Siel Devos, London, England, SSH Blog Correspondent
By now, everyone has seen the video of a woman walking around New York for 10 hours and getting harassed over a hundred times.
But did you also know there has been a response in the form of a video of a woman walking through New York wearing hijab? The first 5 hours she is shown walking without hijab, experiencing harassment similar to the original video. However for the next 5 hours, when she does wear the hijab and niqab, she is miraculously not subjected to harassment at all.
The video says “you be the judge” implying that it is obvious to see that the only way to be free from harassment is covering yourself up. Once again, women are shamed and blamed – by both men and women – for bringing harassment upon themselves, merely by what they are or are not wearing. Once again people fail to acknowledge the real issue that is street harassment: the ingrained idea of entitlement and power over women and the fact that harassment is so normalized in both Western and Middle Eastern culture.
Victim blaming happens often when addressing sexual crimes and harassment, and even more in the cultural and social context of Islamic societies where women are seen as sexual creatures who are to blame for inciting men’s sexual urges. The idea of modesty and the concept of honour and shame regarding women’s bodies as a means of protecting women does nothing to solve the problem, rather it reinforces rape culture by always putting the blame on them.
The underlying meaning of this ‘modesty’ is that “good” women are those who cover up and belong to a man, “bad” women don’t cover up which implies that they are available to all men. In other words, respect for women depends mostly on their way of dressing as expected and imposed by men. Victim blaming and slut-shaming are very close related when talking about harassment. The notion of the male gaze becomes crucial here, and I very much agree with what the (anonymous) blogger behind A Sober Second Look says about this:
“What we didn’t notice was that regardless of whether we were measuring ourselves against a more or a less restrictive check-list determining “proper hijab,” we were nonetheless forever measuring ourselves in terms of an imagined male gaze, which we had internalized. We told ourselves that this had nothing to do with the male gaze, because what we were concerned with ultimately was obeying God. But coincidentally enough, the gaze that those check-lists had in mind was the male gaze. According to those check-lists, a woman has to always be aware if her clothing is “too” tight, “too” bright, “too” short, “too” fashionable, “too” eye-catching, “too” insufficiently Muslim… mainly, in the judgment of men—the generations of male scholars who had debated and determined these matters, and the male leaders of our community—and to a lesser extent, of a censorious and judgmental community generally.”
Going back to the message of the hijab video, “you be the judge” which implies that the hijab functions as a kind of invisibility cloak that magically protects against harassment and the male gaze. Problem solved then? Not really. How do you explain that 99.3% of Egyptian women experience harassment, when the majority of them wears the hijab?
The Qur’an and Hadith suggest that both women and men dress modestly in order not to incite sexual urges (an inherent natural aspect of human beings, both men and women). Maybe men who are shaming women for not wearing the hijab and saying this is required by the Qur’an haven’t read the Qur’an properly, as in the same chapter it is recommended that men lower their gaze. Other chapters in the Qur’an encourage men to respect women and treat them kindly. So why are we not addressing this blatant violation of Islamic doctrine? When are we going to focus on changing men’s behaviour and attitude instead of simply blaming women’s appearance and modesty?
Siel is a master’s student in Middle Eastern studies with a major in contemporary Islam at SOAS University in London. Find her on twitter and instagram under @mademoisielle.
