In an interview for the April issue of Vogue Arabia, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said, "To me, the hijab means power, liberation, beauty and resistance." As two women who once lived with the mandatory hijab in Iran, we hope to bring another perspective to this complex matter by describing our experiences.
There are two vastly different kinds of hijabs: the democratic hijab, the head covering that a woman chooses to wear, and the tyrannical hijab, the one that a woman is forced to wear.
In the first kind, a woman has agency. She sets the terms of her hijab, appearing as ascetic or as appealing as she wishes. She can also wear makeup and fashionable clothing if she likes.
In the second kind of hijab, the woman has no agency. Where we lived, the terms were set by Iranian government authorities under a mandatory dress code that banned women from wearing makeup in public and forced them to wear a baggy, knee-length garment to fully disguise the shape of their bodies, over a pair of pants and closed-toed shoes. For a while, the authorities even decreed the colors that women could wear: gray, black, brown or navy.
Years of young Iranian women's unofficial revisions of the code have succeeded in wearing down the government's rigidity, but the official law remains unchanged and is capriciously enforced. A random sweep can result in mass arrests on a single day.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, women are alarmed by the planned departure of U.S. troops and the negotiations with the Taliban, terrified by the possible return to power of a group whose oppression of women has included the imposition of the burqa — taking the Iranian dress code one step further and covering even their faces. In Saudi Arabia, the abaya and niqab, allowing only women's eyes to show, are not legally imposed, but the patriarchal society makes wearing them essentially compulsory.
Women who live under these forms of hijab effectively live under a gender apartheid. The coverings mark women as lesser citizens, legally and socially unequal. In Iran, there are restrictions on women's ability to travel, obtain a divorce or enter sports stadiums. A woman's courtroom testimony is in most cases given half the weight of a man's. The forced hijab honors neither tradition nor religion; it is a powerful tool of misogynist oppression.
Women are rebelling against these rules. In Saudi Arabia, Loujain al-Hathloul and several other activists have been jailed for their work toward gaining equal rights. In Iran, the #WhiteWednesdays campaign has endured for several years as women — old and young, from every segment of society — wave white scarves in defiance of the hijab laws, walk the streets with their heads uncovered and risk arrest and imprisonment.