By Dr. John Andrew Morrow
Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot (b. 1933)
It is men from the eighth century onward who interpreted the passage in the Qur’an which enjoins men and women to dress modestly to mean that women should be totally covered and segregated, neither seen nor heard.
Leila Ahmed (b. 1940)
The uniformity of interpretation and the generally minimal differences characterizing the versions of Islam that survived reflect not unanimity of understanding but rather the triumph of the religious and social vision of the ‘Abbasid state at this formative moment in history.
Leila Ahmed (b. 1940)
The definitions of Islamists as to what “true” Islam was and what forms of dress and practices were “mandated” by Islam began to gain power in the Middle East in the 1970s and in America too by the 1990s… Today it is above all Islamists and Islamist-grounded institutions who are the authorities defining and determining the beliefs and practices of Islam in this country. So powerful and effective have Islamist definitions of Islam become today in America and the West (and elsewhere), that even Muslims who grew up thinking they were believing Muslims and for whom Islam was above all a spiritual and ethical resource might well come to doubt their own sense and understanding of Islam. Finding themselves alienated by and feeling no empathy with the views and practices of this now dominant form of Islam — from its obligatory hijab to its activist social and political agenda — they perhaps begin to wonder if they are in fact Muslims after all: if this is Islam.
Wassyla Tamzali (b. 1941)
Accepting the practice, North African or not, Muslim or not, of hiding one’s hair, if not being treated by a male doctor, of not shaking hands with men, that is, accepting practices of strict sexist segregation, seems to me to be a bad answer to a real problem. … How can it not … be said that the veil is … the symbol of this enslavement of women and that its scope cannot be altered by its frivolous use or misinterpretation by some? Girls… in France who… wear the veil… have fallen into a trap.
Some started to wear the veil for play, for provocation, but also for rebellion…, finding there a definition of freedom… You cannot express your freedom by throwing yourself, hands and feet tied, into a culture whose objective is the domination of women… The veil is … a bulwark against gender-based, symbolic, or expressed violence. There are schools and universities, places in Algeria, where one can no longer be unveiled. In Algerian Arabic it is said that an unveiled woman is naked, which says a lot. It is an illusory rampart… [considering] the escalation of violence in the Arab streets where there are more and more veiled women.
The more you repress sexuality, the more it is present. Men’s eyes are becoming increasingly heavy and concupiscent. This repression leads to real pathological deviances that result in the most barbaric acts against women, with the Afghan burqa … representing the most accomplished and theatrical form of these deviances. If women and girls, by veiling themselves, believe that they are safe from men’s desires, the opposite is true. The concealment of women’s bodies has the effect of increasing sexual crimes and harassment, exacerbating women’s fear and men’s greed…
At the heart of this madness is the obsession with virginity… and the disproportionate importance given to the preservation of the hymen. Although Muslim men want to get married, and only to virgins, births outside marriage are numerous and lead to a wide range of aberrations, abandonment of children, infanticide, murderous fury of fathers and brothers against pregnant girls and abusive use of sodomy and its clinical traumas.
I will never say that the veil is innocent. Never. It is much more than a religious sign, as is a cross, for example: it is the sign of women’s oppression. It is a serious matter to trivialize it. I have trouble understanding Quebec women who support the demands of veiled women. They would never think that the hijab is without consequence for themselves or their daughters. Why is this more acceptable for a Muslim woman?
I grew up in a Muslim family, in one of the first generations of women to be unveiled in Algeria. There is a tendency to deny this part of history, but in almost all Arab countries, from the 1920s to the 1960s, women said no to the veil. They went out. They went to college. It showed that you can be an Arab and a Muslim and not cover yourself. Religion does not prescribe anything on this subject. “The veil is not Muslim, it is patriarchal,” wrote Mohamed Talbi, a leading expert on Islam. It is a political tool to dominate women. In some countries, it starts very early, with four-year-old girls already covered from head to toe.
Wearing the veil cannot be claimed as an act of freedom. Even if, in the West, veiled women study, earn a good living, go to the movies, and have a husband who does the dishes. Even if it is a personal choice, you can easily alienate yourself… They reinforce a vision of a woman’s place in society that emerged from the old patriarchal model. They take for granted the discourse on women in certain interpretations of the religion. That is what we must deconstruct… The wearing of the veil is spreading in the Maghreb and everywhere else… In some Paris suburbs, girls can no longer go out without their hijab. Their brothers are watching them. It was unimaginable fifteen years ago.
The left must understand that wearing the veil is a political act to which we must respond with a political act. How is it possible that a left that claims to be feminist accepts to veil women, denying the whole political struggle on women’s rights and on the place of women’s oppression that is the body? … The left has not grasped the extent of the problem. The veil is no longer the sign of an anthropological culture but of a political culture… I do not accept a political culture that discriminates against women… To accept prostitution out of pragmatism is to accept the prostitution system, and that is not acceptable; to accept the veil out of pragmatism is to accept the causes of sexist segregation, and that is not acceptable. To refuse practices harmful to women, whether they come from the Islamic tradition or are very clearly prescribed by Koranic texts, is not to be Islamophobic, it is simply to be feminist.
Riffat Hassan (b. 1943)
There are no Qur’anic statements which justify the rigid restrictions regarding segregation and veiling which have been imposed on women in the name of Islam… If, for instance, the Qur’an had intended for women to be completely veiled, why would it have required Muslim men to lower their gaze when looking at them?”
Nimat Hafez Barazangi (b. 1943)
A woman who self-identifies with the Qur’anic worldview realizes that Islamic teachings regarding modesty are neither rigid nor intended to make her feel guilty of tempting the males, and neither is following these guidelines a function of control, submission, segregation, or restriction of action, as usually perceived, and practiced. These guidelines are for individual chastity and social protocol, with the aim of respecting privacy and lineage. If these teachings are not internalized as such, they can also not be fully realized in practice, even if the individual’s behavior suggests otherwise. A woman who practices wearing the cloak and a head covering without understanding the above modesty principle, for instance, is not practicing Islam, but a social custom. On the contrary, a woman who internalizes Islamic principles of morality and justice demands the observation of the modesty principle not in terms of its prohibitive, rigid law for females, as is rationalized by some male interpreters, but in terms of the guiding principles of the Qur’an on morality for both males and females.
Hélé Béji (b. 1948)
The veil destroys the universal feminine…
Hélé Béji (b. 1948)
The veil divides women… It creates a civil war between them…
Hélé Béji (b. 1948)
The rise of the veil stems from the failure of secularism…
Hélé Béji (b. 1948)
The veil is black ash cast on the light of tradition…
Hélé Béji (b. 1948)
The religious ideology called Salafism or Islamism dehumanizes the Tradition more rapidly than all the transgressions of the modern world…
Hélé Béji (b. 1948)
I am absolutely in favor of the law that prohibits the veil at school since they are minors who should be free from the diktats imposed by their families or neighborhoods. To veil a little girl is a violation of the rights of children. The State must protect her by all means. This is beyond question.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (b. 1949)
Veils for me represent … religious arrogance and subjugation; they … desexualize and fervidly sexualize. Women are … seen as sexual creatures whose hair and bodies incite desire and disorder in the public space. The claim that veils protect women from lasciviousness and disrespect carries an element of self-deception… Little girls are being asked to don hijabs and jilbabs, turned into sexual beings long before puberty. You can even buy stretchy baby hijabs with fake Calvin Klein and Versace logos. Like a half-naked woman, a veiled female to me represents an affront to female dignity, autonomy, and potential. Both are marionettes, and have internalized messages about femaleness.
Do those who choose to veil think of women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and even the West, who are prosecuted, flogged, tortured, or killed for not complying? This is not a freestanding choice — it cannot be. Although we hear from vocal British hijabis and niqabis, those who are forced cannot speak out. A fully burqaed woman once turned up at my house, a graduate, covered in cuts, burns, bruises, and bites. Do we know how many wounded, veiled women walk around hidden among us? Sexual violence in Saudi Arabia and Iran is appallingly high, as is body dysmorphia.
Fatima Houda-Pepin (b. 1951)
The main source on which they still rely today, to make the so-called “Islamic veil” a fundamental right at the same level as freedom of religion, is verse 59 of Sura 33, “The Coalition,” revealed in 627, the year the Prophet Muhammad was to fight the coalition that came to besiege him in Medina. They attacked women, raped, and forced them into prostitution (ta‘arrud). Verse 59 will resolve this dilemma. “O Prophet! Tell your wives and daughters and the women of the believers to bring a piece of their veil close to their faces, as this is more likely to make them recognizable from other women and thus prevent them from being bothered. God is infinitely absolute and merciful.” Islamists will refrain from explaining the context…
This verse has only moral significance. It is specifically addressed to the women of Medina’s high society to prevent them from being offended by ta‘arrud. It is suggested that they “bring a piece of their veil close to them” and fold it over their faces. Why is that? To distinguish them from other women. And which other women were they to be distinguished from? Slaves… The so-called “Islamic veil” made a distinction between free women who should not be bothered (because they are veiled) and slaves who can be given over to rape and prostitution because they are not. Those who today allege freedom of religion in defense of the so-called Islamic veil must bear in mind the date 627, the day the veil became a symbol of discrimination against black slaves and their enslavement to rape and prostitution.
