"I Knew Better Than To Protest:" One Woman And The Hijab

“‘You have to wear a hijab,’ my husband told me shortly after we got married. ‘Don’t argue with me over this issue.'” So begins writer Dalya Hassan’s somewhat disquieting account of “wearing a headscarf in Iraq”:

That’s how the piece is billed, anyway, and yes, she deals with the changing climate that has made the garment increasingly necessary in what she terms “a country that sometimes pretends to be secular.” She explains that, although an infuriating imposition on those women, like her, who don’t voluntarily cover their heads as a sign if faith, it provides the “silver linings” of protection from sand and rain. But more to the point,

After 2003, wearing the hijab became a means of protection. Many women opted to wear the veil to protect themselves from dogmatic militiamen who kidnapped and murdered people they deemed secular. Being beautiful or flashy made women particularly vulnerable to kidnappings and other attacks.

And, adds Hassan, “it has pleased my husband, a reminder that sometimes we do things we don’t like out of love.” At the piece’s end, she concludes,

“Do you know what I wish right now?” I asked my husband recently. “I wish I could force you to wear this hijab so you could experience my feelings.”

My husband remained silent, and his eyes reddened with anger.

I knew better than to protest. It is useless to swim upstream in this country called Iraq.

And you’re left wondering if the personal is indeed that political — or the converse. And what her husband feels about a lot of other things, including this accomplished professional woman who writes regularly for an international audience writing exactly this article. Is it, you wonder, indeed Iraq — or one family? And which is the “right” answer?