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explained that she began to wear the niqab after she worked on an oil rig as a chemical engineer and had been subjected to sexual harassment by male colleagues. Again, that “choice” to hide behind a veil, as I had done in Saudi Arabia. But in her case it was the full veil, which covered her face, which I consider an erasure of her identity. Over and over, because of men’s sexual transgressions—in her case, here in the United States—women conceal their bodies. When the presenter of the radio show asked her if the niqab had affected her work life at all, the woman confessed that it had made it difficult to continue as a chemical engineer and that she had resigned from her job. That is an important point toremember. When I make the argument that the niqab erases a woman by concealing her face, I am often met with howls of disagreement from those who claim that women who cover their faces are as active as anybody else. That is clearly false.
    Another encounter I had with a woman who wears the niqab was during the filming of the Al Jazeera English television show
Head to Head.
Filmed at the Oxford Union, the show has a debate-style format in which host Mehdi Hasan grills the guest on the subject at hand—in my case, my essay “Why Do They Hate Us?” and gender equality in the Middle East and North Africa—after which a panel of experts and then the audience pose questions.
    One woman in a niqab chided me for not allowing her to struggle with her niqab in the way I had with my hijab. By supporting a ban on the face veil, she claimed, I was preventing her from completing her own journey. I told her I respectfully disagreed with her and wished her the best but that I still supported a ban on the niqab.
    At the postshow reception, where men and women mingled, the same woman approached me without her niqab. I was shocked and asked her to explain why she wasn’t covering her face. She said that it was complicated and that she covered her face depending on the situation. I told her that women in the Middle East and North Africa did not have such a privilege.
    I maintain that Muslim women who live in Westerncountries—and are themselves both Western and Muslim—can help lift us out of the Islam-versus-the-West dichotomy. But I implore them to recognize the privilege that allows them to make vocal and impassioned defenses of the hijab. It is easy to forget that there are women with less privilege than they who have no true choice in veiling. I understand the need to defend one’s headscarf—I did it for years, even as I was privately struggling with it. It’s an important defense in the face of Islamophobes and racists. I get that. But if it’s done without cognizance of the lived realities of women who do not have the privilege of choice, then my interlocutors end up doing exactly what they accuse me of doing with my support of a niqab ban: silencing other women. Why the silence, as some of our women fade into black, either owing to identity politics or out of acquiescence to Salafism? The niqab represents a bizarre reverence for the disappearance of women. It puts on a pedestal a woman who covers her face, who erases herself, and it considers that erasure the pinnacle of piety. We cannot continue to don the black veil and raise a white flag to Islamist misogyny.
    Egypt and Tunisia provide two interesting and opposite examples of the impact of the revolution on veiling, and give intriguing hints to which way the pendulum will ultimately swing.
    I have heard from and read about several women in Egypt who stopped wearing the headscarf or the niqab after the revolution that began in January 2011. The feminist activist and blogger Fatma Emam wrote an impassioned blog post on how she decided to stop wearing the hijab because she concluded that in order to liberate Egypt, she first had to liberate herself. Emam told Bloomberg News that her mother accused her of wanting to be a man and threatened to disown her if she joined