Hijab Proper: The Veil Rhetorical Analysis

The next article I will be analyzing is called, “A Hijab Proper: The Veil Through Feminist Narrative Inquiry” by Sarah Abu Bakr. Abu Bakr wants to dismantle the ideology that the hijab is solely a gendered object that represents Islamic patriarchy and Muslim women having impaired agency. Instead, she disputes that women who wear the hijab come from diverse backgrounds and have numerous reasons for deciding to wear the hijab, not solely because of the Islamic patriarchy. Abu Bakr incorporates her own personal experiences of wearing the hijab and she also interviews an international Muslim woman. She then combines these two experiences to create her performative analysis on the intersectionality of the hijab. In one account, she writes about

how Salwa only started to wear the hijab when going back to her country in Kuwait and when she was back in America, she took off her veil, “By switching back and forth between veiled and unveiled, she was performing two roles. In this abstract construction of Salwa’s actions at that moment in time, airports and flights here are spaces of the in-between, where the negotiation between self and other and self/other takes place.

She is not both women, veiled and unveiled. Yet at the same time, she is not both women. This double negative is a state in which Salwa embodies a dualism in constant negotiation” (Abu Bakr 12). Abu Bakr was highlighting the significance of how one’s sense of “self” gets created when wearing the hijab versus taking off the hijab. Salwa created two different identities. In one of those identities, Salwa is pious, religious, and modest in the eyes of her family in Kuwait. She has a religious privilege granted to her because they believe she wears her hijab on a daily basis, especially in America where it is more difficult to do so. In her other identity, Salwa is allowed to walk freely and earn certain privileges in Western society that she would not have access to if she had worn her hijab. However, Abu Bakr argues even though she has those two separate identities, she really has none of those identities completely because when in Kuwait, her family does not completely let go of her new American identity and they tend to other her in some places, which makes her lose some other

privileges. While in America, Salwa is still considered too “foreign” (since she is an international student) and she loses certain privileges because of that identity. In my fieldwork, many of the girls knew that by wearing their hijab, over a loose headscarf, would earn them certain privileges. The girls who wore a full out hijab (that covered their entire set of hair) had this invisible privilege that many associates with purity, modesty, and piousness that the girls wearing a headscarf did not earn within the religious sphere. However, as soon as those girls were out of the vicinity of the religious sphere, the tides shifted and all the girls who now took of their temporary headscarves/hijabs were now more privileged than the female who did wear a hijab. This is because now they are stepping into the dominant, Western culture. When stepping into the green carpets in the masjid, the tides shift again and the privileged status changes once again.