Have you ever seen a woman in a headscarf or burka and wondered what’s up with that? Maybe you’re afraid to ask because you don’t want to look ignorant or be a jerk, or maybe you just don’t want to be schooled on the many ways you’re wrong about everything.
I too was once like you. Then I moved to the Middle East learned what was up with the headscarf. Here are my thoughts, complete with a disclaimer and a rambling introduction that may or may not have been necessary. I don’t know. I’m still new at this.
Article written by Zachar
Note: This article is about headscarves. There are hundreds of kinds of headscarves, just like there are hundreds of kinds of hats. There are also those black or blue full-body things that we often call burkas. Because I’m not writing for Islamic fashion experts, I’m going to call everything either a “headscarf” (covers the hair) or a “burka” (covers the body).
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I’m American but just moved from a rural city in Vietnam to a forest in east Germany. If I want to buy food or anything else, the nearest market is about 14 kilometers away in a city called Burg.
Burg is an interesting city. Located in east Germany, it’s picturesque, poor, and under-populated. Burg is also full of new immigrants because the cost of living is cheaper, or maybe because immigrants have been settled here by the German government to bring new life to this dying part of the country. Probably a little of both.
A couple of days ago my phone charger stopped working and I was hungry so I decided it was time to go to Burg. In between two Arab markets and beside a Thai restaurant, I found an electronics store owned by a Polish couple. The couple spoke English well enough so we struck up a conversation about the state of the world.
Farah, my Syrian confidant (and someone who will probably come up from time to time in these articles) had come with me to Burg. She had been waiting outside the shop but I brought her in from the cold once the conversation turned to politics. We were clearly going to be here a while.
Back inside the shop, the usual things were said about Trump and immigration and racism but things took an interesting turn when the Polish man, who painted himself as a freedom fanatic, started talking about the Syrians in Burg. He started saying things like the Syrian women didn’t realize they were now free in Germany.
“Look at that girl!” he said, gesturing to a young Syrian woman walking past the window. “She’s wearing a headscarf. Doesn’t she know that she can take that off here? Doesn’t she know that she’s free?”
When we finished speaking and left the electronic shop, Farah asked me why the Polish man thought that Syrian women should take off their headscarves. Having never been immersed in Western culture, Farah had never associated headscarves with repression.
However, I am from America and completely understood where the Polish man was coming from. Back when I was studying Middle Eastern culture at San Francisco State University, my first paper was an essay arguing that headscarves were repressive. Then I moved to Turkey and realized that my essay was dumb.
We all do our best. Most Westerners want people to be free and when we see women covered in cloth presumably to “hide the shame of their bodies” or something like that, we want to reach out and say, “Your body isn’t shameful. You don’t have to cover yourself. Be free!”
For example, what are your feelings about this photo?
Maybe you’re thinking she looks like a nice young woman or those clothes look interesting, but if you’re from a country where headscarves aren’t a normal thing, it’s likely that you’re also thinking some form of but why does this nice young woman have to wear a headscarf?
So what are your feelings about this photo?
Maybe you’re thinking he looks like a nice young man or those clothes look interesting. If you’re from a country where scarves on heads aren’t normal things, it’s likely that out of curiosity you’re also thinking some form of but why does this nice young man wear a scarf on his head? However, for some reason you’re probably not including two words that you thought about the woman: have to.
So is the problem with a headscarf that the woman has to cover her head with a scarf, while the man doesn’t have to cover his hair with a scarf? Coming from a Western perspective, I think that’s the heart of the issue. The answer is mostly no she doesn’t have to. I’ll explain further in the rest of the article, but the bottom line is in most of the countries where women wear headscarves, it is a cultural thing. It’s not some kind of repression thing.
When you see a woman in a headscarf walking down the street in America, Germany, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, etc. they are almost certainly wearing a headscarf for cultural reasons, not because they’re being bound by their menfolk to cover their shame, or whatever. There are also plenty of Muslim women who don’t wear a headscarf in America, Germany, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, etc. and it’s not a big deal to anyone when they don’t wear headscarves in the latter countries (and obviously the former as well.)
