We were in a car driving through Beirut in traffic when Darah, a DJ and connoisseur of American rap, tapped on the window. She was pointing at two girls crossing the road in front of us, cigarillo thin and Coco Chanel chic with small and tight black hijabs to match their outfits. Darah called them “muhajababes”.
In Arabic muhajabah means one who veils . . . so the meaning of muhajababe was pretty obvious. These were ostensibly traditional girls, but with a surprising, sassy, modern twist. I was to see them everywhere as I travelled across the Middle East, trying to discover what made them tick.
It all began three years ago when my friend Tash and I moved into our first adult home in London. War in Iraq was looming and there were endless, lively discussions among our housemates. It made me wonder: were young Arab women very similar or very different to Tash and me? Were there knots of graduates living in ramshackle old houses in the centres of their cities, clashing over politics, tidiness and food bills?
I took Arabic lessons and started to read up on Middle Eastern youth. Some two-thirds of Arabs are 25 or younger. This makes 250m young Arabs. What did their youth culture consist of, I wondered? All I seemed to see or read about was war. How did these 20-somethings live their lives? What music did they listen to? Were they into fashion? Did they go on dates? Did girls my age have careers? Behind the veil, how constrained were their lives?
Darah, my guide around Beirut, would have been right at home living with Tash and me. Even in London she would have been thought “cool”, but in Beirut, she really stood out. It was Darah who pointed out to me that though the region was more educated than the West thought, we would most likely sneer at its popular culture.
She was right. “Video-clips”, what Arabs call music videos, seemed to consist of a scantily clad male or female singer filmed for four minutes wriggling in sand dunes or jiggling on bedsheets. Quite apart from the boring palette of music — like a day’s worth of Britney without any Arctic Monkeys — it had to be bad Islam as well as bad music and bad television.
This sort of near-naked writhing wouldn’t go down well with Tash and me . . . surely educated 20-somethings would find themselves united with the religious conservatives in opposition to it? But most people I met seemed entranced, even Darah. “For most people the video clip stars are the best entertainers they’ve ever seen,” she said.
They are also weirdly subversive. These sexy singers are emboldening Muslim women, who are taking ever more liberties with their traditional attitudes and dress. One young girl I met told me that “if you listen very hard to their lyrics actually they are helping us know how to deal with men”.
In a taxi travelling from Beirut to Jordan, I sat between two girls a little younger than myself. They wore the uniform of 20-somethings everywhere — flared jeans, hems frayed where fashion trainers had worn them down. They were talking about the prevalence of plastic surgery among the girls in their university.
They laughed about two girls who had had nose jobs or “rhinos” during the last holiday. When they returned to class their teacher had remarked how they had bought the same nose. “Bad enough when it’s the same T-shirt,” said the younger girl.
They swiftly moved on to other trends that had gripped their class that term — those who had decided to veil. What did Mona think was worse “or more sad”, the younger one asked, “veiling or plastic surgery?”
“Plastic surgery,” the older, taller of the two said, “just”. Why just? “They’re quite similar really . . . it’s a physical thing they do to change your appearance, but with veiling — you’re not meant to unveil . . . but you can if you really, really want. But with plastic surgery, khallas.” (“Khallas” means finish, end of story.)
I told them I was shocked that they were talking about veiling in the same bracket as plastic surgery. What I didn’t realise was that, for many young girls, veiling isn’t just an expression of religious devotion — it’s a fashion trend. “It used to be that a veil meant a baggy material everywhere else. Now it doesn’t,” they told me. “Friends of ours who are veiling are doing it because a tight headscarf and a tight outfit is a good look.”
Amira, a girl I met in Jordan, loved her veils and talked about them as if they were Philip Treacy creations. She spent anything between five and 200 Egyptian pounds (between 50p and £20) on them. Her favourite was a white one because it illuminated her skin.
Many girls I met — both veiled and non-veiled — mentioned their devotion to one man, a charismatic, besuited, moustachioed former accountant who had, in his mid-thirties, turned his hand to Islamic preaching. Amr Khaled has the buffed, pomaded skin of his coin-counting days but has the pulling power of George Clooney in the Islamic world.