Zahra Rahnavard (b. 1945), Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani (b. 1963), Mostafa Tajzadeh (b. 1956), Ahmad Montazeri (b. 1955)
Mandatory hijab was a wrong decision from the beginning and the passage of time has made it obvious. Although there are serious theological differences as to whether the hijab is necessary or not, and to what extent women should cover their hair, there’s no dispute about the fact that imposing the hijab does not have a defensible legal basis in shari‘ah law.
Asma Barlas (b. 1950)
The real veil is in the eyes/gaze… First, it requires both men and women to dress modestly… Second, it describes modesty of dress rather sparingly as the covering of private parts… Third… the function of the khumur (shawl) is to cover the bosom… Muslim commentators overlook this fact and focus instead on words like “adornment,” which the Qur’an does not define but which they define so broadly as to include even the face and hair. This obsession with the female body has spawned forms of veiling the Qur’an does not mandate.
It is remarkable that women should have to fend off abuse in a society that claims to be Islamic, given that the rule of Islam, by ordaining sexual modesty for men and women, runs counter to the rule of the veil, brought on by jahili male promiscuity… Hence, Muslim men who feel they have the right to assault or kill unveiled women in some so-called Islamic societies are living by jahili precepts, not by Qur’anic ethics, which enjoin modesty and restraint on both sexes.
Amina Wadud (b. 1952)
If men respected women as equal human beings and not as objects of their sexual fantasies, then even a naked woman should be safe from male abuse. Furthermore, with regard to the particular items of a Muslim women’s dress styles, including the hijab, when a Serbian soldier in the rape camps can rip a two-year-old girl’s body apart by raping her, it is obviously naïve to assume that any amount of head covering would have made a difference or created any real change in deep-seated male sexual aberrations.
Amina Wadud (b. 1952)
I do not consider it a religious obligation, nor do I ascribe to it any religious significance or moral value per se. It is certainly not the penultimate denotation of modesty, as mandated by the Qur’an, “the best dress is the dress of taqwa” (7:26). While the hijab can give some semblance of a woman’s affiliation with “Islam,” it offers no guarantee of respect or protection. Those who reduce women to their sexuality will continue to do so…
Amina Wadud (b. 1952)
The hijab of coercion and the hijab of choice look the same. The hijab of oppression and the hijab of liberation look the same. The hijab of deception and the hijab of integrity look the same. You can no more tell the extent of a Muslim woman’s sense of personal bodily integrity or piety from 45 inches of cloth than you can spot a fly on a wall at two thousand feet.
Valentine Moghadam (b. 1952)
The hijab is a “novel contemporary ensemble, deployed as a uniform.”
Chahla Chafiq (b. 1954)
There are various reasons why a woman may veil herself… This gesture trivializes a sexual sign and symbolizes a femininity that is submissive to men. Women’s bodies are thus marked as objects of sexual lust. This goes hand in hand with the demonization of women’s liberation, presented in Islamist propaganda as a source of moral depravity and family dislocation. The question is obviously different depending on whether you wear it by choice or by constraint. An Islamist woman is not found behind every veil. But the dialogue must not stop at the question of choice… It must continue by exploring the trajectory of the person concerned, the atmosphere in which she lives, and the social and political evolution of her environment.
Some sociologists and intellectuals believe that free choice closes the subject… The choice of the veil is not equivalent to the choice of a lipstick. Women are forced, in the name of god, to have a sexist relationship with their own bodies. It becomes a place of sin and temptation. In the same movement, men appear to be carriers of uncontrollable virility… This leads to establishing gender diversity as dangerous and demonizing sexual relations. What are the consequences in terms of gender equality and women’s freedom? It is this question that must be answered.
The “chosen” veil, a very common phenomenon nowadays, is a trap. At the origins of Islam, when this religion did not yet exist as the source of laws, the veil did not exist. It arrived later, with shari‘ah law and its vision of the patriarchal family where the man is the head and protects the woman (inferior in law, she is worth half a man) and the children. For this to happen, women have a duty to serve the family. The veil is proposed to them to embody the gendered division and hierarchization of roles. It symbolically creates a gendered wall, supposed to protect the boundaries of lawful and unlawful by separating the sexes… By marking women with this division, it sexualizes them. It marks their bodies as a place of temptation, disorder, sin, that disrupts the group’s chastity.
Many young women who choose the veil say they do so in order not to be considered sexual objects, when it is precisely the sexual dimension of the female body that this choice exacerbates… In some cases, wearing the veil is a choice… What are the consequences of this choice for gender equality and women’s freedom? … Why is this choice not offered to men? Some will say: “They have a beard.” Yes, but it is still very different: the beard is a way to show off manhood, while the philosophy of the veil is to hide femininity so as not to awaken temptations.
Fawzia Zouari (b. 1955)
We are … facing a regression of women’s rights. We are faced with a paradoxical situation of women who are veiling themselves while our fight was to unveil ourselves… These centuries of tyranny against women… have shaped my personality and my future. When one has been raised like me by a mother whose neck, throat, leg curvature, or the slightest hair no one could ever see, or when one has had sisters like mine cloistered in the name of a law prohibiting their bodies, one can understand my reaction to the veil, in its suffered and imposed practice, even more in its claimed choice. I forgive my mother who has never been to school and to whom no one has explained the injustice of a tradition in which she wanted to confine us too. But I cannot excuse such behavior on the part of anyone who is educated and aware of the century’s issues.
I cannot defend a sign that, in our societies, has always relegated women behind walls…. I cannot accept that we voluntarily veil ourselves and pretend that we are not condemned to supporting roles. I cannot accept that we choose to be subjected. Just as I remain cautious before those who honor God to measure our faith by the length of our dresses and the number of locks escaping from our clothes. Would they matter more, these dresses and hair, than the love we carry in our hearts for Him? Would the veil be the only way to ensure our salvation in His eyes — otherwise we would be worthless? All these questions, I already asked myself when I was a child. And here I am now half a century later asking them again.
Elham Man’ea (b. 1966)
The first argument is based on the assumption that the Arab man is a lecherous animal that cannot control its urges, and therefore, one must be on guard against it… This premise is unfair to the Arab man, whom we know as a brother, a father, a husband, and as a human being… He is capable of controlling his urges. This first argument also includes a humiliating premise about women, since it portrays the woman as nothing more than a sex tool — not as a human being but as [a collection] of private parts.
The second argument is based [on] the premise that there is a connection between wearing the veil and establishing a good society. On the contrary, the forced segregation [of the sexes] has led to homosexual relations… [and] has not prevented some girls from having [sexual] relations out of wedlock…
The third argument rests on the premise that [Islam] has a firm position on the issue of the veil, while the fact is that there are many [different] religious texts on the subject. [When you read them] you will see that not only is there an abundance of texts, but that they also have numerous interpretations… As a matter of fact, the third argument, which claims that it is religion that imposes wearing the veil on women, is the weakest argument, since we never heard of it before the late 1970s, and we didn’t see it implemented until the “orthodox” interpretation of Islam became the most prevalent interpretation in the Arab and Muslim world.
Leena El-Ali
For shocking as it seems to use today, it was customary for women in Medina at that time to wear tunics or vests with wide openings in the front that left the breasts exposed… 24:31… put an end to this fashion among the followers of the Prophet at least in front of “strangers,” as the verse clearly appears to accept the custom’s continuation in front of all sorts of relatives and household occupants of both sexes. The verse instructs believing women to draw their khimar, a pre-Qur’anic ornamental shawl that women used to drape loosely over their heads and necks/shoulders, over their exposed breasts to cover them, in effect making it clear that a woman’s breasts are no longer to “ordinarily appear” before anyone outside of a still surprisingly long list of related and unrelated men and women the verse makes an exception for. This is an extraordinary accommodation by the Qur’an, despite its declared disapproval of breast-baring, to prevailing customs, and what was then considered by society as acceptable flesh to show in broad public.
Leena El-Ali
Most interpretations render “adornment” (zeena) in these verses of chapter 24 to mean much more than a woman’s breasts or even groin area despite no less than three instances in 24:31 that literally identify the topic as “breasts,” “private parts,” and “intimate parts…” Such interpretations extend “adornment” to a woman’s very shape and/or almost all of her skin and hair and/or even any ornamental jewelry she may be wearing, rather than simply the natural adornment of a woman’s breasts, despite: 1) The explicit reference her to drawing the shawl over their breasts and only showing otherwise what skin would ordinarily appear in the course of daily life; 2) The explicit reference to both men and women guarding their private parts; 3) The explicit reference to children who have no consciousness yet of women’s private parts; 4) The reports about the chest-bearing women’s fashion of the time that continued late into the Prophet’s mission; 5) And the very definition of clothing/attire (which includes jewelry per 35:12) in the Qur’an as something intended by God to be beautify, to be encouraged, and never forbidden, and therefore necessarily visible.
