Kafr al-Hanadwa

Good piece in Slate on why many American Muslim women voluntary adopt and then dump the hijab.

[...] Suraya Ali, the daughter of unobservant Muslim immigrants from India, shocked her parents and her classmates by donning a Muslim head scarf. “It was my way of flipping the world off, saying, ‘I can be what I want,’ ” says Ali, now 31, who grew up in a Chicago suburb.

But a decade and a half later, Ali had a “strange feeling” of no longer fitting in with her Muslim community; she was constantly set up with potential suitors who assumed her scarf symbolized a certain submissive attitude toward marriage; and her elite education had prompted her to question the traditional roles for men and women laid out in classical Islamic law. “I realized [wearing hijab] is not who I am anymore.”

Ali’s decision was visible only to those who knew her (and because of her family’s sensitivities, she did not want her real name used). But her experience reveals how very modern American Muslim life can be. Hijab in America is not a social norm of ages past, unquestioningly handed down; rather, it has become a tool of self-expression….

When Yale anthropologist Carolyn Rouse studied African-American Muslim women for her 2004 book Engaged Surrender, she observed that the hijab (and, in some cases, niqab, or face-covering) was primarily about group identity. Many female converts, for example, started veiling themselves immediately—the two were seen as inseparable. Wearing hijab “signified belonging to the ummah,” or the broader, idealized Muslim community, she said. But this voluntary expression of citizenship doesn’t always last. By the time Rouse wrote her epilogue, several of the women she had followed no longer wore the scarf. One convert, Rouse wrote, “believes she used hijab to prove to herself the depth of her faith. Now that she feels more secure with her faith she does not feel she needs it.”

[...]

These theological arguments, while important in their own ways, sometimes seem little more than a patina atop more primal social urges, however. Wearing hijab or not wearing hijab—just like owning a gun or driving a Prius—says something fundamental about your beliefs and aspirations. And in America, at least, beliefs have a funny way of changing.

My own fervent attachment to the scarf gradually faded. Two years after first donning it, I was married and no longer needed the scarf to broadcast my unavailability to non-Muslim guys. I had also moved to a Persian Gulf country where hijab was not a personal choice but a cultural system of sex segregation: On the beaches there, men in shorts played soccer and swam, while women in layers of black polyester dipped their toes in the water and shook sand from their shoes.

Like spouses who know they are headed for divorce but still go through the marital motions, many hijabis continue to wear the scarf in public long after its inner meaning has dissipated. They wait for a natural break in their lives to make the transition. I took it off on my return flight from the Persian Gulf to the United States. Ali removed it after finishing a summer internship. Another woman I know literally moved across the country to make the change, simultaneously leaving the tight-knit Muslim community she felt was suffocating her and the scarf that pledged her allegiance to it.