Free Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy

politics and religion.
    I asked Ben Mhenni how she felt about the lifting of the ban on veiling in state schools and institutions and about the increase in veiling that followed.
    “I consider this as personal freedom,” she said. “I know under the regime many women used to be arrested and even some beaten by police just because they were wearing a veil. I have an aunt who wears the hijab and she had been arrested several times. She’s not extremist, and she’s wearing it just because she wants to wear it. It’s personal freedom but those people don’t have to interfere with my freedom.”
    How has it impacted women’s lives?
    “One of my female students said her roommates were trying to force her to wear the niqab. She was wearing black clothes and the veil, almost the burqa. She said, ‘I didn’t used to wear this thing and now they forced me to do this.’ ”
    In Ettadmun—one of the largest working-class neighborhoods in all of Africa—I met Fatma Jgham, a university professor and women’s rights activist who established Tahadi (Challenge), an arts center that teaches young men and women graffiti, rap, and dance in order to advance their activism. She told me she had been threatened by some of the Salafist students on campus because she does not wear the hijab.
    Asked about the article in the new constitution thatguarantees equality, she said: “Equality is a practice, it’s not just about words, about having a nice clause in a constitution. Women are fighting many different types of extremism: economic extremism, cultural extremism, and various forms of violence. The real difference will come when I feel safe everywhere I go. If I stand here in the street, do you really respect me as a woman, can you guarantee my safety?”
    One of the young women who attended Tahadi was a nineteen-year-old who wore a headscarf and whose mother, a hairdresser, did not. They were both happy that a clause on equality existed, but were more concerned with issues closer to home.
    “The one thing I would change is the mentality, because people in the neighborhood all the time say, ‘How could you let your daughter go to [Tahadi]? It’s full of boys.’ And I say, ‘It’s none of your business, this is my daughter, she likes to go here, so I let her,’ ” the mother said.
    “I’m worried about the fundamentalist and extremist groups and especially concerned when I come home late from work. Sometimes I’ll leave deliberately early so I won’t run into them. We know our religion and I understand that wearing hijab is a personal choice. Sometimes I have clients who come to the salon wearing hijab and take it off inside because they’re worried about men outside who are Salafi or from other fundamentalist groups who will look at them badly or force them to wear it.”
    In modern Tunisia, and throughout the region, wearing the hijab does not remain a real choice for women, and it cannot so long as this pervasive discrimination and violence flourishes. Almost a century after Huda Shaarawi removed her face veil, we are floundering—and we will continue to flounder as long as a woman’s body remains the canvas upon which we signal our acquiescence to conservatism and patriarchy.

ONE HAND AGAINST WOMEN
    For those of us
    who were imprinted with fear
    like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
    learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
    for by this weapon
    this illusion of some safety to be found
    the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
    For all of us
    this instant and this triumph
    We were never meant to survive.
    — FROM “A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL,” BY AUDRE LORDE,
FROM
THE BLACK UNICORN
    A lmost 100 percent of Egyptian girls and women report being sexually harassed. A 2013 United Nations report cites the actual figure at 99.3 percent, but my friends joke that the remaining 0.7 percent had their phones turned off when researchers tried to contact them. Before leaving her home, every woman I know braces herself