Beyond the Burka
From the controversial conversations in France about their role in schools, to their strict enforcement in Arab countries like Iran, the burka and the hijab have remained hot topics of conversation in feminist discourse around the world. No other clothing statement seems to have evoked such passionate outrage on both sides of the religious debate. But is it simply a religious issue? Or does this speak past the pages of the Qur’an to a more fundamental societal problem?
I wanted to explore this question further, so for my creative project I decided to experience wearing a hijab. I wanted to get a sense of what a hijab felt like, to turn it from an intellectual idea that I had discussed with friends, to a cultural observance that I had personally experienced. After inexpertly watching a few youtube videos on how to wrap a hijab, I went for a walk around campus. Although I definitely got a few glances here and there, the major difference was how wearing the hijab made me feel. I felt like my identity or self wasn’t overtly displayed and it seemed as if I was much more closed off from the rest of the world. I knew that no one would be able to recognize me, and this made me feel anonymous, yet at the same time on display. Although people did not know my individual identity, I knew people would immediately stereotype me as being Muslim. As someone who is not used to defining her religious beliefs to strangers, I found it interesting that people – who had no idea who I was, what I did, where I was from – were able to distinguish my religion from seeing the hijab. I also knew that by wearing my hijab with my western style clothes, backpack, and blue eyes, I was defying the stereotype of what they expected a ‘Muslim’ to look like as well.
My hijab experiment was inspired by Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. In this novella, the gender roles are reversed and instead of the women living in purdah, the men are the ones kept inside. I found this an ingenious piece of feminist literature, because it was not prescriptive. It reveled in its absurdities, and labeled itself as fiction. At the same time it raised profound and poignant questions. It forced the reader into a world with different realities, empowering women in its pages by giving them the responsibility of running society.
Like in Royeka’s story, my hijab experience was not indicative of my reality, I was respectively “role playing” in order to understand more fully what I had been learning about. I don’t plan on changing my fashion style to include a daily hijab but in this short span of time, I caught a whiff of what this might be like. It made me challenge how I define myself as a women, which I believe, was Rokeya’s goal when she set out to write her story.
