Seven years ago, in 2018, the Canadian human rights campaigner Yasmine Mohammed started No Hijab Day. The campaign was created as a direct response to World Hijab Day, which takes place on February 1st each year and encourages non-hijab-wearing women to wear a hijab in solidarity with Muslim women. Yasmine Mohammed established No Hijab Day to focus on and support women who have experienced coercion in wearing the hijab, highlighting those who have been abused, imprisoned, or even killed for choosing to remove it.
The initiative aims to counter what Yasmine perceives as Islamist propaganda associated with World Hijab Day, emphasizing the stories of women who wish to be free from the hijab, often under threat of severe consequences. This day is intended to raise awareness about the oppressive aspects of mandatory hijab-wearing in various cultural and legal contexts around the world. The “woke left” of the Western world, in alliance with Islamists (Muslim Brotherhood), has managed, over the decades, to normalize wearing the hijab, which for Muslim women means covering our hair so that the minds of Muslim men are not corrupted. It is a preposterous coercion because veiling toddler daughters sexualizes babies and children. Those hijab-conditioned girls then grow up defending the mandatory veiling and slut-shaming of those women of Muslim heritage who don’t.
What is funny now is that the phenomenal Fatima Mernissi’s The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam (originally published in French as Le Harem Politique) proves how there is no basis for the hijab as a religious diktat. It was not there in the early years of Islam. Her groundbreaking feminist critique shows how Islamic history has been manipulated to exclude women from power and public life. She challenged patriarchal interpretations of Islam and argued that the veil was historically a political tool rather than a religious requirement. Mernissi argued that the veil (hijab) was not originally an Islamic requirement but rather a measure introduced by the male elite to control women’s mobility and limit their role in public spaces. The Prophet’s wives were veiled primarily for political reasons, due to their unique position, rather than as a general rule for all Muslim women.
According to the progressive Muslim versions, Islam was initially progressive for women. Under the Prophet’s leadership, women were granted more rights, allowing them to engage in public life, own property, and participate in governance. Women like Aisha, one of the Prophet’s wives, were politically influential, challenging the notion that Islam inherently suppresses women. Mernissi critiqued the authenticity of several hadiths used to justify women’s subordination, especially those attributed to Abu Bakra, a questionable narrator. She demonstrated how certain misogynistic hadiths were introduced post-Prophet’s era to align Islam with tribal patriarchal customs. This is in alignment with new scholarship by Christophe Luxenberg’s (pseudonym) Syriac-Aramaic reading of the Quran and Ibn Warraq’s (pseudonym) question about the compilation of the hadiths during the Abbasid dynasty under the male ulema in collaboration with the Caliphs (a political alliance).
Mernissi highlighted how male jurists and rulers systematically interpreted religious texts to reinforce male dominance. The institutionalization of patriarchy in Islamic law was not divine but a result of political manoeuvring. In Chapter 4, The Hadith of Abu Bakra – A Misogynistic Fabrication, Mernissi critically examines a hadith narrated by Abu Bakra that claims “a nation led by a woman will never prosper.” She deconstructs this hadith’s questionable authenticity and shows how it was politically motivated. Scholars hated Mernissi; she had traced the shift from the Prophet’s more egalitarian policies to a rigid, male-dominated structure. What we have inherited today from our Islamic heritage is simply the result of medieval Islamic societies systematically restricting women’s access to education, work, and politics through legal and social barriers.
Mernissi insisted that gender equality is not a Western concept but an Islamic one that has been erased by centuries of male-dominated scholarship. She is proven right by the before-and-after photographs of Iran, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and many other Muslim-majority countries, showing women in Western attire, studying, working, driving cars, etc. There are photographs and video clips of women in Tehran marching to protest mandatory veiling by the Khomeini regime after the 1979 Iranian Islamist takeover. A viral video of Gamal Abdel Nasser in a 1958 speech shows him describing to an audience the idea of forcing women to wear a hijab. It draws laughter from the crowd, who mock the idea suggested by one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist party.
The video has preserved for eternity the poignant point Nasser made to the Muslim Brotherhood leader—how he would expect lakhs of Egyptian women to veil up when his daughter of university age did not. This hypocritical stance of Islamist leaders was repeated during the Islamic Jihad in Kashmir when terror groups issued diktats for women to veil up and closed down beauty parlours and cinema houses. The Islamic terrorists would kneecap any woman found wearing jeans and acid attack any unveiled woman. Yet the Islamist leaders (Hurriyat factions) would ship off their daughters to Western cities or more liberal Muslim-majority countries like Turkey. Once social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok made inroads, it became easy to detect the hypocrisy of the Islamists speaking for lakhs of Muslims who wanted liberal lives for their progeny and not Islamo-fascism.
I wrote about how the hijab was imposed in the Kashmir Valley in the 1990s through coercion and intimidation on Pakistani digital media in 2015. It was a description of the lived experience of how the Muslim populations of a region were Wahhabized and Khomeinized and, in just two decades, ended up defending the mandatory hijab, niqab, and burka—something alien to the culture of the region in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; our grandmothers had given up the shuttlecock burka (Afghanistan style) as backward. Since then, it has been a wonderful decade of connecting with like-minded women like Yasmine Mohammed, who was married to an al-Qaeda fighter and had to go through tremendous abuse and domestic violence, of all places, in Canada.
Yasmine, who came up with No Hijab Day as a counter, wrote the book Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam, lambasting the feminists who inadvertently support radical Islamist ideologies and let down millions of Muslim women coerced into the veil and getting killed for refusing, particularly in Afghanistan and Iran. Yasmine’s book Unveiled highlights how Western liberalism, through cultural blind spots and political correctness, often fails to address the oppression faced by women in Islamic communities. She argues that this well-meaning but misguided approach has empowered radical Islamist ideologies. Coming up with No Hijab Day was her way of counterbalancing this huge injustice.
Arshia Malik is a Consulting Editor at The New Indian, focusing on Indian Muslim issues, dissent and Islamic Heretic Traditions as a blogger and columnist.