Abstract:
In autumn 1983, a young woman at the American University of Beirut entered the cafeteria wearing a hijab.1 Heads turned, and whispers were audible throughout the room. The hijab itself was not unusual in West Beirut, where traditional and Western lifestyles had peacefully coexisted throughout the civil war. What made the hijab remarkable was that the student had not been muhajjaba2 up to that point. That is, she had never previously committed to the hijab as a sign of Islamic identity. Over the next several years, numerous Muslim Lebanese women would be joining the Islamic movement. Increasingly, the collective transformation to hijab would make family, friends, and associates unsure as to how to respond to the young women making this very personal choice. Like the rest of my peers, I was uneasy about this transformation. The Islamic movement was gaining momentum in Lebanon; many secular and non-Muslim female students were concerned about the implications of the hijab phenomenon. What might this movement mean for Lebanese women in general? I could not deny that the hijab was silently giving voice to my own suppressed feelings of anger and loss, feelings I had been harboring since Israel's invasion of South Lebanon in summer 1982. The invasion had culminated in the subsequent occupation of West Beirut and in the Palestinian refugee camp massacres at Sabra and Shatila. Despite my strong opposition to all forms of coercion, including enforced dress codes, I saw the hijab in a different light: an expression of Lebanese self-assertion and defiance and a sign of grief for the human catastrophe buried along with thousands of corpses that summer. In this chapter I explore my own memories, as well as those of my peers, to understand the impact of the hijab in Beirut during the early eighties. My goal is to describe the perceptions and reactions to the hijab based on my own experience as a college student in West Beirut and the experiences of friends and associates living and studying there during most of the civil war. I interviewed eight women-all students at the American University of Beirut in the early 1980s-who volunteered to share their recollections. The interviews, completed by telephone or e-mail, consisted of unstructured, openended conversations about their memories of the hijab and how its emergence affected their past and present sense of personal identity. The interviewees were Christian, Muslim, and Druze. Confidentiality was prerequisite to candid interviews; therefore, my intention is to describe their experiences with accuracy, yet without compromising their anonymity. In these recollections, I discovered a proportional correlation between the level of awareness of the civil war in general and our sense of personal identity. The Israeli war of 1982 dramatically changed our awareness of the Lebanese conflict and how each of us viewed the hijab and the Islamic revival that was taking place. At that time we perceived the hijab as a means of both expression and suppression for women; in no way did the hijab serve as an identifying factor, in terms of distinguishing Sunni from Shi'a. Clearly, our perceptions of hijab were very different prior to the war. As would be expected, these perceptions evolved and changed during and after the Israeli invasion. © 2010 by University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.