Leena El-Ali
Clothing is intended to cover one’s private parts (7:26), which 24:30-31 … show to mean the groin area; clothing/attire is meant to be beautiful. (7:26, 7:31); no amount or type of covering can rival the clothing of reverence (7:26); and beautiful clothing/attire is a gift from God that no one can forbid. (7:32, 7:33).
Leena El-Ali
When the above five verse of chapter 24 are looked at together, both the meaning of “private or intimate parts” and the Qur’an equal expectation of what men and women’s’ clothing must cover becomes crystal clear: both men and women are expected to cover their private/intimate parts, i.e. groin areas, and women would ideally also cover their breasts in broad public.
Leena El-Ali
The Qur’an… give an extraordinary example of what might “customarily” appear… it makes allowance for not covering the breasts, of all things — since it was customary practice among many at the time — while limiting its acceptability henceforth in front of only family members, domestic servants, and slaves even if they are male (also 24:31)…. The vast majority of early jurists were tolerant of all sorts of exposure by women that was deemed customary or practical, though this leniency was extended only to Muslim women who were servants or slaves and so worked for a living, but not to freewomen (ironically).
Leena El-Ali
As Leena El-Ali explains, jurists from the ninth century onwards:
Gradually expanded the meaning of a woman’s (natural) adornment over and beyond the breasts (24:31); converted the “cloak” verse from a security-via-identification measure into a divine command for all Muslim women at all times (33:59); and to varying degrees extended and ordained “elite” practice of separating the Prophet’s wives from most men to all Muslim women (33:53).
Asma Lamrabet (b. 1961)
Since there is a difference between hijab and khimar, we have the right to ask why we keep using the term hijab for what has been named in the Qur’an scarf or khimar? This error is currently made unwillingly and … reproduced unconsciously… this semantic shift was not made innocently or casually throughout the history of Islamic intellectual production. The semantic shifts are the result of incorrect translations and interpretations and socio-cultural factors, which aimed at one point in history to create “made-to-measure” concepts to serve the political interests… This is what happened with hijab when it was imposed on Muslim women by inserting it willingly in the register of Islamic body ethics.
When we go back to the origin of the term hijab, which means to “hide” or “separate,” and notice the changing process that it has undergone to bear the name “scarf,” we have the right to wonder if this concept was given this double meaning to religiously justify the isolation of Muslim women. The “hijab” was imposed on Muslim women as a way of “separation” in order to show them their place in society, and exclude them, in the name of Islam, from the socio-political sphere… Replacing the khimar with hijab means to confuse different and opposing semantic and conceptual fields in order to endorse, in the name of Islam, the exclusion of women from the sociopolitical space behind a curtain!
To substitute the khimar with the hijab is to confuse two different registers. While khimar remains, according to the Qur’anic vision, a sign of women’s social visibility, hijab undoubtedly symbolizes their relegation to the private space… It is not the khimar — that existed before revelation — which is important, but rather its new meaning and the context in which it was revealed. The khimar, according to its original meaning of women’s liberation, and as a symbol of their participation along with men in the socio-political space, was therefore gradually replaced by the other Qur’anic concept of hijab to prevent women from participating in the social field.
By considering hijab as sacred and disregarding the Islamic vocabulary of khimar, a new Islamic social code is invented to endorse the separation of men and women. By “veiling” women, they will lose all the rights acquired at the advent of Islam. And the “veil” or hijab will remain the single powerful indicator of the deterioration of Muslim women’s legal status, since they will be secluded and excluded from the public space, in the name of this symbol…
Qur’anic ethics seem today to be reduced to women’s dress and body, to the way they should be covered, the color, thickness, and uniformity of the dress … Given that the Qur’an did not insist on a specific clothing or appearance for women, it would be … simplistic to analyze the few verses on the dress far from the guidance of the spiritual message about the global body ethics for both men and women. The Qur’an invites both men and women to behave with “decency” and “integrity,” both physically and morally. The Qur’an does not legislate a … religious “uniform” as it is shown here, and the first spiritual message did not intend to stipulate rigid or “fixed” dress standards once and for all, but rather to “recommend” an “attitude” or an “ethic” regarding the body and soul…
The first intention of the spiritual message of Islam is often neglected or … ignored at the expense of a literal reading which keeps no more than “the obligation of wearing the hijab” out of all the Qur’anic teachings about women! This contradicts the principles of the spiritual message and its spiritual ethics. The … khimar or scarf is not part of the pillars of Islam, but rather of moral values, behavior, and relational ethics. The religious faith is meaningful only when it is practiced without pressure… Speaking about the obligation of Islam to wear a headscarf or khimar is spiritually unacceptable because the Qur’an said: “No compulsion in religion.” It is one of the main principles of Islam.
Reducing the whole global Qur’anic body ethics to the so-called “veil” is to stand against the same message. And this is exactly what happened in the Islamic history by focusing on woman’s dress, and the obligation to “hide” and “conceal” her body. As a result, this spiritual symbol has become a sign of oppression in the Muslim world.
Asma Lamrabet (b. 1961)
Khimar is not important… The debate over hijab and khimar is outdated… it is not an obligation at all.
Asma Lamrabet (b. 1961)
According to Lamrabet, the hijab is absurd. As she asserted, “God is not waiting for me to wear khimar” (Mir-Hosseini 2022: 135).
Asma Lamrabet (b. 1961)
Why should God care about us covering our hair?
Asma Lamrabet (b. 1961)
I recognize your work but you do not want to recognize mine. I will tell you why: because I know the reality of my context, but you are blind to it; you may know the text, but you do not know the context. You are not real ulema as the ulema were in the past; those ulema who knew the text and the context and delt with both. You may know all the verses of the Qur’an; but you do not want to recognize that our society has changed, evolved.
Razika Adnani
The veil is neither a founding principle of Islam nor a principle of the practice of Islam. The founding principles of Islam are faith in the existence of a single God, the prophecy of Muhammad and the sacredness of the Qur’an. The principles of the practice of Islam are shahada, prayer, almsgiving, hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), and fasting… According to Muslim theology, wearing the veil is in no way proof of a person’s belonging to Islam and a person can have faith and put it into practice without having to wear the veil. The proof is that many women claiming their Islamicity do not wear the veil. The concealment of the hair of the woman representing the main part of the veil is indeed not mentioned in any Qur’anic verse.
“Islamic feminists” have done much harm to women’s rights struggles, especially since the 1970s. By claiming Islam as the source of legitimacy for their struggle and as the framework for its scope, they claim that they only demand what is validated by Islam. However, they have never been able to prove to conservatives that the inequalities that exist in the Koran are not inequalities, as they claim. This explains why Muslim women who call themselves feminists today accept the legal inequalities that discriminate against them…
The veil is a means with which to measure the success of Islamists and fundamentalists, a “veilometer” to assess the reinforcement of the religion as the ancients thought and practiced it, including in the West. Islamic feminists have played an important role in this phenomenon of the return of the veil. They have encouraged many female academics and managers to wear it as a sign of emancipation: to be feminist, but in accordance with the recommendations of the Koran. But the veil is fundamentally discriminatory. It discriminates against women in relation to men and against non-veiled women in relation to veiled women. But it must be emphasized that many women also wear the veil in an act of religious exhibitionism.
Sumbul Ali Karamali (b. 1964)
Did “hands” mean hands up to the wrist or the elbow? If “feet” could be visible, did that mean feet to the ankle? To the calf? Or even to the knees? Did the face include the neck? Where did the covering for the chest begin — at the base of the neck or the cleavage? Did the hair have to be covered or only hair from the crown? Some early jurists, despite viewing uncovered hair with disfavor, maintained that the Qur’an did not explicitly require the covering of hair. The Prophet never forced a woman to cover her hair. In fact, Muslim women as late as the ninth century — two centuries after the Prophet — even prayed with their heads uncovered… This couldn’t have transpired if the Qur’an had been clear about head covering.
Sumbul Ali Karamali (b. 1964)
What normally appears is not an objective measure but a subjective one. What “ordinarily” appears in one culture might be incident in another: in traditional Indian culture, short blouses baring midriffs “ordinarily appeared,” but miniskirts would have been shocking; in twentieth-century American street dress, bare legs more “ordinarily appeared” than bare midriffs. Circumstance also dictates modesty: someone who might wear a bikini at the beach would probably not wear one to a funeral. And norms fluctuate over time too: in Turkey and Indonesia, the latter of which has the largest population of Muslims in the world, many women didn’t start wearing headscarves until thirty years ago.
Razika Adnani
The morality of a person is not measured by the length of her skirt but by her behavior and her respect for the rules of morality.
Razika Adnani
The veil is a form of discrimination that is imposing itself in the public sphere.
Ibtissame Betty Lachgar
Women’s veiling is not a freedom or a choice; in a macho culture, it fully contributes to their invisibility.
Ibtissame Betty Lachgar
Neither reform nor reinterpretation of this religion will lead to women’s liberation. Feminism based on Islam is a sham: no more and no less.
