The Hijab: A Personal Journey

Hijab has taken on distinctive meanings according to its cultural contexts—it was part of discussions on women’s rights in Egypt in the 1930s, and women became a litmus test of modernity. At that time the full range of women’s lives was the focus, not a narrow concern about whether or not they wore hijab. Through the Nasser period the hijab could be associated with country women and thus rejected by the middle class; however, it was often worn to identify hajjis, those who had made the pilgrimage that year. This began to shift in the Sadat era as hijab was donned in affirmation of Islam and by the 1980s, with the influences of Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood, hijab had become a political statement. In Canada, it often is associated with Muslim identity. Through the gaze of personal experience, Erving Goffman’s idea of impression management does not provide sufficient explanatory framework. There are many discourses around the hijab and no one discourse is sufficient to pin down the complexity of international hijab-wearing.