I hope you don’t wear hijab

“You seem to focus on my comment about the mental obstacle, but dont seem to talk about the “sexist and oppressive” comment i made, which means you probably agree with it.”

i didn’t comment on your hijab-is-sexist talk because i’m not interested in that kind of debate which already floods the comment sections of any article remotely related to islam. my personal beliefs on the intricacies of the hijab are irrelevant to the question of barring employment to hijabi women. yes, the employers decide all they want, but i am questioning this exact work culture of kuwait – and the gcc, really, with the slight exception of oman – that normalizes labor discrimination of the most regressive sort. egyptians = fast food waiters and taxi drivers, south asians = garbage collectors and street workers, syrians and lebanese = receptionists and secretaries, filipinos = overworked maids, americans and europeans = company owners and private school teachers. most societies make room for upward mobility, whereas it looks near impossible in this country.

this school was just one school in a long string of schools that have a near obsession with hiring westerners and europeans, which in no way is a problem in and of itself until it entails looking down on the non-WASPy, browner folk despite their proven skills and credentials. as a teacher myself, i am well aware of the sense of ‘elitism’ behind the hiring processes in these schools and nurseries.

“If a hijab wearing lady thinks or says something blasphemous that she is convinced of, then her wearing a hijab is a very hypocritical thing. For example, “I love my country and the laws the government places on us, but I speed at 160kph on the emergency lane” if I do that then i am a hypocrite.”

for someone who disapproves of the one-way line of thinking that ‘ends in god’, you sure don’t mind dealing in absolutes yourself. i sure hope there are kuwaitis out there that love their country but won’t hesitate a second to criticize its glaring faults like governmental corruption and the slave-ish treatment of southasian/east african expats and so many other nonsensical laws. this is not a complicated concept. you don’t have to stand behind anything 100% in such a way that you close your mind to criticism. i can adore my own mother while calling out her bullshit.

“the hijab would enforce a religious path of thinking that always ends with GOD being at the end of every existential and mysterious question that science and society has no answer to. I am sorry my comment can be read in a very generalized way, i probably should have reworded it so your scientific mentality (which i respect) gets it: “Society places a burden on hijab wearing ladies, that religion/piety is THE path to take, so make sure you do not do or think or say anything that offends god or religion”.”

your beef, then, seems to lie more with hardline religiosity in general than the scarf itself, but correct me if i’m wrong. non-hijabi muslim women aren’t necessarily any more or less religious than hijabi women. infact, many non-hijabi muslims seem to resent the holier-than-thou attitudes of some hijabi women that suggest they’re not as committed to their religions, or even westerners and europeans guessing that non-hijabi muslims are not “one of those crazy muslims” and could therefore more easily integrate into their societies on the assumption that they’re less attached to their local cultures. in gulf societies, alot of the younger hijabis don’t always like to be seen as religious. when i was interviewing a young kuwaiti hijabi in her early twenties for an ethnographic research, she joked asking “what am i, a bedouin to you?”. i had to reverse tactics in my research because i found that alot of the young hijabis were a little weirded out – but not offended – by the assumption that they were something like experts in their religions or that they could explain any religious or spiritual questions i had. they didn’t even have an interest in clarifying misconceptions to westerners about their religions. sure, they’d feel greatly offended by the dumber questions like ‘did your muslim father/husband beat you into submission?’ and would try to leave the conversation, but they don’t quite care to pull out qur’anic verses to clear things up or get into a lengthy debate on the metaphysics of god and the universe. kuwaitis and other arabs, on the other hand, don’t exactly take one look at a young hijab-wearing woman down the street and think that she must know half the quran by heart.

finally, religiosity comes and fades. not every muslim prays 5 times a day, or fasts, or abstains from alcohol. there is no ‘religious calculator’ measuring the degrees of religiousness in an individual that can eventually total up to a ‘true, non-hypocritical muslim’ answer. there are LGBT muslims, secular muslims, reformist muslims, liberal muslims, muslims suffering from alcoholism, muslims suffering from drug addictions, muslims that have removed their hijabs, non-denominational muslims, plain irreligious muslims, followers of the nation of islam. then there are islamic sects such as the ahmaddiya muslims, ibadi muslims, quranist muslims, alevi muslims, alawite muslims, druze muslims. none of these examples of groups fit into neat little boxes of a singular islamic experience and practice, and you’d exhaust yourself trying to locate the true muslims from the ‘hypocritical’ ones. the entire 1-point-something billion population of muslims may as well be hypocrites by your definition. afterall, islamic practice varies from culture to culture, subculture to subculture, such as black nationalist circles of the 60s or post-war albania. some latino muslims in south america today appreciate the similarities between islam and catholicism and therefore continue to participate in the catholic festivities within their local towns. in nigeria, a minority of the yoruba people practice ‘chrislam’, a faith combining the teachings of christianity and islam since the 70s and 80s. bosnian muslims often state that they practice a ‘different kind of islam’ from that of the middle east. traditional islam is too ‘arab’ for them and incompatible with their european identities, feeling only a historical and cultural closeness with turkey.

consider the historical factor too, since islam has not maintained a singular practice for over a span of centuries. the ottoman empire decriminalized homosexuality in 1858 as part of the tanzimat reformations. in kuwait alone, people rejected the hijab as an overly religious statement, but still preferred the commonly worn abaya which demonstrated an ‘appropriate’ level of religiousness.

many factors – historical, societal, economic, political, geopolitical, cultural – ultimately influence a variety of religious practices and identities across the world.

“I am sorry but you seem like another form of the liberal extreme left defending and tolerating an intolerant concept, hypocrisy yo.”

yeah, a hijabi woman getting hired for a job she’s qualified for is what takes the women’s movement a step back. how the hell does a woman simply wearing a hijab of her own volition constitute an act of intolerance? a hijabi woman sitting across from my office desk isn’t picking my pocket or hurling slurs or coming at me, so what is there to ‘not tolerate’ in her mere existence? the employers did not turn this hijabi woman away because of their ideological differences with the gendered conceptions of the hijab. if the woman’s happy in her hijab, i don’t need to get in her face about my theoretical speculations or try to change her worldview like its my place, when all she cares about is getting her paycheck and going home. if hoping shes happy in her current state of clothing makes me an extreme leftie, then extreme leftie i am. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ will make sure to preorder my das kapital and antifa coffee mug.