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ammunition against the hijab by explicitly differing with the opinions that claim the Qur’an mandates veiling. “It is nowhere explicitly prescribed in the Qur’an; the only verses dealing with women’s clothing … instruct women to guard their private parts and throw a scarf over their bosoms,” Ahmed wrote in
Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate.
    Ahmed emphasizes that during the Prophet’s time, veiling was practiced mostly by his wives, as a way of differentiating them from other women. Known as Mothers of the Believers, they were taken as role models of “purity” and decency, and that is one way that veiling became associated with Islamic identity and those virtues in particular. Reading Mernissi and Ahmed was a balm that emboldened me in my struggles with the hijab, and to this day, I often recommend them to younger women undergoing their own struggles.
    But the headscarves in the title of this book and the headscarves in this chapter are not simply religious symbols. These days I am less interested in debating the religious necessity of veiling and more interested in asking what the widespread adoption of the hijab has done to the perception of women and to women’s perceptions of themselves. Are we more than our headscarves?
    Though comprehensive statistics on veiling have not been tabulated, observation suggests that more women in the Middle East and North Africa wear the veil now than at any time since the early decades of the twentieth century. In a 2007 article,
The New York Times
claimed that up to 90 percent of Muslim women in Egypt wear some kind of headscarf. A recent study from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research surveyed the Muslim-majority countries of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey and found that a median 44 percent of respondents preferred that women cover their hair in public. A median 10 percent preferred forms of veiling that covered the body from head to toe, and almost completely covered the face, such as the burqa and the niqab. In Saudi Arabia, that figure rose to 63 percent.
    The prevalence of veiling in the Middle East and North Africa today is the latest swing of a pendulum. These shifts from conservative to liberal dress and back again have often been described as motions between “Islam” and the “West,” a dichotomy that makes it especiallyhard to talk about veiling or to critique it without having to choose one or the other. But we must find a way to talk about the hijab that does not frame it as a choice between cultures.
    Huda Shaarawi’s historic unveiling in 1923, which began a decades-long movement away from the hijab in Egypt, is usually framed in this Islam-versus-the-West dynamic. Shaarawi belonged to the upper class—affluent, and conversant in more languages than just Arabic—which along with a growing middle class, admired European ways and considered them a “modern” blueprint.
    Europeans had served as liberal models for the Egyptian intelligentsia since the nineteenth century. In 1899, reformer Qasim Amin wrote a book called
Tahrir al-Mar’a
(
The Liberation of Women
) in which he controversially argued that the veil stood in the way of women’s progress and, by extension, Egypt’s. Muslim scholars reacted strongly to Amin’s polemic and demanded that women who removed their veils be imprisoned or at least fined. They positioned the veil as the “traditional” and “authentic” dress for women, making it the uniform for the less-advantaged for whom education, foreign languages, and European ways were not options.
    When Amin’s ideas were championed by Evelyn Baring, the British consul general of Egypt, a terrible dynamic was set in place in which women’s rights became the cat’s-paw of imperial power, making it almost impossible for those opposed to the occupation and to Europeaninfluence to critique the veil without looking as if they were taking the side of