Thursday, January 07, 2010

Why Do Egyptian Women Wear the Hijab?

Image source: The Hijab Blog

I am watching a television news program asking this question. In part the answer is in the negative -- the Koran does not require women to wear that garment and a few years ago very few "modern" women in Egypt did so. I myself noted how great the difference had been in the numbers of women wearing the hijab between the 1980s and the decade of the "oughts".

I also noticed that the hijabs tended to be carefully color coordinated with dresses and that to the uninformed they looked more like a fashion statement than like a religious statement.

I recall in my youth "the new look" replaced short skirts with much longer skirts in America. It would have been laughable to describe that as an increase in modesty with religious roots.

Maybe the better answer as to why Egyptian women wear the hijab is that it is the fashion to do so!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Egyptian women wear Hijab, because no.1 the quran does require for a woman to wear the veil and cover her adornments.They definitely not wearing it just because of fashion.They going back to the true Islam, which is gr8 by the way! by the way, Hijab can also look fashionable. The style and colour of the Hijab is not important, its the parts of the body that it covers that really counts.

John Daly said...

Of course, you are right that Egyptian women would not be wearing the hijab were there not a religious reason to do so.

As I recall there is a considerable variation in the garb of women in Egypt. Some, as I recall, wore beautiful hijabs with beautiful colors carefully coordinated with the rest of their clothing. Others wore black garments that seemed very conservative.

Like people everywhere, some Egyptians must have better color sense than others. Still, it really seems to me that some women in Egypt want to look good in their hijabs. Certainly women of fashion in other cultures could take tips on color coordination from the sophisticated women of Cairo.