According to Mona Eltahaway, “the girls of the Middle East [need] to: be immodest, rebel, disobey, and know you deserve to be free”. This is because being modest means to shrink yourself. It means you’re hiding yourself. You’re not challenging patriarchal power. Coming from a Saudi woman, whose rights depend on a monarchy led by a man, this is absolute bullshit to say the least.
Her ideas of a feminist revolution are led by Western male imagery, influenced by this need to walk the streets of our home countries in bikinis and mini skirts. Her ideas on the niqab perfectly describe this. The niqab to her, represents “a bizarre reverence for the disappearance of women” (Eltahaway, 2015). She erases herself, and her erasure is a “pinnacle of piety” (Eltahaway, 2015). Now, I do agree that niqabi women, especially in Muslim communities within the UK and in the Middle East, are put on a pedestal for being pious women. However, to claim that a woman wearing a niqab is erasing herself, is the perfect example of Western patriarchy hidden under the guise, or shall I say ‘niqab’ of feminism.
What Mona is doing is assuming that a niqabi woman is not a free woman, that she somehow is choosing to oppress herself because men have brainwashed her into thinking that she MUST be modest. She is exclaiming that a niqabi woman does not have a mind of her own – she cannot make her own choices. Therefore, to solve this, we need to strip her of her choice in order for her to see the ‘light’. How is this feminism? How is this empowering or even intersectional?
Is it horrific that a woman can actually be modest or a virgin without men brainwashing her? Isn’t this erasing asexual women?
Let’s be honest here though, there’s obviously women who are forced to wear niqabs and hijabs. However, to say we need to then ban ALL women from wearing it, as if the women who wear it out of choice are secretly brainwashed is sexist. Telling niqabi women to erase their identity to fight against their ‘erasure’, is sexist. What Mona has done, is telling us Middle Eastern women, to replace MENA patriarchy with Western patriarchy.
Her feminism erases the very women she says erase themselves: it erases women who are modest, who are asexual, who wear niqab’s because they see it as empowering (and, this brings me to my other point, just because YOU don’t see it as empowering doesn’t mean it isn’t to the woman in question. A woman should have autonomy over her own body, no?).
To my MENA women: disobey, rebel and know you deserve to be free. Know you deserve to be free from the shackles of Western patriarchal imperialism and MENA patriarchy. Wear what you want, fight for what you want. But what you must NEVER do, is change who you are because someone has told you that you are oppressed if you wear a certain item of clothing that empowers you. To go against the patriarchy, create your own-self and affirm your woman-ness. Affirm yourself as a woman. A woman in control of her own body.
What empowers you, might not empower someone else. That is a lesson I want Mona to learn.
To the women who are forced to wear niqab and hijab: rebel and wear what you want. Fight for your freedom to choose, to be in control of your own body.
To the women who are forced to take off their niqab’s and hijabs: rebel and wear what you want. Fight for your freedom to choose, to be in control of your own body.
– Naof x
Qahwa in Asir 