Khaled talks in colloquial rather than classical Arabic and his sermons are not about jihad or Palestine but about what you can wear to the beach and still be a good Muslim. He has pondered whether boys should wear Speedos and advocates playing sport to dampen their sex drive. In a religion that makes women pray in the upstairs room of the mosque, Amr Khaled is a progressive — he addresses women in his sermons as often as men and emphasises the central role they should play as the Prophet’s wives did.
One girl told me about a romance that was coming to an end and one she hoped would take its place. I asked what Amr Khaled would say about it. “He doesn’t say God will damn you . . . he talks about boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, but he advises us it is best to be married.”
Khaled began preaching in a mosque in Cairo but he became so popular that on the evenings he was preaching, traffic jams would bring his middle-class and hitherto quite secular district to its knees. He now has a television programme on a Saudi-owned religious channel from where he continues to pump out his brand of soft-focus, modern Islam.
But Muslim women’s freedom to express themselves only runs so far. I met a group of 10 Cairo students in a dance studio. They had to lock the door to avoid people who disapprove of them spending their time in a dance studio in Lycra. This infuriated them in a video-clip culture that worshipped girls who danced in a far more sexualised way than they would.
They were scathing about the hypocrisy of many veiled girls. It was the muhajababes, they said, who were the really amoral ones.
“Take these girls who wear headscarves,” said one. “A lot of them are wearing make-up . . . and often they wear a fringe. Hair highlights? All these things, by drawing attention to the female face and features . . . they are haram (forbidden). Who is closer to Allah? The girl with blonde highlights and a layer of make-up under a headscarf . . . or me?” she said, eyeballing me. She was wearing a dancer’s top with spaghetti straps and flared grey tracksuit bottoms — no headscarf, but no highlights and no make-up.
“Take sex before marriage,” said another. “I know it is haram but the veiled girls . . . they are all at it.”
The students described the practice of urfi marriage — an unofficial Islamic marriage before witnesses which allows young couples to have sex without having to wait for their big day. Every weekend, the dancers said, there were muhajababes having urfi marriages: “They get married in front of their friends, have a big party and then go and have sex. But girls get pregnant and the father, who is often about 18 years old, can’t look after the kid.”
The etiquette was, when things went wrong, to have an abortion and then a hymen repair operation. “There are two types you can buy. One that costs 1,500 Egyptian pounds (£150) and the other – just a few stitches before marriage — is 500 Egyptian pounds (£50),” I was told by Hind, a 28-year-old. “But both are getting cheaper. Like mobiles. With different ringtones.”
Hind is a single mother. A brave one. “I wasn’t prepared to go through my life pretending I wasn’t experienced. I was bored of the idea of spending the rest of my life having abortions and then hymen repair operations to fake my virginity, hop into bed with the next man I think I love and lie down pretending I don’t know what to do. No way. I know what to do”.
I didn’t just talk to young people . . . of course there were bit-parts given to the older generation. One colonel who ran a think tank told me the vogue for veils was particularly pernicious because it extended up through the generations: his wife veiled the other day in her forties even though he’d asked her not to (for the older generation of Arab socialists, the veil is a symbol of the stultifying power of religion that they blame for the region’s ills). But his wife had done so because she was the only woman in her office still uncovered.
But I was reluctant to be critical. In the West, we’re programmed to see any increase in religiosity in the Middle East as a threat. But Islam does seem to be modernising, even in sclerotic Arab societies. Khaled’s brand of trendy veiled Islam is empowering for the young. It’s miles away from the boredom and tendentious sermons of official religion.
The muhajababes are living contradictions. Some of the veiled girls I talked to smoked as they extolled Khaled’s virtues though one of his bugbears is girls who smoke. Amr Khaled would rather young people didn’t have sex before marriage. But his followers still do. The difference is — and this is the really revolutionary thing about Khaled — that though these contradictions may madden him he never damns them or threatens them with eternal hellfire. After all, it’s only the same kind of mix and match spirit of western youth — like Tash and me. In all their contradictions, the muhajababes could just be sparking a revolution.
© Allegra Stratton 2006
Extracted from Muhajababes, published by Constable & Robinson, £7.99
