Hijabi hikers

#HijabiHikers my friend tweeted when a group of us went on a trek to Ben Nevis a few years ago. “Why hijabi?” I asked, “how is that remotely connected to the fact that we’re hiking?” Apparently multiple hikers had expressed intrigue – we seemed to have been unwittingly defying stereotypes. In their minds, it was surprising that women covering their hair would be spotted walking up a mountain path. We surprised them not because we were doing anything notable or remarkable (after all, they were walking up the same path) but because of their own perception of what a Muslim woman was or perhaps what she was allowed to be.

I’ve seen that look of surprise many times, often barely concealed. When I was 10, it was the doctor who was convinced that my father was forcing me to wear the hijab. When I was 15, it was the old ladies on the bus when they realised I was reading a novel in the English language. At 17, the biology teacher who was surprised that I was applying to Oxford (despite the 6 A grades at AS). At university, it was the friend that was surprised that I had in fact met my fiancé before agreeing to marry him, or the university doctor when she learned that I got married in North West London rather than Pakistan (my family is not even from Pakistan). After having my first daughter at the age of 23, it was the health visitor who nearly fell off my sofa when I told her I had a degree – “your mummy is so clever,” she kept cooing at my baby girl – completely oblivious to how patronising she was being. And now, over and over again, “Ohhh, you’re a barrister?!” A Muslim woman with a voice, who would have thought?

And so it comes to define us in their eyes and, perhaps because of that, we come to believe that it defines us. We become the hijabi hikers, the hijabi professionals, the hijabi mums beaming from the audience at their children’s orchestra recital, #MuslimWomenRepresenting. It becomes the pinnacle of our faith even though it never made it into the five pillars of Islam. And it often sits as a pivotal point in our struggle for a sense of purpose and belonging, a sense of community and of self. All the while, other people continue to project their own narratives at will.

“I felt so free,” a Muslim friend told me while taking a holiday in a “halal” resort in Turkey, where she felt invisible in a sea of burkinis and nobody stared. The simple joy of being able to splash around in a pool with your children without the burden of representation weighing down on your shoulders. My younger self used to love smashing stereotypes; now I’ve grown tired and weary.

Getting along

At least once every couple of years, all the bottled-up prejudice bursts out at the seams and explodes all over the headlines: letterbox analogies and alleged security risks and maybe if more Muslim women spoke better English, young men wouldn’t be joining ISIS. Headscarves adorned with poppies and union jacks as reassurances of loyalty. The absurdity of two police officers towering over a middle-aged Muslim woman having a nap on a French beach, demanding that she take off her top in the name of social cohesion. Self-professed liberals making the case for using the coercive force of the state to dictate what women should wear, or worse, the extent to which women must be made to undress. A non-Muslim friend sweetly asks “but if public spaces become free of religious symbols, wouldn’t we all get along better?” I patiently explain that the only thing coming between us is that she may have subconsciously placed me in a jar and stuck a label on it. Rather than forcing me to change, perhaps she could just smash the jar? She pauses thoughtfully but never quite expresses her agreement.

Speaking truth to bulls*@t

Busy forging a place for ourselves in mainstream society, we often struggle to find the time or energy to call out the hypocrisy and double standards within our own Muslim communities. We’re told again and again that the headscarf is a panacea for the sexism in western society which exploits women and reduces them to their outer appearance. And yet, our outer expression of faith is treated as more important than our internal spiritual journey. We’re fed the same unrealistic expectations about our bodies, and we often carry the same shame and scars as our non-Muslim sisters.

Every once in a while, a Muslim woman makes advances in a medical field, wins a maths prize, finds her name on a list of top lawyers and the community claims her; she’s celebrated as a Good Representative. It is an honour and a joy and a burden. When a community brow-beaten by racism and islamophobia finally finds a reason to rejoice, it seems like an inappropriate time to share some unpleasant truths. It feels rude to ask: if you thought that a Muslim woman doing well at work was a valuable thing worth celebrating, why have you put every conceivable obstacle in the way of your wife’s career aspirations? Why do you keep judging working mums? And why in God’s name do you behave as if inequality inside the home is the defining feature of your rich cultural heritage?

Some of us have come to define ourselves by our commendable abilities to crush western stereotypes about Muslim women. Yet, all too often, we find ourselves tolerating treatment in our own homes that fits some of those stereotypes. For those of us with a public image of Strong Muslim Woman Smashing the Patriarchy while Donning a Beautiful Headscarf, our home life feels like a shameful secret eating away at our very sense of worth. We’re so worn out from having to fight for our rightful place in mainstream society that there is no energy left to express the appropriate degree of revolt at the idea that a grown Muslim woman may need her husband’s permission to leave her home (and that he might actually say no at whim). We’re so desensitised to abuse that a Muslim man who leaves his wife in limbo rather than divorcing her when their religious marriage breaks down doesn’t find himself shunned or ostracised from his community. We’re so used to preaching platitudes and empty ideals that we fail to look our daughters straight in their eyes and honestly acknowledge the gap between our religion’s often noble aspirations for them and the extent to which our religious communities fall short.

 The possibility of multiple truths

I seem to digress. But the hijab conversations have never been about the piece of fabric on our heads. To me, they have always been about what it means to be a woman and our proper place in the world.

Sometimes they are about the master narratives, often forged at the fault lines where centuries of misogyny clash with shifting feminist ideals; where western colonialism and hegemony clash with the struggle for decolonisation and self-determination; where debates about equality clash with narratives about God’s will. The master narratives often feature in the debates devoid of their proper historical context.

Then there are the family histories: the mother who wore the hijab in defiance of a repressive tyrannical regime that could have killed her for this simple act of piety; or the mother who refused to wear the hijab in the face of a regime that threatened to administer lashings for her insubordination; the generations of women who defied their families’ and communities’ expectations in both directions, sometimes with drastic consequences.

And somewhere in the midst of all these overlapping narratives, there is the story that ultimately matters the most: the subjective experience of every woman who has a personal relationship (of whatever form) with the hijab. The personal truth of the woman who felt it freed her from societal expectations about her body, and the personal truth of the woman who tasted freedom the first time she felt the breeze in her hair. The woman who is ambivalent or indifferent, or the woman proudly wearing it as an extension of her rich cultural heritage. The woman wearing it as a sign of independence or defiance, and the woman wearing it to foster a sense of belonging within a homogenous family or community. The woman who feels emboldened and empowered by it, and the woman who feels it renders her invisible. The woman who holds it dear as an expression of her relationship with God, and the woman who rejects it as a product of male narratives about God’s will. The idea of multiple truths can be scary, in particular for religious people who feel that there could only be space for One Truth.  But even within that context, is there really no space for a woman’s personal exploration of what God wanted from her and for her? Is there no margin of error for what we understand God to require from us and what is in fact required?

The reason a satisfactory conclusion to the debate about the hijab eludes us is because it’s really a debate about competing narratives on gender, power, freedom, control, rebellion, community, immigration, representation, assimilation, nationalism, colonialism, self-determination, belonging, autonomy, self-expression, Divine will and much more, all intricately woven into the threads of the piece of silk/jersey/cotton/crepe draped around an individual woman’s head, or (God forbid) tied up in a rather stylish turban.

Photo Credit: Zahra Al-Rikabi