My hijab, my choice?

On World Hijab Day on February 1, the discussion boiled up again.

The following text is a slightly modified translated transcript of my radio report:

Imagine: Music – Arabic pop, some female voices: “My hijab. What is my hijab? My hijab is more than just a headscarf. My hijab is part of me – as a woman, as a daughter, as a Muslim woman. My hijab is feminism, which stands for freedom and dignity.”

A sequence from the music video “Mein Kopftuch, meine Wahl” (My hijab, my choice) by the youth channel “Funk” from the nationwide two TV channels ARD and ZDF in Germany. The video shows some pretty young women with different skin colors, dressed from elegant to jeans, who have one thing in common: They wear a hijab. There was heavy criticism. The accusation was that the public broadcaster was promoting legalistic Islam. It wanted to make a garment acceptable that millions of women around the world are forced to wear against their will and sometimes under threat of violence.

“It is a perfidious idea to glorify the headscarf as a symbol of freedom. The opposite is the case. Not least because the headscarf degrades women to sexual objects. They have to be covered because they are honorable when they are covered – and dishonorable when they are not,” says Rebecca Schönenbach, chairwoman of the Women for Freedom association in Berlin. Almost as an answer to her objections, Funk’s music video praises the hijab as a sign of anti-racism:

“Of course my hijab is also a projection screen for your prejudices. What you do with your hate is your thing, not mine.” (song line)

World Hijab Day

The music video was launched – coincidentally or not – just before women wearing headscarves celebrate World Hijab Day on February 1. In solidarity with them, non-Muslim women should also cover their heads on this day. The World Hijab Day was initiated by Nazma Khan, according to her own information. The daughter of an immigrant family from Bangladesh, she grew up in the Bronx borough of New York. She was the only one to wear a headscarf at school and was bullied and spat at because of it, she says in a video. “After September 11, I lived in constant fear at the university because they called me Osama Bin Laden and a terrorist,”, recalls Khan. “To that end, I was stared at like I was from another planet. A few times I was even followed on the street. It was a nightmare.”

Nazma Kahn’s second, happier life began, she describes it, on Jan. 21, 2013, the day she called for the first World Hijab Day on her website and Facebook. “I wanted to invite women of any faith to spend a day in my skin. Maybe then something would change.” In the meantime, so is to be read on the web page, people in 150 countries take part in the World Hijab Day. In Europa zum Beispiel in der Schweiz. “Today is World Hijab Day. And we are here on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich,” explains a young woman in a video on YouTube. Two young Muslim women wearing headscarves approach unveiled passers-by and ask them if they would like to try on a headscarf. Those who nod are dressed in the scarves they have brought with them.

“”The hijab is our crown, not a crime” is the motto of this year’s tenth World Hijab Day. Under the hashtag #DressedNotOppressed, self-declared “hijabis” are posting selfies on Twitter. Secular Muslims and women’s rights activists around the world are mobilizing against this. Under the hashtag #NoHijabDay, they are posting videos in which they take off their veils and write why this day should be banned.

“This is what the regime in Tehran wants me to be. This is what Taliban and ISIS wants us to be. And this is one true self.” (tweet)

A woman’s face wrapped in a black chador. As she speaks, her hands reach out and drop the cloth. Revealed is beautiful full hair. It belongs to exiled Iranian Masih Alinejad, who lives in the United States. She goes on to say: “In Iran, I was told that if I don’t wear a hijab, I’ll be kicked out of school, then I’ll be thrown in jail, whipped, beaten up. And if I get raped, it’s my own fault. In the West, I am told that telling my story would cause Islamophobia. I am a Middle Eastern woman and I am afraid of Islamic ideology. Let’s talk.”

#LetUsTalk

“Let Us Talk” or “Let’s talk”: that’s also the name of the hashtag that the journalist created together with Canadian author Yasmine Mohammed. With it, the two women sided with the Egyptian-Canadian pediatric surgeon Sherif Emil. He had criticized the so-called children’s headscarf in the Canadian Medical Association Journal – and was accused of Islamophobia for it. Among other things, Sherif Emil wrote: “The hijab, niqab and burqa are… instruments of oppression for millions of girls and women worldwide who are given no choice.” The hashtag #LetUsTalk is intended to draw attention to the suffering of precisely these women. On Twitter, the two initiators are now followed by half a million people. Hundreds of Muslim-raised women in the U.S. and Europe are symbolically taking off their veils in video clips.

The date of World Hijab Day they all consider very deliberately chosen. Because on February 1, 1979, Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran from exile in Paris. His “Islamic revolution” brought the forced veiling of Iranian women virtually overnight. “If you look at all these women, it’s a betrayal as a non-Muslim to put on the headscarf and post a pretty selfie with it, while these women are being forced under the headscarf,” is Rebecca Schönenbach of the Women for Freedom Association convinced. She considers it downright mockery when Funk’s music video now reads:

“Because my hijab is faith, discipline, protection, worship. Not a compulsion. It’s a free choice of how I want to dress.” (song line)

“In this context, I’m not going to ask about the men at her side. Who, depending on the season and social occasion, walk around in a boss suit, shorts and T-shirt or swimming trunks. Have they not arrived in society? Are they the ones who have followed the bad word of assimilation? Are they no longer able to uphold religion?” This asks Lale Akgün at an online event organized by the Association Women for Freedom on World Hijab Day, deliberately provocative. The Istanbul-born psychotherapist who lives in the Germany in city of Cologne is also a member of the national spokesperson group of Secular Social Democrats. In her eyes, a reinterpretation of the hijab is taking place in German mainstream society. Also known as “re-framing” in psychotherapy. The hijab is no longer seen as an instrument of male domination and a religious symbol, but, Akgün points out, “as diversity turned into material.”

“Re-framing” of hijab

“And society? What does society do? It basks in its own tolerance. In principle it does nothing else than also the male Muslim society: It instrumentalizes the veiling of the woman for its own well-being. For the feeling that they are able to accept everything after all. It should become clear to you that they, too, with their glorification of the veil, declare the female body a taboo zone just like the Islamists.” Lale Akgün also has in mind a November 2021 campaign funded by the European Union. Pictures and videos showed women’s faces – half with visible hair, the other half covered with a hijab. Along with the slogan “Beauty lies in diversity, as freedom lies in the hijab.” After outraged reactions from all over Europe, the campaign was cancelled. For the initiator of World Hijab Day, Nazma Khan, just another proof of Islamophobia. On Twitter, she writes: “A typical dirty tactic in Western countries is to target the bodies of Muslim women in the run-up to elections to cover up the incompetence of politicians. The burqa ban in France at sporting events is a prime example.”

“#LetUsTalk” initiator and journalist Masih Alinejad from Iran, on the other hand, makes clear that her campaign is not directed against women who wear their hijab voluntarily. The target, she says, is Islam’s rules, which oppress millions of women. “It is very clear we are not against the women who choose to wear hijab. On the contrary: the Islamic law is against me and millions of women.”