Egyptians and head covering by women

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jan 13, 2014 at 07:41

NC wrote

Living in Egypt or Turkey you can say if the girl is devout or a not, serious or a flirt - by looking not just at hijab but the whole personal attitude.

In the case of Egypt the claim that wearing el-Higab reduces the chances of sexual assaults or that it renders thw women to become pious and therfore respected was proven to be not true as even el-Muhagabat (those that wear this silly head cover) were also subjects of sexual assaults following the 2011 Egyptian revolution

The history of the Higab in modern Egypt is very interesting. Egyptian women more among el-Falaheen wear the very Egyptian Tarha but this really has nothing to do with Islam as Coptic women also wear the Tarha

Now in early 20th century women (and I include here Muslim as well as Coptic and Jewish women) used to wear el-Niqab which was an import in Egypt via the backward Turks and it was no more than a fashion statment

And believe it or not Cairo was a bastion of fashion and just a few steps behind Paris

Now around 1924 Hoda Shaarawi هدى شعراوي http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huda_Shaarawi who was a femenist and who regarded that wearing any face or head cover by women as a sign of submission to men and this is why she took off her Niqab in public and from that moment on women en masse stopped using el-Niqab and el-Hegab but in rural areas women continued to wear the very Egyptian Tarha and the Niqab was not in fashion any longer

Even the women in the family of Hasan el-Bana the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood did not wear any form of head cover and this indeed stresses the fact that there is no correlation between being pious and covering of one's head by women

Now we move forward to the 1970's and 1980's and many Egyptians moved for work to places like Saudi Arabia and came back with very Wahhabi ideas including salafism and more conservative forms of Islam and they brought with them el-Higab and el-Niqab

The spread of using el-Higab in Egypt now is no more than a fashion statement and it can disappear over night as it did in 1924

You see the more it changes the more it stays the same

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