That all said, a family might heavily disapprove if their sister/daughter/wife didn’t wear a headscarf in public. But it’s the same story with the boy in his head covering. That’s just how people are. Kind of like the time I visited my family in Texas and told them I wouldn’t be eating anything at BBQ because I was vegetarian. It didn’t go well but it’s not like I needed to be “freed from my oppression.”
Of course, in some of the more ‘merican families you’d get a beat down for being a fancy-pansy vegetarian; and the same is true for not wearing a headscarf in some conservative Muslim families. There are also conservative areas where wearing a headscarf would be a good idea because by definition of “conservative,” sticking out isn’t a good thing. Same is true for men with long hair in both conservative America and conservative Muslim areas.
So let’s look at this photo:
Uh oh. She’s not even smiling. Don’t you tell me that this is a society that doesn’t oppress women! Is this a photo of an ISIS or al Qaeda get-together? Let’s say it is. That brings me to my second point. There are places where the headscarf or burka is mandatory and therefore it is more like a symbol of repression.
In countries like Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran, and more recently Syria and Iraq; Islamic groups have taken control and enforced the headscarf or burka on every woman in the area of their control. Those women who didn’t wear headscarves before were or are forced to wear them, and are absolutely are happy to throw off their headscarf the moment they won’t get in big trouble for showing their hair. So there’s that.
Let’s look at another photo:
Hmm. Another non-smiler. Maybe. She could be smiling but how would we know? Is she being forced to wear that burka by ISIS or is she wearing it by choice and/or culture? I don’t know. All we have to go off of is this photo. No explanation. No context.
That brings me to my third point. When we see a photo of a woman walking down the street in a headscarf or burka in a Muslim country, we don’t have the full context of her life. ISIS, Afghanistan, and Iran are extreme examples. Saudi Arabia is the epicenter of headscarf culture, so there it’s both cultural and enforced by the Saudi government… kind of, but actually not always. However, almost all of the governments of the world’s 50 Muslim-majority countries don’t force women to wear headscarves.
More importantly, there are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world and most of those cultures aren’t so strict about headscarves. This is especially true for places like Syria where the government is secular, not Islamic; and the urban population follows suit. Even a lot of places in Iraq are not scarf-heavy places.
In most Muslim countries, wearing a headscarf is usually a case of culture and choice. Going back to my vegetarian example, it is common in both western and Muslim countries to have families where some people in the family are more traditional and some are more… I don’t know the right word… casual? Modern? Either way, if one sister in a Muslim family wears a headscarf and another sister doesn’t (as is the case in many Muslim families) it doesn’t mean that one sister is more oppressed and the other isn’t.
In other words, unless someone is coming from a place like Iran where a headscarf is mandatory, a Muslim woman not wearing a headscarf is not a symbol that she is any more or less free than a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf.
For example, when I was living in Kazakhstan, I had a friend who was among other things, headstrong, self-reliant, and scary-smart. She had her own business and was totally in control of every aspect of her life. She was one of the freest people I’ve ever met and a feminist’s ideal of what a woman was capable of. She also looked like this, because these are the clothes of the tradition she follows.
That leads to my last point. When it comes to western countries, chances are that people wear the clothing of their home country because anything else would feel weird. Let’s ask Farah about this.
Zachar : Farah, do you remember what the Polish guy in Burg said about the Syrian woman?
Farah : Yeah. How would he feel if I told him to walk around in his underwear because he’s free now?
Zachar: It’s like that?
Farah : It’s like that.
Actually, that happened to me once. One time in France I wanted to use the public pool. I changed out of my clothes, put on my bathing suit, and started walking to the pool. Just before I got the water, a worker stopped me. “You can’t go in like that!” He said, pointing to my American bathing suit. “We only allow normal [French-style] bathing suits here. You have to go to the office and purchase a normal bathing suit.”
So I bought a thong like everyone else had on at the pool. I lasted a maximum of half an hour in my new thong, then I left the pool and never returned. It was weird, I wasn’t comfortable, and the last thing I felt was more free. I could imagine a similar feeling for those who came to a western country and are now being told to dress in the same style as the “normal” people for the sake of their own freedom.
So that’s that. Lastly, I’ll end this article with a few more images of people covering their hair with the traditional clothes of their culture:
Baghdad to Mars 