It's More Than a Headscarf

by Loren Seibold

How a headscarf became news twice in a single week:

1. SCOTUS issued a nearly unanimous ruling on Monday, 4 June 2015, that Abercrombie and Fitch was in violation of the religious rights of Samantha Elauf when they refused to hire her because she wore a Muslim head scarf. A&F, whose strict sartorial standards exclude headwear, said that it was up to Samantha to inform them that she wore the scarf for religious reasons. The justices said that if A&F even had a hunch it was for religious reasons (and really, how could they not?) they were in violation of Title VII.
2. Only a couple of days earlier, a hijabed Tahera Ahmad, a chaplain at Northwestern University, was refused an unopened can of Coke on a United flight because, the flight attendant said, she might use it as a weapon—though the attendant was giving unopened cans to others. When Tahera objected, a man across the aisle said, “you Moslem... you know you would use it as a weapon, so shut the **** up.” 

Samantha Elauf

The two situations differ, but they're both about judgements people made of a humble headscarf.

This is hardly the hijab’s first brush with controversy. In several majority Muslim countries (Turkey, Tunisia, and Tajikistan) the hijab is banned by law in government buildings and universities. (Even Iran banned the hijab in 1936, before making it mandatory in 1979.) France, the home of a large number of Islamic immigrants, in 2004 banned from schools all clothing or symbols by which students “conspicuously display their religious affiliation”, and in 2010 banned the full face-covering in public. 

These countries seem to be motivated by a desire to enforce a public secularity, and more recently to discourage Islamic extremism. Some cite security concerns: that a terrorist could go incognito under a niqab (the Muslim total face covering) or burqa (the full body covering). 

The motivations of those who insist that women wear it, and those women who choose to, are more complex. Beyond “thus saith the holy writings” (which in fact, they don’t—the whole “doctrine” is based on a passage that says Muhammed’s wives had to stay behind a curtain when he was meeting at home with other men), the stated justification has been modesty. But in the case of both of the above women, they are modern in other aspects of dress and make-up: Samantha appeared in court wearing tight leggings or jeans. Given A&F’s sexy reputation, one wonders why a modest person would want to work there.

But that’s beside the point, and none of our business. These cases are about the hijab's religious/cultural symbolism as it affects economic prospects, in Samantha’s case, or is the occasion for ignorant discrimination, in Tahera’s. 

I believe the SCOTUS decision was the right one. But I also believe, along with some feminist thinkers, that there are legitimate questions to be raised about a concept of modesty that seems to say that the responsibility for male sexual temptation falls on women, as is not infrequently the case in both Muslim and Christian contexts. The fault for a man’s sexual trespass, then, isn’t his, but his temptress's. In some Muslim cultures women are held responsible for their own rape, and Christian attitudes in some circles come very close to that. Bill Gothard (see this column) has gone so far as to say that a woman wearing clothing that a man considers provocative has implicitly promised him sex. So who could blame him for taking it? One more example of abusive religion, in a field that hasn't been short of such examples lately.

Comments

[Jackson Dildonovich]

The A & F advertisement makes reading this article worthwhile. Hot!