Over the past couple of decades, millions and millions of Egyptian women have found peace in wearing the hijab or veil – a sign of modesty and a visible manifestation of their commitment to the teachings of Islam.
I, too, thought I wanted my share of that peace, especially if the trade-off was as surmountable as altering the way I dressed. After all, the prospect of peace amid my upbringing in a city as consuming as Cairo was simply an offer my 14-year-old self could not refuse. The truth was, though, that I was only able to find said peace years later, after I took my veil off.
My story is not unique. It is the story of millions of Egyptian women. But it illuminates the complex forces that have changed cities like Cairo, from places where, a few decades ago, some communities chose to wear the veil and some didn’t, to now where some form of hijab is worn by the overwhelming majority of women.
I remember when it first happened. I woke up one morning, pulled out a white scarf from my mother’s wardrobe, wrapped it around my head the way a friend of mine had taught me, then headed out to catch the bus to my evangelical parochial middle school.
When I reached school, my friends, Muslim and Christian, congratulated me. Everybody seemed relieved that I’d finally done the right thing. Everybody approved of me. My parents were less enthusiastic – not because I wore the hijab when I had not even hit puberty, but because they were concerned I would want to take it off later (they said it would be worse than not wearing it at all). What I did not know was that I would spend much of the following decade struggling to decide whether to wear it or not.
At the time it felt right. All those pink-coloured, crescent-emblazoned pamphlets that my Muslim classmates had been furtively distributing around the school promised not only a guaranteed spot in heaven, but also a combination capable of defeating all of my clichéd teenage identity crisis woes: a sense of purpose, heightened self-worth and, more importantly, the pleasure of walking down Cairo’s streets without getting leered at or groped – an experience ever so alien to any female in Egypt (14-year-old girls included).
But there was a political climate to the rise of the veil. It can be summed up in an incident from 2006. It is telling that the one incident that pushed 130 parliament members to demand the resignation of the Mubarak-era Farouk Hosni throughout his 24-year career as minister of culture was not the death of 50 people in one of his ministry’s theatres when it burnt to ashes due to negligence and a lack of safety measures. Nor was it the theft in broad daylight of a US$50-million (Dh184m) Van Gogh painting from one of his ministry’s museums. Nor was it the simple fact that Mr Hosni had been in the cabinet for more than two decades (standard practice under the Mubarak regime). No, the one thing Egyptian lawmakers wanted Mr Hosni to be held accountable for was a comment to a newspaper in 2006, where he was quoted as saying that the hijab is a “step back for Egyptian women”. Because by 2006, the hijab was the norm, not the exception.
It was in the mid-2000s that I finally joined the ranks of the majority of Egyptian women in covering my hair. By then, the hijab had not just become the prevalent fashion among Muslim girls in my school, it had become the default for women in Egypt – a country with a 90 per cent Muslim population. People would ask you: “Why aren’t you veiled yet?” and not the other way around.
Things were different just a few decades ago. Watch an Egyptian film from the 1950s or 1960s, or flip through the photo album your Egyptian grandmother keeps on her night table, and you’ll find women wearing their hair in up-dos and sporting miniskirts.
When asked to explain how Egyptian women’s dress evolved from miniskirts, bell-sleeves and up-dos to teenagers in hijabs of many colours over the span of just two or three decades, social scientists tend to point to two influences.
The first was an increase in religious discourse across the society – crystallised under Anwar Sadat’s presidency when he adopted a less subtle religious discourse that affirmed Egypt’s “Islamic identity” in defiance of Nasserists. The second was the influence of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, to which many Egyptians migrated in the 1980s.
For me and my teenage classmates, though, the allure was the right to choose an alternative lifestyle – an alternative from the emptiness and stagnation the country muddled through day in and day out.
As satellite dishes began to find their way to Egypt’s middle-class homes, and as Saudi-owned broadcasters such as ART and MBC began to replace entertainment from the ailing Maspero Television Building, this alternative model seemed closer than ever: veiled women in advertisements, veiled women in TV dramas, veiled women as newscasters, and religious programming where the preachers were not men in their 60s wearing gowns and turbans, but in their 30s wearing shirts and trousers. They presented a much-craved change from a stagnant, unfulfilling status quo sustained by former president Hosni Mubarak and his ruling National Democratic Party.
To me, and to many other women, wearing the veil seemed like an appealing act of rebellion – an act so drastic and visible, somewhat similar to getting a tattoo, only religiously blessed.
And Egypt turned out to be a fertile land for the hijab. Even my own all-girls school at the time – founded in 1910 as a missionary school by the United Presbyterian Church of North America – introduced a school uniform that accommodated hijab. Women-only hair salons started to emerge in every neighbourhood; ateliers specialising in re-sewing imported – and habitually revealing – prom and wedding dresses to make them veil-friendly became profitable businesses and a staple of every mall; tie shops began selling scarves, sports clubs began to offer women-only swimming pool hours, actresses young and old retired from their soap-opera careers and began hosting religious TV shows telling Egyptian women how the quality of their lives would improve if only they covered up.
As more women wore the hijab, it developed further into a fashion statement. Long gone was the traditional headscarf, replaced by myriad styles, and even bi- and tri-layered hijabs.
I eventually decided that wearing the veil was not for me. I felt the promises that my friends and their pamphlets offered were not delivered. Instead of giving me self-worth, I became ashamed of my body. Instead of the feminist, anti-establishment statement I thought I was making, I ended up conforming. After seven years, I stopped veiling.
Perhaps surprisingly, my family were just as disheartened by my decision to take the hijab off as they were by my first decision to wear it in the first place as a child. But this seems to be in line with Egyptian society’s varying viewpoints on religion. Although the hijab is widely worn, hijab-wearing women have noted incidents of discrimination, where they have been denied entrance to or publicly shamed in restaurants because they were veiled.
Even after tens of millions of women have started to wear the hijab, changing Egyptian society, it still appears to divide opinion.
Dina Elsayed is a writer about Egyptian society and politics