Nothing prepared me for Saudi Arabia.
I was born in Egypt, but my family left for London when I was seven – and after almost eight years in the UK, we moved to Saudi Arabia in 1982. Both my parents, Egyptians with PhDs in medicine, had landed jobs in Jeddah, teaching clinical microbiology to medical students and technicians. But when we got there, it felt as though we’d moved to another planet whose inhabitants wished women did not exist.
In this world, women, no matter how young or old, are required to have a male guardian – a father, a brother, or even a son – and can do nothing without this guardian’s permission. They cannot travel, open a bank account, apply for a job, or even get medical treatment without a man’s stamp of approval. I watched all this with a sense of horror and confusion.
When I encountered this country aged 15, I was traumatised into feminism – there’s no other way to describe it – because to be a female in Saudi Arabia is to be the walking embodiment of sin. The country follows an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism or Salafism, the former associated more directly with the kingdom, and the latter, austere form of Islam with those who live outside Saudi Arabia. The obsession with controlling women and our bodies often stems from the suspicion that, without restraints, women are just a few degrees short of sexual insatiability. Yet it is the men who can’t control themselves. In too many countries in the region, sexual harassment is epidemic.
It was soon after my family arrived in Saudi Arabia that I first wanted to wear a headscarf. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice – the morality police – chased after women, urging them to cover up. I needed something to defend myself from men’s roving eyes and hands, and I thought the hijab, a form of dress that covers everything but the face and hands, would do that. When I told my parents, they said I was too young and suggested I wait a year or so.
Less than a month after we arrived in Jeddah, we went on hajj, or pilgrimage. Until then Mecca, the birthplace of Islam, was a place I’d seen only in pictures hanging on the living room walls of family and friends. This trip was the first time I’d worn any kind of veil outside prayer time. I looked like a nun dressed in my white pilgrimage clothes. One of the rituals of the pilgrimage is tawwaf: circling the Ka’aba, the cube-like building at the centre of Mecca’s Grand Mosque. As I slowly walked around it, reciting prayers along with my family, I felt a hand on my bottom. I had never before been touched there by a man. I could not run, and even if I had possessed the courage I could not turn around to confront the man who was groping me because the space was so crowded.
I could not understand how, at this holiest of holy places, something like this could happen. Whenever I broke free, he persisted in groping me. I burst into tears, because that’s all I could do. I couldn’t tell my parents the truth; I told them the crowds were getting to me. We went up to an inner level of the Grand Mosque, one storey up, to complete our tawwaf. Then we returned to the lower level and the Ka’aba once more to kiss the Black Stone set in the building’s wall, another ritual of the pilgrimage.
My mother and I had to wait for the women’s turn. As I bent toward the stone, the Saudi policeman standing there surreptitiously groped my breast. Surreptitiously: I came to learn during my years in Saudi Arabia and then in Egypt that this was how men did it. You ended up questioning your own sense of having been violated; did fingers actually poke through the underside of your seat on a bus or lightly brush against your behind as the man to whom those fingers belonged looked away?
By the time we went for our second hajj, a year later, my mind was ready to surrender and my body was desperate for invisibility. It felt as if everything was haram (prohibited) in Saudi Arabia. I was descending into the first of several episodes of depression; I felt I was losing my mind. I didn’t talk to anyone about how I felt or get any help. I struck a deal with God: I’ll cover my hair if you save my mind. I decided to wear the veil, and this time my parents accepted my decision. I hid my body the way teenage girls, newly aware of male attention, sometimes take refuge in baggy clothing. Still, the garments I wore did not protect my body from wandering hands.
Despite my sadness, I was doing well at school. I wrote an essay about the ubiquity of women’s head coverings across different faiths, which argued it was unfair to associate the veil exclusively with Islam. What about nuns, or ultra-Orthodox Jewish women? I was keen to defend my commitment to the headscarf, and to connect to other religions the notion of modesty to which I had submitted.
I have never before written at length about my experience of either wearing or giving up the veil. It’s always been a difficult subject, and for many years following my decision to stop wearing a headscarf I was so ashamed that I preferred not even to mention to new acquaintances that there was a time when I wore the hijab. Hijab has come to represent complex principles of modesty and dress – the Prophet Mohammed is said to have instructed women to cover all of their body except for the face and hands – but veiling has never and will never be as simple as this seems to suggest.
Some women veil themselves out of piety, believing that the Koran mandates it. Others want to be visibly identifiable as Muslim, and for them veiling is central to that. For some, it is a way to avoid expensive fashion trends and visits to the hair salon. For others, it is a way to be left alone and afforded more freedom to move about in a public space. In recent decades, as veiling became more prevalent throughout the Arab world, the pressure on women who were not veiled increased and more women took it on to avoid being harassed on the streets. Some women fought their families for the right to veil, while others were forced to veil by their families. For yet others, it was a way to rebel against the regime or the West.
