Is the hijab worn mainly to avoid arousal, or simply out of respect?

“Some of us are vexed
Most of us perplexed
Will life and lovework out?
If you have the answer—
Give us a shout!”
From Piccadilly Peccadilloes by Bachchoo

In some recess of my memory, before I was a teenager, I had heard the American shibboleth that “gentlemen prefer blondes”. Living in India, albeit round and about it as the child of a fauji family, I can’t recall having encountered a blonde, even after I understood what the word meant. I suppose the closest I got was seeing Marilyn Monroe on screen. At the time I wasn’t savvy enough to stoop to asking whether Norma Jean had dyed her hair to attract the preference of gentlemen.

All the women I knew had black or, in the case of old grandaunts, white hair. Even through my teens and the inevitable adolescent sexual awakening, it never occurred to me that the colour, texture or even the simple existence of hair on a woman’s head was a key and stimulant to sexual desire.  

But there are sections of the Islamic world who believe it is. One female Islamist activist has initiated a World Hijab Day (WHD) on the 1st of February, 13 days before some immodest Western unbeliever initiated Valentine’s Day. The WHD encouraged all women of whatever faith — Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Yazidi, Satanist, Buddhist or whatever to embrace the hijab.

I believe, though I can’t be sure that this was an injunction to follow what some Muslims believe is a custom urged by the Holy Quran in the interests of female “modesty” or shielding themselves from the potential lust of males whose eyes may fall upon them. Seeing a head of hair would, in the tradition that this ideology espouses, drive men to sexual frenzy. The injunction to hide one’s hair, blonde, red, black, brown or white, will, if the assumption that hair is a stimulant to male arousal is true, would protect women from unwanted attention or even rape and men from this temptation to stray from their god-fearing routines.

The Christian tradition starts with an apple being the object of sexual temptation. In my short and happy life, gentle reader, I must confess, I have never found apples sexually stimulating. The Christian tradition doesn’t call for them to be covered up. Of course, apples have served very many other purposes, being instrumental, for instance, in formulating the theory of gravitation — but we stray…

The idea that hair is a sexual stimulant probably originates in the Jewish tradition and then was passed on to Islam. Sufi poets, some of whose work I have undertaken to translate, very often allude to being trapped in tresses or being in some way entranced or even enslaved by the beauty of the beloved’s hair.

The conceit has passed from Urdu poetry to Bollywood lyrics.

If I can take the opportunity to translate one of these roughly, taking liberties with the third line for the sake of rhyme, it would go:

On seeing you I first realise
That love is just a trick of the eyes
The raindrop happily descends before it crashes
I’d love to melt into your eyelashes.

Eyebrows and eyelashes are attractive features of female faces. Even full burkha wearers don’t cover these up, unless with the niqab they are wearing dark glasses. I wonder if the initiators of World Hijab Day have noticed that eyelashes and eyebrows are treated by beauty salons as features to be modified by making lashes longer and brows shaped and thinner. The salons aren’t doing this for charity or religious reasons. They advertise these transformations as enhancing attractiveness and the women who undergo these treatments do so for that reason. Then dark glasses all round, I say.

Very many of my Muslim friends, male and female, tell me that the hijab and the niqab are nowhere recommended in the holy book or in the sayings of the Prophet. There is certainly an injunction to modesty, which doesn’t stretch to recommendations of couture.

In Britain there has been a reaction to World Hijab Day. An interesting article by a 16-year-old in an established weekly said that she was coerced from infancy into wearing it and had now cast off this instrument of subservience to male-made tradition. One feminist current of opinion among Muslim women in the West could logically result in a World Cast-Off-Your-Hijab Day.

The balance of power between the genders in, say, Iran, will ensure that the trend is not transferred eastwards. The cultural police are there to nip any such insouciance in the bud.

But what of India? I grew up with the assumption that burkhas, niqabs, hijabs and all were accepted and acceptable ways of dress. A lady who visited my grandfather when I was but a boy wore a full burkha in the streets but discarded it when seeking his advice.

Orthodox Jews have a rather ironic custom of requiring women to cover their own hair with a wig. In Stamford Bridge, in the predominantly orthodox Jewish community of London, the women wearing the required black garments, wear wigs of all sorts over their own hair. If it’s done in the interest of alleviating temptation in the eye of the beholder, its paradoxical. The wig might be more stylish or even alluring if you go for that sort of thing, than its wearer’s own curls.

Other religions enjoin the covering of heads to show respect. Its universal though not enforced in churches, temples and at shrines. We Zoroastrians, males or females, have to cover our heads when entering the fire temple. It’s more custom than religion as there are carved portrayals of the Achaemenid Kings appearing before the symbolic fire bare-headed.

As a reformist Zoroastrian I am thinking of seeking support for a World Bare-Headed Worship Day. I am in two minds about it. Does it really matter?

And would it encourage some enthusiastic Jews or Islamists to declare World Circumcision Day? Ouch!