Leila Lesbet
The veil is not a matter of modesty and prudishness, but a means of controlling women’s bodies. In Muslim countries, women are raped because they refuse to wear it. This veil and burqa that we are defending here are stained with the blood of all the teenage girls and women who wanted to say no.
Nadia El-Mabrouk
The Islamic veil is not just a garment, it conditions children to conform to religious dogmas that are imposed on them. It sends the shocking idea that the little girl’s body would be an object of seduction that would have to be hidden from the eyes of boys, while they are not under any constraint. It stigmatizes Muslim girls in the schoolyard and is a barrier to their interaction with other children. It hinders their movements and prevents them from participating fully in physical activities, not to mention the discomfort it causes in often overheated classrooms. How can free choice be advocated for such young children?
The practice of veiling little girls is neither a Koranic prescription nor the legacy of ancestral traditions that should be preserved. In most Arab countries, it has emerged recently with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic scholars, including Ghaleb and Soheib Bencheikh, do not hesitate to call it abuse of young girls. Tunisia, a country whose religion is Islam, has even banned the veil in elementary schools in 2015 on the grounds that it goes against children’s rights. A poll conducted at the time indicated that 75% of Tunisians were in favor of the ban.
Sérénade Chafik (b. 1965)
The veil is an essential issue for Islamists. It is no coincidence that the first measure of the Islamic State was to force women to wear it. The veil has always been used as an instrument for society’s appropriation of women’s bodies. These bodies become a collective property. The veil is … the most visible propaganda tool to affirm… Islamization… The veil limits women’s movement, the space they can occupy, and the vision they can have of themselves. We refuse to see that the veil has a function, that of controlling girls and women. It induces in education that they are only sexual objects, that they are guilty temptresses, that their body represents sin and that therefore it must be hidden. The girl is no longer a child. She is the object of male desire.
Chahdortt Djavann (b. 1967)
Why do we hide girls, only girls, teenagers of sixteen, fourteen, twelve, ten, nine, seven years old? Why are we hiding their bodies, their hair? What does it really mean to veil girls? What are we trying to instill in them? Because initially they didn’t choose to be veiled. They were veiled. And how do you live in a veiled teenage body? After all, why don’t we hide Muslim boys? Can’t their body, their hair make girls desire them? But girls are not made to have desire, in Islam, only to be the object of men’s desire. Don’t we hide what we’re ashamed of?…
Among Muslims, from birth, a girl is a disgrace to hide since she is not a male child. She is … insufficient, powerless, and inferior. Any attempt at sexual intercourse by a man before marriage is her fault. She is the potential object of rape, sin, incest, and even theft since men can steal her modesty with a simple look… She represents guilt, since she creates desire … in a man. A girl is a permanent threat to Islamic dogmas and morals.
She is the potential object of the crime, having her throat slit by the father or the brother to wash away the stained honor. Because Muslim men’s honor is washed with girls’ blood! A girl is considered a shame and a danger… She may violate the men’s honor. I would like to know why a man would feel dishonored if the woman violates the rules of modesty. Why is the honor of Muslim men inscribed on the bodies of Muslim women? Let them assume their honor on their own!…
When you veil a girl, you … teach her that if any part of her skin and hair protrudes from this fabric, any attempt at rape is her responsibility. And we know that this is happening in some countries. Saying “the veil is my choice”’ doesn’t say what the veil is. Islamists trapped everyone. Everyone is relaying the Islamists’ discourse. I am deeply shocked that fashion brands like Marks and Spencer offer integral swimsuits that hide the whole body.
In Muslim societies, women are invisible, buried, because they cannot be exterminated. We need them to procreate, to satisfy men’s sexual needs… Since we cannot exterminate them, we bury them in the dark. In the most barbaric systems, women are veiled. Why do we put up with it here? Because they are women and Muslim. In the name of cultural difference? Why not accept stoning and excision in this case? In all Muslim countries, there are marriages of underage girls with aging men. It is a cultural difference, is it not? But here it is considered a crime: pedophilia. What do these intellectuals and Islamologists think about it?
I decided to write when I saw 12-year-old girls starting to wear the veil and when I heard some intellectuals say that sending veiled students out of school would only make their situation worse. These … people did not think that tolerating veiled girls in school would only increase the pressure on Muslim teenage girls. Some veil advocates explain that this is a way for girls … to protect themselves from boys.
This is unacceptable. It is tantamount to bowing to violence… It is in countries where women are veiled that there is the most prostitution and pedophilia! I am asking for … a ban on veil-wearing for minors… In Islam, a veiled girl is considered nubile… She is a girl who is placed on the marriage market and … the sex market. When you see 9-year-old girls wearing the veil, you’re practically in pedophilia! There are laws in France to protect minors from all forms of sexual abuse… The veil is a physical and psycho-sexual violence inflicted on girls. It is equivalent to disposing of their bodies, to defining the teenager as a sexual object intended to satisfy men’s desires. This is barbarism!
The veil defines women psychologically, socially, sexually, and legally as sub-men. The veil is the yellow star of the female condition. It marks female bodies as humiliated, guilty, sources of worry, anguish, threatening, dirty, impure, sources of discomfort and sin, these unhealthy objects, coveted, desired and forbidden, hidden and exposed, locked up, abused, circulated around men, like shadows. If… young Jews started wearing the yellow star, claiming “it is my freedom;” if young blacks decided to wear chains around their necks and feet, saying “it is my freedom,” wouldn’t society react? When you try to nuance it by using the words “headscarf” or “headband,” I reply: “Between the burka and the colored headscarf, the meaning is the same.” Talking about headscarves, about headbands, is just a semantic cowardice; it is a miserable rhetorical trick.
Boys, girls, women, and men can wear a cross or Fatima’s hand around their neck, referring to religious figures and the Christian or Muslim faith. It is an ornament, while the veil is reserved for women. On the religious, historical, anthropological, social, and legal level, it has meanings, functions and scope that structure the Islamic society. The veil concretizes and materializes the sexual apartheid and the inferiority of women’s rights… It is the symbol of … Islamic ideology, the Islamist banner, and the flag of the ummah.
Veiling teenage girls and women was an essential prerequisite for initiating the massive re-Islamization of youth from Muslim immigrant backgrounds, preventing them from being fully integrated by the unholy West… To finally create a Muslim community that would be anti-Western. The method of re-Islamization in the West is identical to the one used in Muslim countries, such as Iran, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia… because it operates, above all, on Muslim youth. Wearing the headscarf here is a support for the Islamist dictatorships that impose the burka there. The veil is the very emblem of Islamist dogma. Islam can quite live without it, but there is no Islamist country without the veil.
Djemila Benhabib (b. 1972)
The veil is an obsessive relationship to the body, to the flesh, to sex. The veil is the control of women’s sexuality. Let us not be naive enough to believe that the hijab would be acceptable, even progressive, while the burqa would be retrograde and unacceptable. The difference between the two is only due to the size of the fabric. The meaning remains the same: the archaic manifestation of women’s oppression and submission. These women claim that they veil themselves so as not to attract the attention of men and awaken their impulses. This conception, which considers women as “unfulfilled temptresses” and men as “perpetual predators,” is totally infantile and primary.
I am not ashamed to have been born a woman. I don’t have to apologize for that. I don’t have to hide from it. Islamists blame women for their sexual desires, miseries, and sexual frustrations. They’re sex maniacs. Women’s hatred and submission crystallize their ideology. There can be no free and emancipated women — or men for that matter — in an Islamic state. Engels was right to say that “the degree of women’s emancipation is the measure of the degree of general emancipation.”
Djemila Benhabib (b. 1972)
This veil you are promoting is not universally valid. You exclude yourself and your close ones from it. Deep down, you get the light, and I get the prison. Strange conception. There is racism right there… The veil? Never! Not here, not there, not anywhere else… You make me a “whore.” You designate me as a sexual prey. You’re calling for my rape. If you have ever walked the streets of Cairo, Casablanca, or Algiers, you must have noticed that at the end of the promenade there is an open-air prison for women. Their bodies are scrutinized, hated, fantasized, scalpel-cut, when they are not soiled by tough hands ready in all lowliness to grab a piece of flesh. With or without veil, from cradle to grave, we are but a mass of desolation. How could it be otherwise when “females” are seen as fortresses to be assaulted, flesh balls to be rubbed against on the subway and buses, battlefields where you unwind after a football game, mats on which you wipe your feet without even thinking about it? If this veil were just another piece of clothing, it would not be so forcefully and rigorously imposed on Iranian and Saudi women, to name but two examples. When it is worn, the woman’s body becomes the possession of the man, the imam, the tyrant, and Allah, all sharing the same detestation of women. “Submit, obey, accept your sub-humanity!”
