I’m often asked why I took off my headscarf and what it was like to remove it. This essay which I wrote for SaudiDebate.com last year answers some of those questions.

Muslim Women Caught Between Would-Be Liberators and Would-Be Saviours

By Mona Eltahawy

August 8, 2007

Iranian photographer and writer Haleh Anvari, is fed up of being fought over by the combatants of the “Clash of Civilizations”. In the red corner, it’s the western media and in the blue corner we find the Islamic Republic of Iran. And in the middle of the ring, hidden under that black icon of Muslim womanness aka the chador, stand Anvari and the rest of us, women of the Muslim world.

“One (side) wants to protect my soul, the other wants to rescue it…so you see me in my total blackness on books and magazines. I sell copy, I sell an idea, and in the folds of my black chador I sell in one place two violently opposed ideologies which are set on an ugly collision course,” she says.

The day I saw Anvari’s spoken word performance in New York City, she held up a copy of that week’s The Economist magazine for proof of her point, as if any were needed. Even intellect-heavy media, it seemed, could not resist illustrating a cover story on Iran with a woman in a black chador.

But it gets worse.

What’s worse than one side trying to protect your soul as the other tries to rescue it, you ask?

How about a question from an American woman in the audience asking if she should wear a chador out of solidarity with Iranian women? It is difficult to outdo such a killer combo of condescension marinated in a deep-seated desire to liberate and rescue Muslim women and seasoned with good old ignorance.

Some might call me unkind for ripping into a well-intentioned inquiry about ways to help. But nine years of wearing a headscarf will do that to you. My years in hijab were great lessons in figuring out the saviours from the liberators. The liberators, to be fair, weren’t always from the “West”. Sometimes they were fellow Egyptian Muslims who didn’t like the hijab.

Just as importantly, the headscarf honed my skills at figuring out the honest from the patronizing and there’s nothing like being spoken to IN A SLOW AND VERY LOUD VOICE AS IF ONE WERE DEAF to really get the blood boiling and make one want to yell I MIGHT COVER MY HAIR BUT I’M NOT STUPID.

Even friends would ask the stupidest questions sometimes, such as expressing wonder at how I could possibly watch MTV or want to watch a David Lynch film.

“I am not the Quran in motion,” I would tell them.

And when I had decided, after years of struggling with it, that I would remove my hijab, my biggest fight was with myself. I wished I could keep it on so that I could “show” the West/non-Muslims and everyone really that you could be intelligent, stylish and wear hijab. But the distance between the external “me” and the internal “me” – who I felt myself to be – had grown too far and it was time to reconcile the outside with the inside, without any need to prove anything to anyone but to be true to myself.

And when I finally dug up enough courage to manage the guilt – how do you get over the alleged saying of Prophet Mohammed that women who don’t cover their hair will hang from it in hell? -  and take the scarf off, the saviours and liberators were still going at it. One Muslim friend chided me for giving non-Muslims a shaky image of Islam. Again, the “I’m not the Quran in motion” retort came in handy. The liberators assured me I looked so much better with the headscarf off which just added to my guilt exponentially. In fact, I deliberately went to a bad hairdresser so that no one – read: I – would think I’d taken off my hijab because I wanted to look good or anything that frivolous.

The saviours and liberators don’t really care about me or my soul. Just like Anvari said, they don’t see me. The conversation for them begins and ends with how a Muslim woman looks. What she thinks, feels or wants is quite irrelevant. For too many Muslims, if my hair is uncovered, I’m not Muslim enough. For too many non-Muslims, if my hair is uncovered, then I’m that rare example of a “free” Muslim woman.

How do you explain all of that to someone who wants to wear a chador out of solidarity with Iranian women? The American woman who asked that question of Anvari is like someone who walks in at the end of a conversation or better yet, she’s like the second to last player in a game of Chinese whispers. Just because you heard what you thought was the last sentence doesn’t mean you understood.

I was just as horrified when I first came across the misguided desire to cover up in support of Muslim women shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Again, the path from well-intentioned to clueless was not that long or winding. As news spread that Muslims or anyone who seemed to be Muslim were being targeted, I began to read about “Wear Hijab Days”, wherein groups in various North American cities handed out headscarves for their members to wear in solidarity with Muslim women. While the dangers to Muslim women wearing headscarves were real – I interviewed a family in Seattle at the time who told me a relative who wore a headscarf had narrowly escaped being run over by a car – my instinct was to tell those groups what I told the woman at Anvari’s performance – stay out of it!

I was more captivated by the fatwas allowing Muslim women in the West to remove their headscarves if they felt they were in danger. By that point, I no longer believed the headscarf was obligatory for Muslim women and to hear those pronouncements added a whole new layer to the cake.

But to those “Wear Hijab Days” groups, complexity, nuance and anything beyond the surface be damned! Other people’s causes are so much cuddlier of course. How else to explain such incredible naiveté? What did it matter that they were offending some of us Muslims who didn’t believe hijab was a religious requirement? Had they never heard of the politicization of the headscarf, hair and women’s bodies in the Muslim world? A politicization that as Anvari so astutely pointed out, happened both within and without?

With the recent victory in Turkish elections of a political party that has roots in Islamic politics, the headscarf in that country is once again making the round of headlines. It never left, really. Ironically, Muslim women in the U.S. have more freedom to wear the headscarf than they do in Turkey, where the scarf is banned in government buildings and public schools. Turkish women who want to wear a headscarf to university for example, will either wear a wig or remove the scarf just before they enter campus gates. And for the polar opposite, let’s visit Saudi Arabia where 15 schoolgirls died in a fire on their school grounds in 2002 after morality police would not let them out because they were not wearing headscarves and abayas (cloaks), the public uniform of women and girls in that country. Would that we could stage “Remove your Abaya and Hijab” days.

And why the obsession with Muslim women’s bodies – again an obsession shared by those within and without the Ummah/community? Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women wear wigs or cover their hair with bonnets and wear modest clothing after they get married. Nuns also cover their hair and until recently, women attending church had to wear hats.

Each of those communities had to and continue to wrestle over such issues. Muslims are no exception. So my advice to the well-meaning but clueless: If you want to show support, then fight against profiling of all kinds for starters. “Wear Hijab Days” are as silly as “Wear Beards Day” to show solidarity for Muslim men with beards who are profiled.

How absurd that some groups want to cover up to support us while others want to support us to uncover! How about leaving us alone to decide? Now that’s support.