Throughout my short life, friends and colleagues have often asked me why I wear a veil when I travel abroad, and why I choose to hold on to my Islamic values and Egyptian traditions. For some of them, this is something quite odd and surprising.
I came to Canada a couple of years ago to pursue my PhD at McGill. With my Islamic veil and values, and my Egyptian traditions, I have been welcomed with respect, support, appreciation, and encouragement from my neighbours, colleagues, professors, university, the government, and the whole community in Quebec and Canada. Almost everyone who knows me is aware that I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t eat pork, I return home before 9 p.m., I can’t be alone with a man in a closed area, and I don’t talk to men on the phone unless it is for work or an emergency. It is simply my identity, something that I am proud of, and everyone accepts me and respects me just the way I am.
That’s why two weeks ago, I was shocked to read about the Egyptian Muslim girl who was asked to leave a French-language school after refusing to remove her niqab. I was shocked not by the incident itself, but by the reaction of the girl, who filed a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights Commission, as she felt that her freedom of religion had been violated, according to CBC News. Is this a logical reaction? I am not sure. I am neither “with” nor “against” her decision. I am neither attacking nor judging. I am not an Islamic scholar, yet I am an Egyptian Muslim and fully aware that in Egypt the niqab is controversial. The need for a niqab is not clearly stated in the Qur’an and the Sunna. This is why opinions on the niqab have always been varying and always will be.
Sheikh Mohammed Metwally Shaarawy, a renowned Egyptian Islamic scholar, emphasized that the “Niqab is a virtue, not an obligation.” In October 2009, Sheikh Tantawi, Egypt’s highest Muslim authority, asked a girl to remove her niqab while he was visiting Azhar University. Subsequently, Egypt’s minister of higher education, Hany Helal, decided to ban the niqab in Egyptian public universities. The need for a niqab is a debatable area full of questions marks.
Throughout my journey, I have come across minorities complaining about the values of foreign cultures, including the Canadian culture. Personally, this has always annoyed me. If you are rejecting these values and can’t get along with them, this means they don’t suit you. So why have you made this choice to come here? It was your decision, not an obligation. Is it logical to come to a foreign country and start criticising the way people live? To keep complaining about them? To try to impose your own ideas from your own single perspective? Don’t you think that such an attitude is unfair to others who have welcomed you in their homeland?
On the other hand, I also find it totally unfair when women wearing a niqab are thought of as oppressed or pictured as locked in prisons, like the cartoon on CBC News two weeks ago. All the people I have met wearing a niqab are highly educated people. It was their own decision, initiating from deep faith, something they felt would bring them closer to God and Paradise. Nobody has the right to judge others except God because He is the only one who knows their intentions.
A few years ago, during a conference I attended in Turkey, I was invited to visit Fatih University. At the main gate of the university, the security officer informed me that I had to remove my veil as per the university regulations. I politely thanked the officer for the information and left. Life is always based on choices, compromises, and decisions. It was my own decision to wear the veil and my own decision not to remove it. My understanding is that rules and regulations have been created so that people abide by them. Allah says what can be translated into: “O believers, obey God, and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you. If you should quarrel on anything, refer it to God and the Messenger, if you believe in God and the Last Day; that is better and fairer in the issue.”
It is vital to define our comfort zone within the laws that govern the community in which we live together with the values and moral codes we bring along as part of our personality and heritage. With reasonable compromises, we can accommodate each other. This is how we can co-exist with respect and harmony. And this is my vision of both world peace and inner peace.
