As a challenge to World Hijab Day on 1 February, No Hijab Day aims to confront the dominant narrative that packages the hijab as a symbol of women’s ‘empowerment’ and ‘choice’ and any opposition to it as ‘Islamophobia’.
On the day, Ex-Muslims International, a coalition of ex-Muslim groups and activists, is calling on women to remove their hijab and for men to wear it as a humorous way of highlighting a serious violation of women’s rights.
Of course, adults who want to wear the hijab should be able to. (Child veiling is a different matter and nothing less than child abuse.) But it’s important to recognise that on a mass and global scale, innumerable women and girls are coerced into wearing it in order to comply with Islam’s modesty rules. Acquiescence to coercion or religious directives is not the same as choice. Until women are allowed to refuse or remove it, there is no real choice involved. Choice must be preceded at the very least by legal, social, and sexual equality for it to have any real meaning.
Algerian sociologist Marieme Helie Lucas says that the use of the word ‘choice’ regarding the wearing of the hijab is reminiscent of an old debate on
workers’ ‘freedom to work’ at the time of Britain’s industrialisation, i.e. a time when in order to not actually starve and die, workers’ only ‘free choice’ was to work 14 hours a day in hellish circumstances that also killed many of them, including women and children under the age of 10.
Islamists and the religious right always gift-wrap their rules as ‘choices’ and ‘rights’ to manufacture consent and legitimacy when they are not in power. When they are, their imperatives on women are always backed by threats of hell, shunning, violence, morality police, and even imprisonment and murder. The killing of Jina Mahsa Amini in Iran, which sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution in 2022, is a clear example of the level of violence used by the religious right—and also the contestation of and resistance to it that exists there and everywhere.
To defend the hijab, apologists and Islamists even use the slogan ‘My Body, My Choice’, which came out of the feminist movement in the 1960s during the fight for abortion rights. A more accurate slogan would be ‘Woman’s Body, Man’s Choice’.
The call for men to don the hijab on No Hijab Day is to show that modesty is always the remit of women. How many times have we seen a woman in full burqa walking behind a man dressed in shorts and a T-shirt? This is because men will apparently not cause fitnah, or chaos, in society if they show their hair. Rivers will not run dry. Earthquakes will not follow from seeing men’s bare heads. And men certainly don’t fill hell; immodest and ungrateful women do. Hence why there is never a men’s modest clothing line sold at M&S and Dolce & Gabbana.
Modesty culture sexualises girls from a young age and puts the onus on them to protect themselves. In her 2005 book Bas les voiles! (Veils Off!), Chahdortt Djavann argues that the psychological damage done to girls from a very young age by making them responsible for men’s arousal is immense and builds fear and feelings of disgust for the female body. It also removes male accountability for violence, positioning men as predators unable to control their urges if faced with an unveiled or ‘improperly’ veiled girl or woman. It feeds into rape culture. Women are to be either protected or raped depending on how well they guard their modesty and the honour of their male guardians. Many an Islamist has absurdly argued that modesty is an important deterrent for society’s well-being: if unveiled women mix freely with men, women will lead men astray and will need to be stoned to death for adultery, so better to prevent such an outcome from the get-go by imposing modesty rules on women!
It is important to note that the hijab is the most visible symbol of a broader, all-encompassing system of sex apartheid that uses systematic violence and terror to oppress, persecute, and kill women in order to deny them equality and autonomy and exclude them in every field, including education, employment, health, the law, and the family and from public and political life. It means, for example, that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s, that she cannot travel or work or study without her male guardian, that she must use a separate entrance to access government buildings, that she must sit at the back of the bus… In Afghanistan, this system is so heinous that the International Criminal Court Prosecutor has announced this month that he will seek arrest warrants against Taliban leaders over the persecution of women and girls.
Diane Nash, a leader of the 1960s US Civil Rights Movement, once said:
Segregation was humiliating. Just the reality of signs that said you couldn’t use front doors or you couldn’t use this water fountain implied that you were subhuman… Every time I complied with a sign, I felt like I was acquiescing to my own inhumanity. I felt outraged and hated it.
Similarly, sex apartheid is humiliating and deems half the population subhuman. This is why a global campaign is calling for sex apartheid (also known as gender apartheid) to be considered a crime against humanity like racial apartheid.
Despite the cost to the lives of women and girls, criticism of the hijab is often labelled ‘Islamophobic’. But as Egyptian feminist Aliaa Magda El Mahdy has put it, ‘Hijab is sexism, not anti-racism’.
In a recent submission to the Women and Equalities Committee’s session around ‘Gendered Islamophobia’, Southall Black Sisters, One Law for All, and Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain stated:
The term Islamophobia…carries a problematic history. Anti-racists may use the term to refer to attacks on Muslims but the term Islamophobia has the effect of moving these experiences from an analysis of structural, systemic, and institutionalised racism to an irrational individualised fear or ‘phobia’ of Islam. It erases the connections with other forms of racism, which are often manifestations of exactly the same axis of power, violence, ideology and policies [thus shutting down much-needed conversations about women’s rights].
No Hijab Day’s theme this year is #HijabSilences (as a subversion of World Hijab Day’s theme #HijabisUnsilence), which speaks directly to the hijab’s role in erasing and silencing women and girls.
As the Ex-Muslims International statement says:
A symbol that has been used to shame, control, and suppress women cannot be used to combat intolerance and racism. A sexist tool to control and erase women is antithetical to women’s empowerment and visibility. Whilst anti-Muslim bigotry and xenophobia are undeniable, racism cannot be combatted with sexism and the hijab, rooted in modesty culture and oppression.
No Hijab Day stands in solidarity with women who resist… [and] calls for global recognition of the struggle against sex apartheid and the hijab and a commitment to supporting the fight for women’s freedom, equality, and rights.
How to take part in No Hijab Day
We are calling on women of all beliefs and backgrounds to take off their hijabs and put them on a man on 1 February. Men should also feel free to don a hijab in solidarity.
Use this opportunity to spark meaningful conversations about purity culture in Islam, challenge sex apartheid, and show your solidarity with ex-Muslim, Iranian, Afghan, and other women around the world who refuse to wear the hijab.
Share your thoughts, experiences, and support using #NoHijabDay and #HijabSilences.
Let your voice inspire real change for women’s rights.
Related reading
From the streets to social change: examining the evolution of Pakistan’s Aurat March, by Tehreem Azeem
White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser
The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht
Confronting identity politics, a breeding ground for division and dehumanisation, by Maryam Namazie
‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel, by Emma Park
Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson
The Taliban’s unceasing war on Afghan women, by Khadija Khan
A Small Light: Acts of Resistance in Afghanistan, by Zwan Mahmod
The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan
‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park
Political Buddhism, bhikkhuni, and gender apartheid in Burma, by Hein Htet Kyaw
The plight of ex-Muslims in Britain today, by Benjamin Jones
Time to step up and support #ExMuslimAwarenessMonth, by Khadija Khan
The problem with ‘Islamophobia’, by Mark Lilly
Storm over a tea-cup? The ‘Mug-Gate’ teacher speaks out, by Matt Lovell
Islamic identity politics is a threat to British democracy, by Khadija Khan
The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid
Review of ‘A Dirty, Filthy Book’ by Michael Meyer, by Bob Forder
Celebrating Eliza Flower: an unconventional woman, by Frances Lynch
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