Can the hijab be a feminist symbol?

The headscarf worn by Muslim women, known in Arabic as the hijab, has become a symbol of female oppression under Islam. According to the rules of the religion, the hijab is not enforced, and it is not crucial, but many women opt to wear it. And in many cultures, it is more or less enforced simply by virtue of being the social norm*. So, can the hijab be a feminist symbol?

The main issue with the hijab is that there is no male equivalent. That’s not to say that men in Muslim countries do not dress modestly, but Muslim men have the option to wear shorts and show their legs, or swim topless in the ocean: they are not governed by Islam in the same way. The hijab assumes a difference between female bodies and male bodies: one is less suited to modesty, or more prone to sexualisation, and one must be governed more than the other. However, when we move away from the rules and regulations of the Islamic code and move into, say, a Syrian/English household in Southwest Scotland, the hijab becomes less a figure of female policing, and more a representation of the agency of empowered women.

The first six years of my life were spent in the Arab world and my family is originally Syrian but in 2008 we moved to a region called Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland’s Southwest. More specifically, we moved to Castle Douglas, population 4000 – more sheep than people. Suddenly, the hijab wasn’t the social norm for Muslim women because there were none. My mother went from being one of many to being the dark(er) outcast with a funny accent and a dishcloth on her head. My brother and I also stuck out. At that time, we were two of five people of colour in our primary school of 350 students, and those stats remained pretty much the same up until we graduated from high school. Castle Douglas is a small town, but it became our world, and it was not a world that was very kind to my beautiful mother.

Mama was a carer for elderly people for some years when we were younger, and she still remembers an incident when a client told her to take off her headscarf and wash her filthy hair (“even though I always smell nice!”), or the time when a man spat at her and her sister in the street (“I told him he’d dropped some money and then told him to fuck off when he turned around to look”), or even the time when her husband asked her to stop wearing her hijab because it was bad for his academic prestige.

Strangers on the streets and lovers in the kitchen – everyone was against her. Everyone thought it was okay to tell her what to wear and what not to wear. Everyone expected her to be fine with the onslaught of abuse she would go on to receive. “You don’t forget moments like that”, she says, but she remains defiant against all who deem it acceptable to govern a woman’s right to choose. The hijab is not the oppressor, and neither is the bikini. It is the militant tendency to police female bodies.

Mahsa Amini’s tragic death at the hands of the Iranian morality police was met with horror here in the UK, but British readers should not be so quick to assume a stark moral distinction between the two cultures. There is a view in the West of the uncivilised Middle East, an unrestrained Third World where moral dubiousness runs rampant, but clearly the West doesn’t support a woman’s right to choose either – whether the choice is wearing a hijab, or if the choice is to terminate a pregnancy, for that matter. For my mother, the hijab is a feminist symbol in the same way that a bikini can be; it represents the commitment to choice in the face of discrimination: the dedication to female freedom in a man’s world.

* Although it’s important to note that the hijab is enforced beyond social pressure in some countries and cultures, such as Iran and Afghanistan.