Muslim woman covers her hair, so I’ll cover my hair if you save my mind. I decided to wear the veil, and this time my parents accepted my decision. But the hijab did not make me invisible. I had decided to hide my body the way 16-year-old girls, newly aware of male attention, sometimes take refuge in baggy clothing. Still, the garments I wore did not protect my body from wandering fingers and hands. If I were to use paint to indicate the places where my body was touched, groped or grabbed, even while wearing the hijab, my torso, back and front, would be covered with colour.

Despite my depression, I was doing well at a school for Muslim expats in Jeddah. I wrote an essay about the ubiquity of women’s head coverings across different faiths, which argued it was unfair to associate the veil exclusively with Islam. What about nuns, or ultra-Orthodox Jewish women? I was keen to defend my commitment to the headscarf, and to connect to other religions the notion of modesty to which I had submitted.

I have never written before about my experience of either wearing or giving up the headscarf. It’s always been a difficult subject, and for many of the years following my decision to stop wearing a headscarf, I was so ashamed that I preferred not even to mention to new acquaintances that there was a time when I wore the hijab.

Hijab is an Arabic word meaning “barrier” or “partition,” but it has come to represent complex principles of modesty and dress. The interpretation of the Koran’s instructions on modesty is supported with Hadith literature in which Muhammad is said to have instructed women to cover all of their body except for the face and hands. But veiling has never and will never be as simple as these passages seem to suggest.

There are various explanations for why women veil themselves. Some do it out of piety, believing that the Koran mandates this expression of modesty. Others do it because they want to be visibly identifiable as “Muslim”, and for them a form of veiling is central to that identity. For some women, the veil is a way to avoid expensive fashion trends and visits to the hair salon. For others, it is a way to be left alone and afforded a bit more freedom to move about in a public space that has become increasingly male-dominated.

In recent decades, as veiling became more prevalent throughout the Arab world, the pressure on women who were not veiled began to increase, and more women took on the veil to avoid being harassed on the streets – in a 2007 article The New York Times claimed that up to 90 per cent of Muslim women in Egypt wear some kind of headscarf. Some women fought their families for the right to veil, while others were forced to veil by their families. For yet others, it was a way to rebel against the regime or the West.

So the act of wearing the hijab is far from simple. It is burdened with meanings: oppressed woman, pure woman, conservative woman, strong woman, asexual woman, uptight woman, liberated woman. I chose to wear the hijab at the age of 16 and chose to stop wearing it when I was 25.

It is no exaggeration to say that the hijab has consumed a large portion of my intellectual and emotional energy since I first put on a headscarf. I might have stopped wearing one, but I never stopped wrestling with what veiling means for Muslim women.

I wore a headscarf for nine years. It took me eight years to take it off. My escape route was to emphasize the idea of “choice”. If a woman had a right to wear a miniskirt, surely I had the right to choose my headscarf. My choice was a sign of my independence of mind. Surely, to choose to wear what I wanted was an assertion of my feminism. I was to learn that choosing to wear the hijab is much easier than choosing to take it off.

When I returned to Egypt at 21 to study journalism at the American University in Cairo (AUC), the hijab became a full-time job, the duties of which I had not anticipated. Back then, in 1988, before neon-pink and orange hijabs and skinny jeans, there were more fixed ideas about what a woman in a hijab could and could not do. The strange combination that I represented complicated that equation: an Egyptian woman with a very English accent and broken Arabic, who danced along to music on campus in her hijab. Back then, that was not a comfortable combination. But trying to persuade people I could make it work became an obsession.

I’d think to myself, I can’t let the team down. What will people think about Muslims if I take my headscarf off after all I’ve said and done to prove you can wear one and still be an extrovert and a feminist?

One day, I interviewed a veteran journalist who was doing exactly what I aspired to do: using her writing to fight for women’s equality. “Why are you covering your hair?” she asked me. “Can’t you see you’re destroying everything we’ve worked so hard for?”

At the time, I could not.

“But I’ve chosen to dress like this,” I replied. What finally helped me part ways with the hijab was an anecdote my mother relayed from a conversation about me she’d had with a doctor, a colleague of my father’s. It helped put to rest my conflict over that word, choice. The doctor, asking after my brother and me, wondered if I was married. When my mother told him I wasn’t, he replied – as she conveyed to me – “Don’t worry, she wears a headscarf. She’ll find a husband.” Just like that, a piece of cloth had superseded me.

Then I understood, as this man’s patronising confidence in my scarf had shown, that I wasn’t the Hijab Poster Girl I thought I was. I was just a hijab.

When I so quickly replied, “But I’ve chosen to dress like this,” I had not considered men, such as that doctor, for whom my choice was irrelevant (just as my choice was irrelevant to the journalist). I realised the journalist and the doctor were on opposite sides, and I knew I did not want to be on the doctor’s side.

The week I decided to stop wearing a headscarf, I had just finished my graduate studies in journalism at AUC. You could count on maybe two hands the number of women in headscarves at my university during the time I studied there, from 1988 to 1992. In those years, I was in the headscarf-wearing minority off campus as well.