Malika Boussouf
I don’t know what the term “Islamic veil” means! The other two monotheistic religions are not to be outdone in this respect. All fanaticisms strongly recommend the confinement of women. All demand from them a total and absolute submission. What is a veil, but the physical illustration of this enslavement ordered by all the fundamentalists on earth? … The wearing of the hijab is growing everywhere. What started in the 1990s is becoming generalized social behavior. Women, to put an end to the injunctions and reproaches from men, their families, and the group, wear the veil. At the same time, according to a Ministry of Health survey, 59% of women believe that a husband has the right to beat up his wife. Patriarchy… still has a bright future ahead of it.
There is nothing specific to Islam, all monotheistic religions are fundamentalists, they oppress men but especially women because every time we want, in a society, to control men, we go through their women, and that suits them well. Women are conditioned to be beaten. Religion was made by men and for men, to allow them to maintain themselves as rulers and keep power.
Leïla Babès
The outcry in the Muslim world over the French law banning religious symbols in public schools has revealed two facts that are totally new in Islamic history. Firstly, the almost hysterical reactions that have been expressed here and there about the veil, which has become a worldwide phenomenon, the emblematic sign of a community, clearly show a fracture in the Muslim consciousness. Never before, neither in the caliphate period nor even since the emergence of the first Islamic ideologues at the beginning of the twentieth century– who made the veil a fundamental precept by misrepresenting it as the hijab, which the Koran reserves exclusively for the Prophet’s wives — had the woman’s body been the subject of a debate involving the fate of the entire community. It is as if the social body was merging with the female body. Secondly, what is striking is the recurrence in unison just about everywhere of a discourse that has been circulating in Islamic circles for some years now, according to which the veil is a religious belief and practice. This is a gigantic mystification whose mechanisms are easy to dismantle.
But why so much noise for this piece of fabric? Why don’t these Muslims protest to get beautiful mosques instead of those obscure prayer rooms that give such a miserable image of their religion? After all, prayer is one of Islam’s cultural foundations along with profession of faith, zakat, fasting and pilgrimage. The veil is neither one of the five pillars of observance nor is it an element of Muslim dogma … along with belief in God, angels, books, prophets, and Judgment Day. There is absolutely no difference in this area of faith, worship, spirituality, and status of the believer between men and women. The Koran and the prophetic tradition are clear on this. If… the veil was a religious obligation… then what are men waiting for to veil themselves? …
This trickery is the work of men, and it affects the female body. The veil has always been, since its appearance nearly two millennia ago, a means of subjecting women to men’s guardianship. This rule of “branding”’ women of the clan, wives, virgins, high-ranking women, accompanied by a taboo on hair, will be found almost everywhere in the Mediterranean region. Islamists who believe that the Koran invented the veil are mistaken. The veil has nothing religious about it, it is not even the work of Jewish or Christian believers, it is a custom established by pagan peoples, jahiliyyah men, in that Age of Ignorance of “true religion.” The Koran does not “prescribe” the veil. It only recommends that women wear it in a decent manner — which is not described anywhere — and that they cover their necklines. The ethical principles that the Koran advocates are modesty and a reserved attitude towards attraction between the sexes, principles that apply to both women and men. Everything else is phantasmagoria. Therefore, there is nothing religious about the veil. It has to do with men having an obsessive relationship with the female body…
Women are the main object of such fixation when defending a liberticidal conception. The veil is such an essential symbol for the Islamist order that it makes it possible to mark a strict differentiation of the sexes, assigning women to a particular place. By accentuating the ban on women’s bodies, it makes them incapable of discovering themselves, of making themselves visible, of taking over the public space, of gaining access to power; in short: of being equal to men. But it is on another level that the deep springs of this pathos are at play: the sexual level… It is on this terrain that obsession has been unfolding for the past two thousand years. The Koran does not give any other argument in the three verses relating to the “veil,” systematically calling men and their sexual motivations into question. By legislating on the veil, the divine text has tried to regulate the libidinal instincts of men, always ready to covet women indiscriminately, starting with the Prophet’s own wives. These men were neither Jews, nor Christians, nor polytheists, they were Muslims.
What can we conclude from all this? That fourteen centuries after the foundation of Islam, Muslims, who today wave the veil as the community’s banner, have forgotten or pretend to forget the exercise of jihad, which the Prophet himself called the greater jihad to distinguish it from armed combat; that personal effort of ethical and spiritual perfection designed to control one’s own instincts.
By making women’s bodies the object of all lust, and the veil a means of ensuring their tranquility, men allow themselves not to make this effort… It is women who pay the price for this childish attitude that allows men to take refuge in the comfort of non-responsibility. Continuing to assert that the veil is an eternal and unspecified prescription instead of accomplishing [the greater] jihad is to recognize that Muslim men are uneducated men, unable to control their animal instincts. Is this not acknowledging Islam’s failure as a religion of responsibility? How do we explain this divide? How did we get to the point where Islam became the religion of the veil?
After the eradication by the proponents of an exclusively legal conception of Islam of what has made this great civilization great, what is left of encyclopedic knowledge and humanism, philosophy, theology, and mysticism? Preachers who are disciples of a handful of reactionary “theologians,” responsible for the civilizational and intellectual impoverishment of a religion that has become a prisoner of a paranoid reading that only holds on to prohibitions and obligations. The veil is truly the epitome of the state of intellectual, cultural, and spiritual decay in which contemporary Islamic thought finds itself.
Zineb El Rhazoui (b. 1982)
I went to school in Morocco where the teaching of religion was compulsory, but women did not wear the veil, or at least not the one we know today. This one appeared in the 1980s with some young women from university circles in major cities close to emerging Islamist organizations… I was able to observe closely this country’s evolution, which is not the worst in its kind, but the fact is that radicalization was gradually increasing. At the time, it was possible to wear a skirt and use public transport, today only women who own a car can dress relatively as they wish.
Some feminists have long since capitulated in this war being waged by Islamists. Thus, in order not to be called Islamophobes, they accept male guardianship over Muslim women, particularly in the form of the veil. However, this veil in all its forms is far from being a banal fabric synonymous with freedom of expression, the right to dress as one pleases, a symbol of modesty, or spirituality. It is indeed a sexist militant instrument to advance Islamic fascism by domesticating women.
Forcing a woman to wear a garment she did not choose is violence, but rather than punishing the perpetrator, these feminists propose to live with it. This amounts to being silent in front of a woman who has a black eye for fear that she will withdraw into herself and give up all social life.
Accepting the veil and its most rigid variations in the name of freedom to dress as one wishes is the very negation of feminism. How can one accept an outfit, enacted by “heaven,” and mandatory in many countries, if the offenders are physically punished in the public place.
What would these pro-veil feminists say to these Saudi women that the Moutawa agents, the “Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” quibble in the street or shopping malls, with sticks, like cattle that do not walk straight, for a strand of hair that protrudes? That their niqab is just a piece of fabric worn in the name of freedom to dress as you wish?
In France, we see how the notion of individual freedom is reclaimed to defend the veil wearers. The veil is by definition the denial of women’s freedom, but it does not matter to Islamists: they only praise the “freedom” to be Islamist when in reality it is a consent. In countries where the veil is a mandatory uniform under penalty of corporal punishment, the same Islamists do not defend the individual’s freedom to dress as one wishes.
Antiracism is also diverted by them and emptied of all nobility: they will never denounce the Islamic precepts that prohibit interreligious unions as being racist. Islamists who cry out against racism make it meaningless, because for them, it is not a struggle for universalism, to erase the differences between human beings, but rather a struggle to impose their own difference as universal. Islamists denounce the racism of others because they want to have a monopoly on racism.
There is also a part of the feminist movement that accepts the veil as a “freedom” while it serves as a visual marking technique, not for those who wear it, as they claim in France, but for those who do not wear it in countries where it is legally or socially obligatory. Not to wear the veil in a context where it proliferates is to be immediately identified as not adhering to the Islamist ideology. These feminists have accepted another intellectual imposture: Islamic feminism. Since when does Islam have anything to teach us about women’s liberation?
I can imagine that those who now wear the veil, full or partial, were not forced manu militari to do so. If this had been the case, there would have been complaints, because in France, laws allow people to defend themselves. On the other hand, this is far from being a free choice. Algerian feminist Wassyla Tamzali saw hundreds of thousands of women in Algeria during the Black Decade make this “free choice” all at once. It is strange, is it not? …
Wassyla Tamzali explains that the veil is not a choice, but a consent. For me, it will become a piece of clothing like any other on the day that Saudi women can wear a veil on Monday, jeans on Tuesday, and a bikini on Wednesday. On that day, I will say “OK.” But as long as there are places where women are covered from head to toe and are whipped by religious police if they don’t, don’t talk to me about choices.
Those who talk about choice in France are in reality either women who have consented to wear the veil, or Islamic ideology activists who use the dialectical tools of human rights and individual freedoms to impose the denial of human rights and freedom. This is a uniform in Saudi Arabia and other countries.
As a feminist, I can only be fiercely opposed to the veil, whether integral or a simple scarf, because its function remains the same: to cover the woman, to make her ugly to reduce unexpected erections. It is an insult both to the woman, perceived as a sexual object to be covered, and to the man, seen as a rutting primate who cannot help but rape as soon as he sees a tuft of hair. But beware, this aversion to the veil does not mean that I deny human dignity to all women wearing it. Because behind the veil, there is a human being, who has rights. But these women have rights as individuals and citizens, not as ninjas covered from head to toe.
