Let’s say a woman wrote into Ask A Manager asking about what to do about a coworker. This man seemingly exorcised his publicly-stated resentments towards management about being forced to participate in a gift exchange by giving her a bad gift. That gift consisted of a garment designed to cover a part of her body that she and most of her other female coworkers don’t normally cover, along with a book which states, among many other questionable things, that women should cover that part of their body lest they tempt men into sexually assaulting them.
Most would consider the gift inappropriate and would think his act misdirected and possibly discriminatory, not find the story hilarious. Yet somehow, when it’s a tweet written by a Muslim man rather than an advice letter written by a woman, people find it funny. To wit: A screencap of this tweet was uncritically splashed onto my Facebook Timeline courtesy of several never-Muslims I thought should know better.
My workplace is forcing me to take part in SecretSanta. Jokes on them. Linda from HR is getting a copy of the Quran and a Hijab.
There is a bit of humor here, but mostly, it’s just cringe-inducing misogyny — and specifically, for those who have lived experience with Muslim men pressuring us to cover our heads, chill-inducing slut-shaming. Continue reading “Holiday Gifting Guide Don’ts: Quran & Hijab”→
This video, via The Guardian’s Comment Is Free and featuring Hanna Yusef, was brought to my attention by Nathan Zwierzynski (transcript):
Speaking as someone who also used to wear hijab and claim it was a bold feminist act, I will say that there is a lot to unpack here, none of which can be addressed without nuance and care. Continue reading “Is Wearing Hijab a Feminist Statement?”→
Once upon a time, society told me that my worth began and ended with my body. More precisely, I, like everyone else in my context, had been born into a society where other people thought that a designated-female person’s body held the beginning, the end, and everything in between when it came to her value.
I grew up in a particular version of Purity Culture where more was less in terms of how much of your body you revealed; the more you covered your body, the better of a person you were assumed to be. Women and girls were judged by the fit of their dresses, the opacity of their leggings and tights, the arch of their brows, the polish on their fingernails. Their faces were scanned for traces of makeup and religious teachers consulted about the Sharia legality of brown eyeliner on brown skin. A secret point system existed that was used to assess the merit of female human beings and decide how they were to be treated: Avoided, Befriended, Befriended Closely, Befriended Closely Enough to Ask for Marriage to a Male Relative.
Recently, I heard of a man of Muslim background who is so offended by headscarf-wearing women that he refuses them entry into his home. While people have the right to freely associate or not associate with whomever they wish for whatever reason, I was disgusted to hear of it as well as the defenses of his behavior. The idea of a man policing women’s clothing in particular seems to me to be an extension of the same patriarchal norms that lie at the root of hijab itself. Obsessing over the garb that women choose to wear or to not wear is to turn women’s bodies into battlegrounds for ideology, a common strategy used by sexists of all stripes.
In other words, forcing women to take it off is just like forcing women to put it on. In both cases, women are being forced to adhere to the norms set by a man who wants her clothing to conform to what he likes or doesn’t like. Why not let them wear what they want to wear?
A version of this was originally posted on my fashion Tumblr, where you can see how much I care (obsess?) over my presentation.
I think a lot about clothing and the way in which I present myself because I have yet to shake the sense of wonder I feel both at my expanded sartorial possibilities and the fact that my such choices are far more my own than they ever were before.
I was asked today, by a Muslim, why I self-identify as an ex-Muslim and not just an atheist. I’ve had the same question posited by fellow atheists as well. Setting aside my impulse to retort with a knee-jerk anthropologists’ argument of “I can call myself whatever I want”, I can see something of a good question hidden in the label-policing.
Tarico: How long did you wear hijab, and what did it mean to you at the time?
Dadabhoy: I wore hijab for a decade (ages 8 to 18). I started wearing it because I was always a people-pleaser; it seemed like the right thing to do to please my parents, many of my older relatives, my teachers at my religious school (a headscarf was part of the uniform for the Islamic girls’ school I attended in London for a year), and, of course, Allah. I was also a very literal and devout child. I wanted to make sure that I obeyed Allah as much as possible.
A few weeks back, I gave a talk at the first Sexy Secular Conference in Akron, OH, with the title Virgins, Raisins, & Sexy Serving Boys: Decoding Female Sexuality in Islam.
I had a lot of fun giving the talk and attending the con — shout-out to the organizers who put the it all together. Even disregarding the fact that it was just their first year doing it and that they are students, it was a remarkably smooth, well-run, well-organized event that I look forward to attending again.
If you watch the video, you’ll notice that the videographer, Rob of Hambone Productions, was cool enough to caption and cut out the questions during the Q&A rather than include them, for which many of us are grateful. In a conversation following my talk, the asker of one of the questions hit upon a disconnect worth noting: the difference in what a non-Muslim sees when they behold a woman in hijab versus what she might be expressing by wearing hijab.
You see, the asker explained, he did not feel that he was singling out Muslim women by asking them about their religion. He does the same with Christians wearing crosses, Jews wearing Stars of David, and so forth. He thinks that it’s interesting that they choose to wear a symbol of their faith and believes that doing so invites him to ask them about their beliefs.
So, there are two problems here.
Firstly, this is a gendered matter. Women are often treated as if we exist for the benefit of society rather than as individuals. I have personally felt the effects of this assumption quite heavily. When I wore a headscarf, I was condescended to, gently chided, yelled at, ignorantly questioned, rudely interrogated, violently accosted, and have otherwise had my day disrupted thanks to my headscarf. After I de-veiled, I assumed that I could be normal, blend in, and live my life without being bothered. Not so — street harassment of the more sexually racist kind replaced the garden-variety racism I had experienced before. Until women are generally treated as people rather than as representatives of their gender or any other such category, it’s important to keep in mind what we are doing when we expect a woman to serve as ambassador for an entire group of people — doubly so when that group is a minority one.
Secondly, conflating the headscarf with any other religious symbol is at least somewhat fallacious. The reason that Muslim women wear headscarves is not so that they can be Allah’s ambassadors to the world. Indeed, dawah, or calling people to Islam, is traditionally done by men if it is for the benefit of men. Stricter interpretations of Islam, i.e. the sort that many scarf-wearing Muslim women follow, limit the amount and type of interactions that might occur between men and women. This brings us to the underlying reason why Muslim women cover, according to Islam: to live in accordance to Islamic standards of modesty. For a practicing Muslim woman who adheres to that interpretation of Islam, putting on a headscarf is as essential as putting on a shirt. While a Christian woman can choose to not wear a crucifix because she happens to not want to wear one that day, a Muslim woman who has committed to hijab wears her headscarf as part of her basic wardrobe.
There do indeed exist Muslim women who wear the headscarf as a way to portray Islam in a more positive light who would be happy to talk to you about their choices and their faith. There also exist Muslim women who, for whatever reason, are uninterested in being an open-source educational resource to the public. Assuming that a headscarf-wearing Muslim woman exists to satisfy the curiosity of strangers is to both play into gender myths and misunderstand what covering up means to most Muslim women.
