Amal Ghandour on the Veil 'As My Lantern'

Over forty years have passed since those early days when the wind blew and entire landscapes swayed to its incessant rhythms. It has become customary, and with good reason, to identify the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the subsequent 1979 Siege of Mecca by al-Jamaa al-Salafiya al-Muhtasiba (JSM), a Salafi Jihadist group, as watersheds in the Middle East’s escalating politics of sectarianism and Islamist radicalism. But for us, the minutiae of the region’s changing moods were being felt before Khomeini landed in Tehran in February 1979 and Mohammad Abdullah al-Qahtani, Juhayman al-Outaybi, and their followers attacked Mecca’s Masjid al-Haram in November of the same year.

I often imagine the period as a museum of images and symbols of a contested history. So many of them, and so much to write about. But for me, the veil has the most honored place in this imaginary gallery. This is not because it’s the best expression of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, as its Islamist champions and Western critics insist it is, but because it evokes so well our existential disquiets as a people.

In truth, I would be insulting the veil if I give all the credit to Islamists for spreading it with such vigor. To freeze it in time, as they have, is to deny the mercurial role it has played since it was dubbed our identity’s crown as women. The glory of the hijab, in fact, belongs to all of us—Muslim “Brothers” and “Sisters,” mothers and fathers, systems and peoples, East and West.

I am actually in awe of the veil. That’s why I have chosen it as my lantern in illuminating our muddy cultural terrains. Paradoxically, it is conformist and revolutionary, oppressive and liberating, spontaneous and premeditated, uncovering the fault lines that have long fractured Arab society. It both feeds and flouts every stereotype, celebrates and mocks submission, announces surrender and declares war, is a tormentor and a savior. It all depends on the woman wearing it and her circumstances. Among my own friends and colleagues, from Cairo all the way to Tripoli via Damascus and Amman, those who willingly don it, who wear and hate it, and those who wore it and then finally took it off, every conceivable reason is mentioned: because Islam tells me to, the family forces me to, my dear father implores me to, because I would look odd in my neighborhood, because this is my emancipation from Western temptation, because this is my revolt against imperialism, because I am tired of being sexually harassed everywhere I go, because it’s the price I have to pay to go to school or work.

Therefore, to pigeonhole the hijab as purely an Islamist cipher is to censor all its meanings but one. And the thorniest of these meanings is that of freedom of choice in smothered societies constantly negotiating over it. In this sense, the success of this piece of cloth, beyond perhaps anything Islamism could have hoped for, is an eloquent commentary on the fraught path of women in public space, and the compromises we have had to make to ensure our continued presence there. The hijab, in point of fact, has been the most vivid demonstration of our struggle to engage. And we have, as part of this quest, wrapped ourselves in it in order to unshackle the rest of our being in a wary world ever mistrustful of us. I say this because ours is a Middle East awash with complaints about the unfair challenges of modern times, internal and foreign, political and social, real and contrived. And we women have been conveniently chosen by a patriarchal culture as the showcase of its resilience, its battle for honor and authenticity. We women are at once the measure of success in this “civilizational” tussle with modernity and the scapegoats for failure everywhere else. And so, we “wear” this role, this cover, as a burden or a privilege, as a penalty or a duty, as an albatross or a pass, as a mere gesture or a statement about identity—even, increasingly, as a confident dialogue with modernity itself.

In my own family, Zeinab (Umm Ali), my paternal grandmother, wore the traditional long white mandeel; Mira (Umm Mussbah), my maternal grandmother, the short, modern écharpe that rested midway up her hair. Of the two, Zeinab was the more modest one; Mira always walked out of the house in dresses just below the knee and splendid high heels. My mother tells me that she, at the age of nine, was expected to wear a scarf, like all her friends in Nabatiyeh. Girls and women were also in the habit of wearing a transparent silk face covering when they went to town. Only the wives of sheikhs wore the chador, the more conservative full black garb and head cover. Only the daughters of Dr. Bahij Mirza recused themselves from all such dress codes; no one dared to criticize them because he was very respectable and his girls were as feisty as they come. My mother used to wear her headscarf on the way to school, hide it under the apricot tree, and put it on again on her way back home in the afternoon. By her early teens, it was shoved ever deeper into her closet. By the time she joined her mother and father in Africa in 1947, when she was sixteen, it had disappeared altogether. The rest of us Ghandour women—daughters, granddaughters, nieces, and cousins—never wore the hijab, never wanted to, and were never expected to.

But whatever the motivations of the wearer, the hijab is here to stay. It may continue to reign supreme or it may yet again become just one of many ordinary sights on a busy street. It all depends on whether younger generations of Arabs are finally ready to let go of it as a totem of honor and resilience, releasing all of us women with it as their weapon of choice.

Excerpted from This Arab Life: A Generation’s Journey into Silence, by Amal Ghandour, available on October 11, 2022, via Bold Story Press.