Hijab Nation
Soul Hijack or True Freedom?
A dress code for adult women to save a nation. Religious manuscripts requiring women to be submissive as a result of their titillating bodies. If you don’t own your flesh, can you really possess any authorship over your own mind?
Imagine this … it’s 2023 in Iran and smart cameras are being installed on street corners to make sure women are fully covered with hijabs or burkas. Men are throwing yogurt at women who leave their houses without a head scarf. It’s 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The rules don’t change, despite heat strokes. The surveillance on public streets is a political strategy to double up the task force. The male population is now invited to play cop on street corners.
Now imagine this … it’s 2023 in the United States. Right here, around the corner, in California women with hijabs are campaigning to be judges in federal courts, working as doctors in abortion clinics, occupying seats in male dominated industries such as aerospace engineering and biotechnology, and living otherwise very westernized lives.
A perplexing contrast, isn’t it? It’s hard not to wonder how much of this decision to wear a hijab is truly voluntary? For the 42 million women currently living in Iran, it’s understandable why they would submit to what some call soul surrender. The stakes are high … they are imprisoned, beaten and exiled. The question that bears looming is…why aren’t women stripping their hijabs off in liberated countries where no such threat exists?
So I went straight to the source, a devout Muslim woman. I asked my very dear friend … what’s keeping her from taking it off? She showed up to answer all the hard questions with conviction, an open-mind, and an open heart.
She challenges me, and YOU, to consider that hijabs represent a woman’s ability to reason. How, you ask? She reminds us that there’s a feminism in choosing to wear what you want. A parallel begins to unveil between the freedom of choice in being fully covered and the freedom of choice in dressing provocatively.
This covered beauty insists that hijabs don’t define the women who wear them. She shares with us her own top 3 reasons for wearing a hijab:
1. It represents her commitment to God;
2. It allows people to focus on her intellect; and
3. It represents her right to visually identify with a chosen belief system.
In the end, whether Muslim women are cherry picking which freedoms are worth defying or, to the contrary, showing the rest of the world what freedom truly looks like is a question that remains a conundrum.
Written by: Mary Terterov
Referenced Sources:
HILSMAN, PATRICK. “Iranian Police to Enforce Strict Hijab Laws with SurveillanceCameras.” UPI Top News, Aprl2023. EBSCOhost,search.ebscohost.com/login.aspxdirect=true&db=n5h&AN=B92W3582545666&site=ehost-live.
“Lifting the Veil on Iran’s Past.” Daily Mail, 31 Dec. 2015, p. 59. EBSCOhost,search.ebscohost.com/login.aspxdirect=true&db=n5h&AN=112010136&site=ehost-live. Liljas, Per. “Thousands of Iranian Women Defy Hijab Law on Social Media.” Time.Com, May 2014, p. 1. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx direct=true&db=bsh&AN=96089345&site=ehost-live. Raf Sanchez. “I’m Scared to Return Home to Iran, Says Chess Master Pictured without Hijab .” Daily Telegraph (London), Jan. 2020, p. 15. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx direct=true&db=f6h&AN=8Q2156562068&site=ehost-live.