Read Online Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy - Free Book Online

ruling is exactly how the issue should be considered: the effects of concealment must be considered before religious connotation.
    Arguments against the niqab can be made on groundsof security: for example, a person in a mask cannot enter a bank, and the niqab can be considered a type of mask. I prefer a more philosophical argument. We are social creatures, and nonverbal communication is an important part of our daily interactions. If I were sitting in front of you now, our interaction would be very different depending on whether you could see my face. When we leave our homes, we enter into a social contract with the community we live in. Face veils, I believe, violate that contract by diminishing the ability to interact fully because of the way they impede nonverbal communication.
    Some have argued against a ban on the niqab by claiming that the state must not play a role in people’s choice of wardrobe. I find this a disingenuous argument that ignores the fact that the state already does this by banning nudity in public, for example. The state of New York, where I lived for ten years before I moved back to Egypt to write this book, forbids the wearing of masks in gatherings of three people or more.
    An interesting and necessary tension in the discussion over veiling has developed over the past decade with the growing visibility of Muslim communities in the “West.” I spoke earlier of how in Egypt, for example, the push and pull on the hijab was often articulated as a tug-of-war between “Islam” and the “West.” Well, then, what happens when you are a Muslim who lives in the West? What happens when you are both Islam and the West? Theseincreasingly visible identities will, I hope, help push us out of the binaries of Islam versus the West.
    Ironically, the bans on the niqab could force a much-needed argument over the face veil that too many Muslim communities are scared to have. We must take apart the idea that the niqab is the pinnacle of piety for women—I have heard some religious scholars even say that if a woman is “too beautiful,” she is obliged to cover her face. We must examine how the niqab contributes to the promotion of a “purity culture”—to borrow a phrase that feminists in the United States have began to use against Christian conservatives there who obsess over women’s “modesty”—and how such a culture directly contributes to the dangers girls and women face in public space. Also, we need to hear more Muslim women’s voices. After I stated my support for niqab bans—and clearly condemned the racism and xenophobia of the political groups behind those bans—I heard privately from Muslim women who opposed face veils of all kinds but who were reluctant to speak out because of the avalanche of attacks I was subjected to after I so publicly supported the bans and opposed face veiling.
    Often when I speak in various Western settings, such as on university campuses or on television shows with a studio audience, a Muslim woman will challenge me on my opposition to the niqab and my support for its ban. I relish the back-and-forth we end up having because it’s an important reminder that Muslim women disagree—weare not monolithic in our views. It’s also a healthy lesson in challenging what we’ve been taught is accepted scholarly interpretation. When I was younger and I would hear from men and women around me that it was the responsibility of an especially beautiful woman to cover her face so that she would not tempt men (again, the idea that the onus is on women to save men from themselves), it made me very uncomfortable, but I was timid in struggling with my headscarf and didn’t have the language or the ability to challenge the absurdity of such a line of thought.
    An Egyptian American woman who wears the niqab was featured along with me on a public radio discussion about the face veil, as well as on a CNN segment that has since gone viral on YouTube. On the public radio show, she