My two biggest challenges were telling my family, who had pressured me to keep the headscarf on during those eight years of struggle, and getting a bad haircut. I did not want anyone to think I’d taken it off for vanity’s sake. At the time I did not wear any make-up, did not pluck my eyebrows and rejected “femininity” with a passion.

Those final days of my struggle with the headscarf took place during a heatwave, and I used the weather as an excuse to hide at home for a few days. I finally forced myself to go to AUC, my friends, both male and female, were split between the “You look so much better!” camp and the “What have you done? You’ve made us look so bad!” camp.

I felt guilty for years. I assuaged it somewhat by continuing to wear my old hijab-appropriate clothes, minus the headscarf. I was so ashamed that I’d taken it off that I would never tell new acquaintances that I used to wear the hijab. I didn’t wear make-up, my hair remained short, and I had to reckon with a new body consciousness. Wearing the hijab for nine years had been my way of trying to hide from men, but in the end it had only hidden my body from myself.

I have heard from several women in Egypt who stopped wearing the headscarf or the niqab after the revolution that began in January 2011. I was living in the United States then [having married (briefly) an American and become an American citizen in 2011]. I did not have enough money to fly back to Egypt to join the hundreds of thousands who marched on Tahrir Square. But I returned in November 2011 to take part in the subsequent protests in Mahamed Mahmoud Street. During the five days of clashes that occurred between demonstrators trying to protect Tahrir Square and the soldiers and police, I was sexually assaulted by security forces – beaten so severely that my left arm and right hand were broken – and detained, first by the Ministry of the Interior and then by military intelligence, for 12 hours, two of which I spent blindfolded. Only by virtue of a borrowed mobile phone was I able to send an alert on Twitter about my situation. At least 12 other women were subjected to various forms of sexual assault during the protest in which riot police attacked me. None of them has spoken publicly about her ordeal, likely due to shame or family pressure. At first, I spoke out in order to expose and shame not just the men who’d assaulted me but also the regime that had trained them to do so.

When the riot police stormed the street on the second night, I ended up alone in an abandoned shop. Four or five police surrounded me and started beating me with nightsticks. I raised my arms to protect my head and they broke my left arm and my right hand in two places. I had hands all over my body, on my breasts – I was literally taking hands out of my trousers. They were calling me a whore. Pulling my hair. They dragged me to the interior ministry past men in plain clothes. Their eyes, dead to my assault.

Divide and conquer takes on a new meaning when you tug on the jacket of the supervising officer who, as he witnesses his men groping every part of your body, assures you nonetheless that you are safe because he will protect you. Then, after he says he will protect you, in the very next breath he threatens you with gang rape by another group of his men, amassed close by and gesticulating at you. It was an older man, from the military, who ended it, shouting, “Get her out.” I thought that meant let me go but it would be 12 hours – 6 hours being interrogated in an office at the interior ministry and 6 hours at the military intelligence building – before I was released and finally received medical help.

The details of what happened to me mattered little to the triage nurse in the emergency department of the private hospital where, about 16 hours after riot police had broken my arms and sexually assaulted me, I was trying to get medical care.

“How could you let them do that to you? Why didn’t you resist?”

She might as well have asked me where my shame was. How could I “let” riot police sexually assault me, and how could I so brazenly describe what had happened to me? It had been many years since I was a virgin, but she was chiding me for my lack of moral virginity, if you will. A good virgin, a good moral virgin, would have “saved” herself from those men’s hands; a good moral virgin would not have been there on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in the first place. Finally, a good moral virgin would not have so openly described her sexual assault.

“When you’re surrounded by four or five men from the riot police, and they’re beating you with sticks, there isn’t much ‘resisting’ you can do,” I explained to the nurse.

I actually “resisted” sex for a long time – too long, I believe when I look back now. I guarded my hymen like a good virgin until I was 29.

Just as it had taken me eight years to take off my hijab, it took me a long time to overcome all that I had been taught about sex and what I should and should not do with my body. Unlearning cultural and religious lessons and taboos can involve a radical turning against all that you have been taught.

I had spent most of my twenties working hard at building a journalism career. Channelling all my energies into work was also a convenient way to avoid marriage, which at the time was the only way I could conceive of having sex. I had avoided marriage because I feared I would not have the strength to fight the religious and cultural disadvantages with which I felt a wife must wrestle.

By the age of 28, I was fed up with waiting. I met an Egyptian man I was attracted to and who would become my first sexual partner. I asked him out; he accepted, and we began to date. He was a few years younger than me and was not a virgin. He was patient. Just after my 29th birthday, we finally had intercourse. He went on to propose several times. Each time I would say yes, then renege.

Not long after I broke up with that first lover, I married a white American. Those turbulent two years of marriage also sealed for me the issue of children. I learnt that I did not want any. I am happy to be child-free. I do wonder, sometimes, if I had had a daughter, how I would have brought her up. Would I have raised my daughter to disobey?

I’m 47 now, living and working in Cairo. But sexual guilt still lingers – I fought hard to write this, knowing my family will read it and disapprove, but this is my revolution.

© Mona Eltahawy 2015. Extracted from Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, published by Orion on May 21, which is available from the Times Bookshop for £14.49 (RRP £16.99), free p&p, on 0845 2712134; timesbooks.co.uk