Zineb El Rhazoui (b. 1982)
Why the hell should I respect Islam? Does it respect me? The day Islam shows the slightest bit of consideration to women, first of all, and secondly toward free-thinkers, I promise you I will rethink my positions.
Yağmur Uygarkızı (b. 1996)
It is the manifestation of a desire not to see women in the public — male — space. The veil aims to erase women. If you dare to leave your home, at least have the decency to cover your dreadful and so arousing female body. Hide the fact that you are a woman. The positive — superior — man can move around freely, you negative — inferior — woman must be contained. The veil also acts as a leash. The woman cannot exist independently of a master. She has to be owned by a male figure to be honorable, whether this figure is a god or a parent. And the woman can only exist to their eyes of her legitimate proprietor. Vision concretizes existence. If one cannot see women, then one is one step closer to eliminating us. The veil is the punishment for the fault of being born female…
The veil is the epitome of the growing acceptance of sexist practices under the guise of foreign mystique. Among those practices, there is: the refusal of touching women, female genital mutilation, domestic violence, virginity tests, etc. The type of list one wishes was exhaustive. It is not by defending sexism that you bring in more cultural diversity. The veil subordinates women to men, setting a glaring divide between the two. It is not about freedom; it implies many constraints. Self-effacement is not a right… It took less than fifteen years for Atatürk’s secular Turkey to be veiled up. But this is not just Turkey. This is Iran, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and more. Women have already experienced these things. The veil is only the tip of a continental iceberg of misogynist violence. It is the beginning of the end.
Yağmur Uygarkızı (b. 1996)
In this process of objectification, the veil swaps places with the woman to her detriment: the veil gains its own subjectivity… As the veil becomes part of a woman, the two engage in a frenetic diabolic dance, where the two are confused. The veil leads the dance…. In this choreography, the veil has engulfed the woman: she can no longer exist independent of it; unveiling would equate to mutilating oneself… What this means is that a patriarchal practice is incorporated into women: just like the veiled woman cannot have an independent existence from the veil. She becomes dependent on men for her self-definition.
It is the manifestation of a desire not to see women in the public — male — space. The veil aims to erase women. If you dare to leave your home, at least have the decency to cover your dreadful and so arousing female body. Hide the fact that you are a woman. The positive — superior — man can move around freely, you negative — inferior — woman must be contained. The veil also acts as a leash. The woman cannot exist independently of a master. She has to be owned by a male figure to be honorable, whether this figure is a god or a parent. And the woman can only exist to their eyes of her legitimate proprietor. Vision concretizes existence. If one cannot see women, then one is one step closer to eliminating us. The veil is the punishment for the fault of being born female…
The veil is the epitome of the growing acceptance of sexist practices under the guise of foreign mystique. Among those practices, there is: the refusal of touching women, female genital mutilation, domestic violence, virginity tests, etc. The type of list one wishes was exhaustive. It is not by defending sexism that you bring in more cultural diversity. The veil subordinates women to men, setting a glaring divide between the two. It is not about freedom; it implies many constraints. Self-effacement is not a right… It took less than fifteen years for Atatürk’s secular Turkey to be veiled up. But this is not just Turkey. This is Iran, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and more. Women have already experienced these things. The veil is only the tip of a continental iceberg of misogynist violence. It is the beginning of the end.
Yağmur Uygarkızı (b. 1996)
Since veiling was prior to Islam, and has been recuperated by different religions there must be something intrinsic to veiling that renders it appealing to patriarchal institutions… The veil is not any type of clothing. Within a wardrobe, it falls under the category of headwear. Someone’s head is one of the first things we look at to communicate and it is also metaphoric, often seen as embodying intellect. As such, headwear conveys meaning and is highly codified: suffice to think of crowns or turbans to see how. Headwear can be functional, like beanies in winter, but the veil is certainly not since the thermometer has little effect on it. Moreover, a headscarf goes beyond a simple object placed on a head: it entirely covers the hair of women, another deeply symbolic body part… Sometimes they even cover the face. Lorella Zanardi, talking of plastic surgery, explains that most facial muscles solely serve the purpose of communication by conveying emotions: if that part is erased for one sex only, the symbolism is at its pinnacle.
Yağmur Uygarkızı (b. 1996)
Claiming veiling is feminist demonstrates a deep reductionism of feminist principles…
Yağmur Uygarkızı (b. 1996)
Veiling is a sex-based practice, therefore inevitably sexual… the veil requires external gaze to exist… By hiding, the veil displays. Veiling must necessarily be practiced in a social setting, visible to others to make sense… “Look at me,” says the veil… The veil is a portable device of communication between men through women. The woman is effaced under the veil as the veil becomes ostentatious…
Yağmur Uygarkızı (b. 1996)
The contemporary discourse on veiling pretends that a millennia-old archaic practice is a previously unheard-of revolutionary product that will shield you from male oppression. What it denotes… is a vision of feminism as a safe haven from oppression, not a challenge to it, and of sexualization as women’s personal responsibility, not men’s… Veiling has posed no tangible threat to consumer culture and femininity. That is because veiling is a practice reserved to women reinforcing stereotypes about how a woman should look and dress like. Less evident is the fact that veiling and modesty do not necessarily go hand in hand… Veiling is a conspicuous sexualizing practice: it must be visible and convey information about the sex and sexuality of women to men. In that sense, the relational and ambivalent nature of veiling is confirmed.
Yağmur Uygarkızı (b. 1996)
Veiling… is an intrinsically harmful practice.
Fatemeh Sadeghi (b. 1971)
Let me tell you about how my painful experience with the hijab started. I remember the day when I had to wear a headscarf for the first time in front of the boys in our family who were my playmates and often competitors. I felt humiliated. I felt paralyzed and crushed in their eyes. I could especially read the following message in the eyes of one of them: “See how you were vanquished?” The story was not just about covering my body. It was much more. On many occasions when I was busy playing or preoccupied with myself, I heard chiding voices from various corners: “Sit properly. Straighten your outfit. All your body parts are uncovered. Pull you scarf forward, Your veil is too far back on your head, Your neck is showing, Your hair is showing,” etc. I never knew the meaning behind these reprimands and even why I was being addressed in such a manner.
The personal experiences and humiliation which the hijab has caused me and many others, cannot be found in any of the precious and often reprinted books of the clergy in Qum… Let me tell you that after those childhood experiences, the most humiliating sentence about the hijab which I have heard, has been the following: “For a woman, the hijab is like a pearl which covers a jewel.” I could tolerate more respectable sentences such as “Sister, your hijab is a more powerful weapon than my blood.” But I could never tolerate the former sentence.
The former sentence contains an insult which can be understood by any human being. Without having met the creators of that sentence, I can tell that they were experts in the psychology of personality disorders. Can you guess why? This sentence combines praise and humiliation. A woman is praised but only as a being who must be beautiful. Anyway, you know this better than I do. In the latter sentence however, I sense a type of respect. I like its combativeness along with the respect that it has for my femininity, even though it does not understand me and dismisses me as a woman.
As I was growing up, I realized that this story has gained more complex dimensions. Soon I understood that there is a difference between the headscarf and the veil. If the headscarf was to sexually control me –although very unsuccessfully — or to pull me out of the realm of childhood and force me to become a woman, the veil was something else. I could see that my mother and many other women around me, used the veil in a variety of ways. They did not wear the same veil at all places and they did not cover themselves as tightly in all places. Especially when a grand clergyman was to visit our house or when we were to visit a grand clergyman, they would hold their veils more tightly. Naturally under these circumstances, I was told, “Watch your hijab,” meaning, hold it more tightly. Were these men considered more representative of the outsider category than other men? I think so. The higher the class and rank [of a man], the more the [woman’s] face was to be covered. The hijab had an inextricable relationship with power.
The veil was not just a cover. It allowed for thousands of ways of establishing distance, symbolic gestures, blending in, differentiating oneself, and giving or gaining benefits. I too had to learn how to use the veil in the aristocratic hierarchy of power of the clergy. I had to learn how to use it as an instrument of power and impose it on others. I had to learn how to use the cues to become a prominent person among other prominent people, to become recognized, to become seen, to gain benefits. I proved not talented at this task.
Wearing the headscarf or the overcoat was not enough. Thus, the first time I surreptitiously tried wearing an overcoat and a headscarf, I felt naked. Now I know that more than any feeling of physical nakedness, what made me distressed and confused was the loss of the consequences [of wearing the veil], all the symbols, the benefits and distinction and prominence, the aristocracy.
Nevertheless, wearing the overcoat and the headscarf had an adventurous and awesome benefit despite the fear and the dangers. Along with many other consequences, losing the social and political benefits that accompanied the hijab and the veil forced me to step in a different direction. By wearing the overcoat and headscarf I became empty and lost my identity. Now I needed to build a new identity.
