It was one of the summer nights in Cairo that stayed up until the morning, and I had a friend who was my window to a world I knew little about except through novels and stories. She asked me: “We are going to a bar/pub downtown. Will you come with us?” Her question was sudden and strange. How could a girl like me, who wears the hijab and modest clothing, go to a place like this?
I got excited immediately. A few months before that period, I had pledged to myself that I would be open to all different experiences to see from afar what those worlds looked like, instead of rejecting them from mere external observation. I wanted to get closer to it and study it.
I asked her: “And the hijab?” She said it was normal, and that I was with them, and they were popular customers at this bar and it was one of the bars in downtown Old Cairo that I had always wanted so much to go to. I have always seen them from the outside, wishing for even a minute to enter them and see that world that many writers, intellectuals, and politicians talked about in their novels and books. Naguib Mahfouz, Amal Dunqul, Ahmed Fouad Negm, and others. They are a special case where every corner tells a story.
I went into the bar on Hoda Shaarawi Street, and I was hiding behind my friend, afraid of this stereotypical image, as if I saw someone holding a bottle of wine and staggering, saying, “I am a man.” At first glance, everyone noticed me, but no one bothered me, and I did not hurt them with my looks. My friend and her boyfriend ordered beer, the official drink of downtown Cairo bars, and came “mezze,” a collection of appetizers such as lupine and chopped vegetables, which I settled for.
My mind was apparently with my friends, but my eyes actually began contemplating and swallowing all the details around me, with childish curiosity, fear, and hesitation. I would look toward the door from time to time, but if I had not accepted my presence in that place and at that moment, as a girl wearing the hijab, I would not have opened up after that to all the experiences that were different from me.
That 120-year-old mahogany door on Hoda Shaarawi Street was like what Naguib Mahfouz said: “The door may one day open for those who go through life with the innocence of children and the ambition of angels.”
I lived through a strange period of contradiction and acceptance at the same time. My friend never discussed the issue of the hijab with me and did not pressure me to do anything against my principles at the time, but she wanted me to see another world, the world of the “people below” whom I had lived my entire life before that moment not accepting and fearing. Sometimes I am disgusted by their existence, reject them, fight them, and hate them.
I sat with my friend’s friends as they smoked hashish, drank alcohol, and went to downtown Cairo’s cheap and popular bars. I was forming a visual and cognitive memory. These experiences increased my acceptance and understanding of that world and the secrets of the other, who was not the devil as I thought.
Years later, my awareness of the hijab itself changed, after I read a lot about it and various interpretations, and after I reached a point where the smallest piece of it around my neck or hair almost suffocated me until I lost my breath, until I made the decision to stop wearing it completely, and irrevocably.
As much as my decision was a shock to those around me, I wished I could tell them all to be open to accepting everyone, but I myself did not do this, so I went from Al-Aqsa to Al-Aqsa, and the attacks of those close to me increased my hatred and loathing for the hijab and those who wear it, and I wished I had not gone to places where there were veiled women as long as Most of them have that mentality… and have joined more than one “group” of extroverts, one of which stipulates that there be no veiled women among us, and if one is found against their will, they expel her immediately.
It is the same group that a few days ago made fun of a veiled woman dancing on a pole, and a veiled woman in the Miss Egypt contest. The debate raged in the “secret group” about the hijab in the first place, and can a veiled woman do all that? This is the question that I translated: “Can a veiled woman live?”
That discussion took me back eight years, when no one prevented me from entering places that were forbidden to people like me, but it formed a major part in changing my awareness. I realized that I, too, had moved from the far right to the far left, which is a natural thing in a person’s intellectual transformations, before he reaches the stage of balance in which he must accept the other without imposing his guardianship on him regarding what he wears, takes off, eats, drinks, or… He decides for his life.
No veiled woman participating in the Miss Egypt competition will cause strife, as the extremists claim, and as the liberals reject, nor will a veiled young woman dancing on a pole cause a nuclear disaster, nor will a veiled teenager secretly kissing her lover in the street hurt anyone’s feelings. And all these Facebook quarrels confirm how much we have been intellectually raped in Egypt during the last half century, giving everyone the right to be a guardian over everyone, whether they know them or not, and to control their lives.