The subject has consumed a large portion of my intellectual and emotional energy since I first put on a headscarf. I might have stopped wearing one, but I never stopped wrestling with what veiling means for women.
Choosing to wear the hijab is much easier than choosing to take it off. When I returned to Egypt at 21 to study journalism at the American University in Cairo (AUC), the hijab became a full-time job, the duties of which I had not anticipated. Back then, in 1988, before neon-pink and orange hijabs and skinny jeans, there were more fixed ideas about what a woman in a hijab could do. The strange combination that I represented complicated that equation: an Egyptian woman with a very English accent and broken Arabic, who danced along to music on campus in her hijab. Back then, that was not a comfortable mix. But trying to persuade people I could make it work became an obsession. I’d think, “What will people think about Muslims if I take my headscarf off after all I’ve said and done to prove you can wear one and still be an extrovert and a feminist?”
One day, I interviewed a veteran journalist who was doing exactly what I aspired to do: using her writing to fight for women’s equality. “Why are you covering your hair?” she asked. “Can’t you see you’re destroying everything we’ve worked so hard for?”
“But I’ve chosen to dress like this,” I replied.
What finally helped me part ways with the hijab in 1992 was a conversation my mother had about me with a doctor, a colleague of my father’s. It helped put to rest my conflict over that word, choice. The doctor, asking after my brother and me, wondered if I was married. When my mother told him I wasn’t, he replied – as she conveyed to me – “Don’t worry, she wears a headscarf. She’ll find a husband.” Just like that, a piece of cloth had superseded me. I wasn’t the Hijab Poster Girl. I was just a hijab.
The week I decided to stop wearing a headscarf, I had just finished my graduate studies in journalism at AUC. The biggest challenges were telling my family, who had pressured me to keep the headscarf on, and getting a bad haircut. I did not want anyone to think I’d taken it off for vanity’s sake or to attract men. At AUC, my friends, male and female, were split between the “You look so much better!” camp and the “You’ve made us look so bad!” camp. Guilt clung to me for several years. I assuaged it somewhat by continuing to wear my old hijab-appropriate clothes, minus the headscarf. I didn’t wear make-up, my hair remained short, and I had to reckon with a new body consciousness.
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. I was living in the US then. I did not have enough money to fly back to Egypt to join the hundreds of thousands who marched on Tahrir Square.
When I returned later that year, it was in the “new Egypt” that I was sexually assaulted by security forces during clashes near Tahrir Square – beaten so severely that my left arm and right hand were broken – and detained, first by the Ministry of the Interior and then by military intelligence, for some 12 hours, two of which I spent blindfolded. Only by virtue of a borrowed mobile phone was I able to send an alert on Twitter about my situation. I am eternally grateful to all who spread the word about my detention and campaigned for my release. At least 12 other women were subjected to various forms of sexual assault during the protest in which riot police attacked me.
“Divide and conquer” takes on a new meaning when you tug on the jacket of the supervising officer who, as he witnesses his men groping every part of your body, assures you nonetheless that you are safe because he will protect you. Then, in the next breath, he threatens you with gang rape by another group of his men, amassed close by and gesticulating at you.
The details of what happened to me mattered little to the triage nurse in the emergency department of the private hospital where, about 16 hours after the physical and sexual assault, I was trying to get medical care. “How could you let them do that to you?” she asked. “Why didn’t you resist?”
“When you’re surrounded by four or five men from the riot police, and they’re beating you with sticks, there isn’t much ‘resisting’ you can do,” I explained.
I actually “resisted” sex for a long time – too long. I guarded my hymen like a good virgin until I was 29. Just as it had taken me eight years to take off my hijab, it took me a long time to overcome all that I had been taught about what I should and should not do with my body. I had spent most of my 20s working hard at building a journalism career. It was also a convenient way to avoid marriage, which at the time was the only way I could conceive of having sex. I feared I would not have the strength to fight the religious and cultural disadvantages with which I felt a wife must wrestle.
At 28, I was fed up with waiting. I met an Egyptian man I was attracted to. I asked him out; we began to date. He was patient. Just after my 29th birthday, we finally had intercourse. Not long after I broke up with him, I married a white American. Those turbulent two years taught me that marriage – to anyone – was not for me. It also sealed for me the issue of children. I am happy to be child-free. I do wonder, sometimes, if I’d had a daughter, how I would have brought her up. Would I have raised her to disobey?
I’m 47 now, living and working in Cairo and New York, and sexual guilt still lingers. I have had to fight hard to keep these paragraphs in, knowing my family will see them and disapprove, but this is my revolution.
Edited extract from Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy (Hachette Australia, $32.99)
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