When I asked a very famous clergyman whether the hijab was based on Sharia law, he said something along the lines of the following: “There is no such hijab in shari‘ah law. The question concerns the civil code.” Another who was a famous clergyman of his time and taught at the hawzah and at a university, revealed that in Sharia law, the hijab does not even mean covering one’s head. He surprised me by inviting me to reconsider my own manner of covering my body. Nevertheless, neither of these clergymen ever openly expressed his viewpoint in public. Similarly many others do not. We know that the few who have had the courage to express their views have been defrocked and punished in other ways…
The works of Mottahari and his likes cannot answer the above simple questions, even if they are published thousands more times thanks to the large budgets of the Ministry of Culture and the Organization of Islamic Propaganda. Mottahari himself was well aware of the fact that the viewpoint of the reactionary clergy can no longer answer the questions of the new generation. That is why he named his book, The Question of the Hijab and tried to adopt a so-called scientific attitude toward this momentous subject.
Everyone knows well that there is only one solution to the question of the hijab: Covering oneself should be left to women’s individual choice. If the institution of the family, society and Islamic government depends on the hijab, then the problem is to be found in that institution, the foundation of that family, that society and that government, all of which require bold but necessary revision… This will not happen, at least not in the near future… The attitude of the Islamic regime or at least important parts of it are more confrontational toward women than ever. Such a confrontational attitude toward women is unprecedented among incumbent administrations since the beginning of the revolution. One has to ask what is causing this brutality of which the attitude toward the hijab is only one of many dimensions…
As women we have been critiquing and will critique the varieties of the compulsory hijab for years. We have done so in implicit and explicit ways, with irony, protest, argumentation, civil resistance and in many other forms. Today, given the confrontational attitude of the Islamic regime, it seems that we need to speak about this issue again. We have to say “no” to it. We have to start a new discourse. They cannot put an end to this matter simply and with an order from this or that commander and the arrests of many women on the streets and private companies, and the firing of women office workers. I believe that a major confrontation is on the way. This is a confrontation that the perpetrators of the “social safety plans” and “the elevation of public decency” have initiated…
Fatemeh Sadeghi (b. 1971)
Soon after her death, Mahsa [Amini] became a symbol of full-scale humiliation in today’s Iran. First, she was a woman; being a woman in Iran means being subject to humiliation and discrimination. Second, she was arrested because of her hijab, which is one of the most visible manifestations of the oppression of women. Third, she was brutally tortured and murdered by the police while in custody; her death confirms the Iranian police’s brutality. Fourth, she was a citizen of one of the most deprived and repressed Iranian provinces, namely Kurdistan. And finally, after her death, the repression apparatus turned to fabricating scenarios and spreading lies to justify her death. The protests have focused on two main issues: mandatory hijab and police brutality. The first is the demand for freedom, the second is the demand for dignity. Both of these have been absent from political life in Iran, yet they have a clear and prominent presence in almost all slogans of this movement, especially the slogan “Woman, life, freedom.”
Fatemeh Sadeghi (b. 1971)
The main problem is in the government’s approach to society. It has tied its identity to domination and force. The discourse of Iranian officials is full of contempt. They have a commanding tone and words full of contempt for others. Even when they want to talk normally, their tongues only turn to sarcasm, hatred and misdirection. This command-and-control discourse has a strong root in jurisprudence. Generally, jurists’ job is to command and they don’t have the patience to oppose and criticize. They do not understand the simple fact that with this ruling discourse, they cannot control the new generation, which the jurists and authorities neither know nor understand.
Abla Hasan
The generality and the flexibility of the Qur’anic description of zinah, translated here as ‘charms,’ shows tolerance; the verse can be interpreted broadly to meet the changing spatiotemporal, cultural, and ethnic needs.
Abla Hasan
The headscarf is not compulsory.
Paola Garcia
No person, male or female, living in a modern society, let’s say, contemporary America, Europe, or Asia (and even many parts of North Africa and the Middle East), would consider a woman showing her hair to be immodest. Neither are men these days particularly provoked by the sight of a woman’s hair. Among today’s morally questionable fashions and cultural practices, a woman’s uncovered hair is hardly a temptation or a show of moral laxity. But let’s imagine that it were in fact a “temptation.” Let’s pretend present-day men were somehow so weak as to be provoked by glancing a woman’s hair, still, the solution is within themselves. Modesty is also required of, and was first mandated to, men: they are ordered to lower their gaze, purify their thoughts and dress modestly too. The answer is not for women to make it their central preoccupation to ensure by all means that they do not cause men any impure thoughts. This is, again, absurd: Islam teaches that in the eyes of God, each person is responsible for his or her own actions.
Paola Garcia
The universality of Islam invalidates the claim that veiling of any kind is mandatory for all Muslim women and … negates the notion of particular clothing requirements… The Qur’an states… “We have created you from male and female and made you into nations and tribes that you may know one another” (49:13). The Qur’an recognizes … and accepts cultural differences… Clothing is among the most salient manifestations of culture. (Had God intended uniformity of dress upon embracing Islam, the Qur’an would have indicated so, but it most definitely does not)… The Qur’an, instructing modesty as a principle, illustrated it with the practices that were common at the time … The Qur’an’s mandate is the general principle of modesty, rather than veiling and seclusion, which are cultural manifestations that pertain to a specific context. Otherwise, how could it be true that Islam is universal and timeless, all humans and cultures equal under it, none superior to another, yet simultaneously true that all women, irrespective of the time and place they exist in, who accept Islam as their faith, should proceed to adopt the dress mores of seventh century Arabia? This is entirely absurd and not Islamic but rather cultural…
The way modesty was expressed before and during the lifetime of the Prophet is quite different from how it is manifested in other societies. Because Islam is a religion for all times, it logically does not follow that despite the religion’s universality and timelessness, Muslim women all over the world must continue to show their modesty and piety in 1400-year-old Arab standards. Moreover, “Allah intends for [us] ease and does not intend for [us] hardship” (2:185)… There is no dispute about the importance of modesty or about the fact that modesty is required and central to Islam for both men and women. But claiming that modesty demands… that a Muslim woman living in New York City in 2014 wear garb that originated, was useful in, and symbolized modesty and dignity in the desert of Arabia 1400 years ago is completely ridiculous.
Mona Eltahawy (b. 1967)
Almost 100% of Egyptian girls and women report being sexually harassed… Before leaving home, every woman I know braces herself for the obstacle course of offensive words, groping hands, and worse that await her in the streets she takes to school, university, and work… 96.5% of Egyptian woman have experienced unwelcome physical contact, while 95.5 % have been subjected to verbal harassment on the streets… In Yemen… 90% of … women have experienced harassment, specifically pinching… nearly all women in Yemen are covered from head to toe… The extraordinarily high incidence of harassment in Yemen gives the lie to the conservatives who claim women bring harassment upon themselves by dressing “immodestly.”
Mona Eltahawy (b. 1967)
Western women who wear the veil contribute to the subjugation of women in other parts of the world.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (b. 1969)
Whether she is a virgin, married, divorced, or widowed, if she works outside the house, if she moves freely in public without a chaperone, if she ignores the modesty dress code, she is deemed immodest. A woman who has no male relatives to protect her is, by default, also considered immodest. They can be leered at, harassed, groped, or sexually assaulted because the perpetrators have no consequences to fear, whether because there is no one to retaliate on her behalf or because the woman is simply thought to be “asking for it.”
Mimunt Hamido Yahia (b. 1961)
What does the veil mean in the Muslim religion? The veil, often called hijab… is a garment that is intended to hide the beauty of women so as not to excite men, thereby preventing sexual harassment, assault, or rape… It hides hair and neckline, but it can also be extended to cover the face except for the eyes (known as niqab) or the entire face (burqa). Islamic theology considers that men are naturally inclined to harass or sexually assault women… To avoid this, women are required to cover their “charms.”
In non-Muslim countries, where the vast majority of women do not wear headscarves, the hijab is now increasingly used to visually identify Muslim women from non-Muslims. Thus, it has become the identity symbol for a group of people who refuse to mix or be confused with those who do not share their faith. We reject the veil for both reasons.
We do not believe that men have the natural impulse to sexually assault or rape the women around them. We believe that harassment is a symptom of a serious social disease and that, if it occurs, men should be educated so that they learn to live with women, as opposed to hiding women. By making women responsible for preventing sexual harassment, the veil justifies and legitimizes it.
We do not want to display our religion, whichever we have, in public. We do not want to be a uniformed group, identified with a specific ideology. We do not want to be subjected to the visual control of those who claim to represent us. If we are Muslims, it is our business; they will not force us to prove it.
We want to prevent women born into Muslim families from feeling compelled to identify themselves as such by wearing the veil. But if in a community — be it a Muslim country or an immigrant neighborhood in Spain — the vast majority of women born Muslim wear veils, not doing so becomes a heroic action and exposes whoever does so to continuous pressure, harassment, and insults from family and neighbors: when everyone wears a veil, not doing so turns a girl into a whore as well as a legitimate prey for harassment.
Wearing a veil legitimizes harassment, establishes segregation by religion, and exerts pressure on others. That is why we say: “No to the veil.”
Fundamentalist Islam tries to colonize the minds of all people who are born into Muslim families. It claims to be the main identity of its adherents. Compared to the “West,” (a geographical term), they speak of the “Muslim world,” as if all its inhabitants were characterized primarily by religion.
We refuse to be defined primarily on the basis of religion. We are Moroccan, Spanish, Egyptian or Turkish. Our identity is formed by multiple factors — nationality, language, culture — and religion is just one more element. This religion is enormously diverse. The Islam that our grandmothers practiced in the Rif was very different from what they practice today in Qatar. We reject that a certain fundamentalist vision of Islam seeks to eradicate our traditions, our culture, and replace them with a uniform Islamic identity.
We open the debate on the process of formation of the religion called Islam, a process that is still ongoing and that cannot be hidden with the not so rational dogma that Islam, in its current form, was created by divine intervention in one fell swoop fourteen years ago in Arabia, to arrive as it is to our days.
Criticizing the centers of power of fundamentalist Islam is practically a taboo today both in countries that officially declare themselves Islamic, and in Europe, which has coined the term “Islamophobia” to shield fundamentalists against their detractors.
In almost all Islamic countries, regimes use Islam to legitimize their power and stifle any discussion on the role of religion in public life, even when they tolerate political criticism in other respects. Declaring yourself an atheist does not appear as a crime in the legislation of countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, or Egypt, but it is treated as if it were prohibited, just like any other opinion that questions the laws that force the application of Islamic norms in the public sphere. There is no freedom in Islam as long as the police persecute anyone who disputes the faith.
In Europe, the word “Islamophobia” is not only used to describe racist acts directed against Muslims — which is logically a crime, because racism is a crime — but it is also applied to any criticism of Islam as a religion, its orthodox commandments or the most severe regulations promulgated in recent years by its theologians. One is allowed to criticize — and rightly so — the power of the Christian Church. However, one is prohibited, at all costs, from criticizing the centers of Islamist power.
When we women, who were born under so-called “Islamic” laws, criticize the patriarchal repression justified by these norms, there is never a shortage of Europeans, often people who have never seen an Islamic country up close or a ghetto dominated by fundamentalists in Europe, who denounce us as “Islamophobic,” and demand that we be silenced to prevent us from attacking “Muslims.” The press and television invite the defenders of political Islam, usually imams or women who, through the veil, display their adherence to the fundamentalist current. However, they never invite those who oppose the power of the Mosque.
We will not be silent. We will denounce the influence of religious centers of power. To criticize the norms that they try to promote, expand, and impose, is not to attack Muslims. Rather, it is to defend Muslims, especially Muslim women, against their oppressors.
The repression of women’s sexuality is the main obsession of the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But while Christianity in most of Europe has lost the power to impose this obsession through law, and few people who consider themselves Christian follow religious norms regarding sex, in Muslim communities sexual repression is only advancing.
The obsession of being a virgin at marriage has been common to patriarchal traditions throughout the Mediterranean, regardless of religion, but the advance of fundamentalist Islam in recent decades has put an end to the evolution experienced during the twentieth century in the Maghreb. Under the pretext of being a divine commandment, families control their daughters more and more and put more and more barriers to their experiences with the other sex.
In immigrant communities in Europe, this repression is even greater because the Islamic rule that prohibits women from marrying men who are not of the same faith is also introduced. For this reason, contact between teenage girls and boys of the same age are restricted and prevented, all in order to keep them “pure” for a marriage with a Muslim man. We oppose sexual taboos. The greater the taboo, the greater the ignorance of the body, one’s own and that of the other sex, the greater the harassment, abuse, and sexual violence. We ask for more sexual education in schools and we oppose schools segregated by sex. We oppose religious leaders demanding separate spaces or hours for boys and girls in public swimming pools or school sports activities. We denounce the propagation of an ideology that considers “chastity” the greatest value of women and we reaffirm our right to choose at all times with whom to share our bodies, our sexuality. Because there is no freedom for women without sexual freedom.
Mimunt Hamido Yahia (b. 1961)
In orthodox Islamic theology… hair is considered an erotic attribute of women that can arouse … men. If a man gets excited, he will try to have sex with that woman. He can harass her, try to touch her, and even try to rape her… The veil serves a sexual function: to avoid arousing men’s lust. If a man sees our hair… he cannot control himself and will feel the primitive urge to rape us… Muslim men view themselves as rapists and Muslim women consider their brothers, cousins, fathers, or uncles to be potential rapists: men who cannot control themselves at the sight of the hair of a Muslim woman… This only applies to the hair of a Muslim woman because others can go about as they wish, and nobody will feel like raping them… or perhaps it does not matter what happens to them. It does … matter for us Muslim women: we belong to those male rapists and, unless we go out decently dressed, they believe they have the right to admonish us or directly to rape us. And we will be held responsible for having failed to uphold the norms of essential decorum, which require that we be immediately identifiable as good Muslim at first sight. This theological basis of the hijab is not one among many interpretations: it is the official and only one.
Mimunt Hamido Yahia (b. 1961)
In a normal country, be it European or North African, nobody jumps a woman and tries to rape her because she has shown a lock of hair… As the Salafi-Wahabi ideology has spread, so has the idea that girls are obliged to publicly demonstrate that they are decent and are not going around arousing men. If in the middle of the twentieth century it was normal to go around with hair uncovered in any Moroccan city, that it no longer the case: now, there is no shortage of men who interpret the absence of the veil as a provocation. It is a type of signal: if I do not cover myself, it is because I wish to arouse you because that is how much of a slut that I am.
Mimunt Hamido Yahia (b. 1961)
I think that recalcitrant Islamists who recommend that girls wear hijabs from birth should be taken to court for promoting pedophilia. Asking a five-year-old to hide her “charms” is to consider her a sexual object. This is the mentality in which the Salafists live.
Mimunt Hamido Yahia (b. 1961)
Once you put on the hijab, and you do so in such a public fashion, you cannot take it off, at least in public. You will have to live up to the norms that everyone — Christians and even atheists — expect from the behavior of a Muslim woman.
Mimunt Hamido Yahia (b. 1961)
The struggle of North African women has many different fronts, and they are all very important… In this struggle, symbols are extremely important. The hijab encompasses all forms of oppression, restrictions, prohibitions, and norms that we are subjected to as Muslim women. The veil symbolizes the acceptance and submission to the patriarchy that imposes these norms upon us.
Mimunt Hamido Yahia (b. 1961)
To be a believer is a vague concept… one can be a believer and more or less practicing or hold personal views regarding which norms really form part of the religion. To wear the hijab, however, is to show the world that one has accepted the rules entirely. The women who claim to wear it freely, without coercion, are recognizing that those norms are just.
Mimunt Hamido Yahia (b. 1961)
Nobody kills and nobody imprisons [women] who do not wish to wear high-heels or makeup. However, Muslim girls who wish to wear makeup or miniskirts are subjected to violence for doing so. It is … amazing that they think aesthetic oppression is limited to Western women. Have they not seen veiled girls with fake eyelashes, layers of makeup, and flaming red lipstick? Women who claim to wear the hijab by choice do not free themselves from makeup and plastic surgery. Iran and Iraq… rank the highest in the world for nose jobs. They fix their cheeks, tits, and asses. Whether they go around stuffed in a niqab that covers their entire bodies is immaterial. Polygyny makes competition very difficult; age is not forgiving, and Arabs have always preferred young, very young, women. Nobody in Spain suffers from such ruthless aesthetic pressure as the girls in countries where the hijab reigns. As for the miniskirt… when did we stop seeing it as a symbol of rebellion against patriarchy?
Mimunt Hamido Yahia (b. 1961)
We women have always been exploited by all theocracies, both Christian and Islamist, as the cannon fodder of their ideology… In order to impose any totalitarian regime, it is crucial to rely on the family… In Spain, we had the famous “Women’s Section” of the Falangists…. In Germany, the Nazis founded the… League of German Ladies… In Iran … there are military units composed of women who march with guns, uniforms, and… hijabs on their heads… They form part of the infamous “morality police,” that impose the veil on girls… In other official Muslim countries, even so-called “moderate” ones, there is no need for a women’s league. The population is so “well trained” that everyone feels free to denounce their neighbors…
Mimunt Hamido Yahia (b. 1961)
Feminism is a universal ideology… By the very fact that we were born female, we, women … suffer from the violence and control that the patriarchy exerts over our bodies. It matters not whether the patriarchy is western, eastern, North African, or Asiatic… Patriarchy is a universal power structure.
Mimunt Hamido Yahia (b. 1961)
Every day more and more girls between the ages of six and seven wear the hijab, and that goes against the human rights of minors. They even put it on babies in the crib. Have you thought that a seven-year-old baby or girl is capable of exciting a man? What do you call that? I call it an apology for pedophilia.
Source: Morrow, John Andrew. Hijab: Word of God or Word of Man? Washington, DC and London: Academica Press, 2024. Buy the book here.
Dr. John Andrew Morrow 