The Independent Newspaper

Muslim women's struggle to wear what they like
In Iran and Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, young women are rejecting the idea that they must live covered in shrouds and veils
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
23 June 2003

The hejab is back in the news. In France, once more, the state is in bitter conflict with Muslim schoolgirls wearing the hejab. The government wants no religious symbols in the secular education system, and for some French Muslims this is an attack on their faith. Meanwhile in Iran and Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, younger women are rejecting the idea that they must live and die covered in shrouds and veils.

I have to confess a prejudice. I feel uneasy when I see young women and girls wearing the hejab, usually grey, white, or black. I am not convinced that these are always free choices made after thought and study. The flaming, independent spirit inside me (a blessing and a curse) shrieks with indignation, though I do often hold my tongue because I have been lectured at by so many holier-than-thou Muslims who tell me that this is an order from Allah or that it is a mark of a proud identity fighting Islamophobia, or that it gives women countless freedoms denied to those of us who like to feel the wind in our hair.

They may be right but not as right as they claim. Such righteous and absolute conviction makes hejabis as perverse as those who rush to judge them as weak and oppressed. The hejab is a controversial issue, within Islam as much as outside it, and the most striking debates and disputes are arising in the country where modern, stark, authoritarian Islam first materialised - Iran.

It was here, after the 1979 revolution that toppled the US-friendly Shah, that Ayatollah Khomeini's theocracy imposed the hejab. Hatred of the monarchy was so intense that for ordinary Iranians anything was preferable. There was genuine popular support for Khomeini and his never-ending string of fatwas that, bit by bit, took away many of the fundamental liberties of women.

Men may have found this appealing, but in time many women did not. Soldiers monitored their clothes, watched out for any touch of make up or flash of ankle. Hundreds of women were imprisoned and beaten on the soles of their feet so they could not walk for months; some were hanged for transgressions of dress codes or for disallowed love affairs. A woman I admired enormously, the child psychiatrist Homa Darabi, set her veil alight and burnt herself to death in a square in Tehran in 1994. She was protesting against the imposition of the hejab and against other injunctions that had incarcerated Iranian women in the home, in their roles, in themselves.

This was at a time when Algerian women, especially university students, were being assassinated for not covering themselves properly. In Saudi Arabia today, women who are publicly beaten or beheaded are completely covered - they don't even have the right to show their tears, or look at the sky before their heads roll.

In Britain the hejab became an equally powerful symbol of the Islamic awakening which followed the Satanic Verses furore. Young women did, in fact, take the hejab to show pride in who they were. But in time this choice has turned into a supreme directive; while simultaneously fashionable alternatives are emerging with some daring women wearing brightly coloured turbans or designer scarves, logo and all.

Much blood has been shed around this "freedom", but British hejabis don't much talk about this because it distracts them from their certainties.

In Iran today young women, desperate to escape imposed "modesty", are wearing chic scarves in silk and chiffon, reds and greens and gold, tied so that slips of wayward curls escape. Their cloaks are tighter and a little shorter and the dress police are out once more venting their brutish force against such innocent pleasures.

The Koran has a lighter touch than these brutes, according to Dr Riffat Hassan, a US-based Muslim scholar. Believers, men and women, are told to behave with modesty and to be mindful of their dignity. Nowhere is there anything that says men can beat and kill women who refuse to be caged in the dullest of fabrics.

Dr Hassan has recently been attacked by a new zealot in Pakistan - Farhat Hashmi, a middle-class woman whose influence is spreading throughout Pakistan and Britain. Through her Islamic teaching centres, Hashmi pronounces that the hejab is too revealing, that Muslim women must cover their faces, too, and their arms and legs, so none of their female characteristics can be detected or imagined.

And now when you go to many Muslim enclaves in this country, this is what you see, girls whose faces cannot show smiles or fears, or love or delight.

My question is this: isn't it terribly unjust to degrade Muslim men in this way? Are we saying that they are so uncontrollably driven, so insanely preoccupied with sex, that the sight of a wrist is enough for them to go into spasm? If they were truly virtuous, which many are, you could walk naked virgins before them and they would concentrate on their prayers and not flinch.

As for respect - I am told hejabis are more respected than women who show their hair or legs, which I do. Sorry sisters, the greater feat is to win the respect of men and women without getting into costume. Is the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif, chairperson of this year's Orangeprize, not respected because she dresses in Western clothes? Last week the Albert Hall in London was filled with Pakistanis who had come to watch their pop stars, fashion designers and poets. It was a brilliant show, with the majority of women dressed to please, their faith unquestionably solid.

Yes, people of all backgrounds are worried about the coarse debauchery of Western societies, but the burqa and the hejab are not a solution to this pervasive social degradation. It is like locking up your daughter so she will not be killed by the increasing traffic on our roads.

As for body image, women in burqas and hejabs are as anxious as the rest of us. Last year researchers found that Iranian women living in Iran had a more pathological relationship with their bodies than Iranian women living in the United States. I went recently into the bookshop of the Regent's Park mosque. In between all the religious books and guidance for a pure life, I found anti-cellulite cream and lines of perfume. I was told that they were "Islamic" because they contained no alcohol. In some ways this is wonderful - that inside a mosque the beauty needs of women are catered for. And the women must know that the faith police cannot stop their intoxicating perfumes getting up the nostrils of men who are not cousins, brothers, fathers and husbands. In Afghanistan, too, beauty parlours carried on throughout the worst days of the Taliban.

You wonder, too, how many of these shrouded women have vitamin-D deficiencies, which can cause health problems such as rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults, because they cannot let the sun fall on their skins. You should see too - as I have - the scars and bruises and broken bones an efficient burqa can hide.

As my Iranian friend Layla says: "Muslim women need to stop fooling themselves. This hejab and burqa is not for religion, only for men to have power over them. Open your eyes I want to say to them." Me too.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk