The mall was the most mall-y mall I’ve ever been to. The mall in Dubai makes the Mall of America look like one Lego. It’s kind of like an airport with shops you’d actually want to shop at. The moment I got there, I found exactly what I was looking for. Well, the two things I was looking for. I found bootleg designer purses, but more importantly, I found women in hijabs and even some in burkas.
If you don’t know the difference, don’t worry, neither did I back then, and to be fair, I probably still don’t. What I gather from my Middle Eastern friends and Wikipedia is that the hijab looks like a headscarf that covers the head and ears, but not necessarily the face, whereas the burka covers women completely. There’s also something called a niqab, which is essentially a remix of both: a burka that leaves the eye area clear. There are other incarnations of these, like a shayla, a khimar, and a chador, but I don’t know enough about this to tell you the real difference, and frankly, I’m worried the Internet doesn’t know either, especially since I’ve gotten two Google alerts in the past five years giving me breaking news that I died.
Seeing the burkas in person was a real bummer. And not like the buying-a-jumpsuit-online, then getting-it-in-the-mail-and-realizing-only-JLo-could-successfully-wear-it kind of bummer. It was more of the heartbreak variety of bummer. I had only seen burkas in horrific post–9/11 news footage and seeing them in person sent chills down my spine.
They looked nothing like what I thought they would. Maybe it’s the tragic romantic in me, but for some reason I expected them to at least be kind of pretty, made of diaphanous fabrics, gorgeous colors, and ornate beaded designs. I guess my naive brain assumed that women must have agreed to this uniform because it was undeniably luxurious and—I don’t know—somehow worth it. I also thought, wrongly of course, that everything in the Middle East was beautiful, comprised of silks, golds, and unicorn dreams. My ignorance isn’t surprising given the extent of my experience with the Middle East included watching parts of Lawrence of Arabia and dozing off while my niece watched Aladdin.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that most of the burkas and hijabs were made of cheap-looking fabrics, as if the whole thing was more a synthetic formality than a sacred ritual rooted in traditional beliefs. I didn’t understand how such an ancient cultural norm could have such an ersatz incarnation. I guess I assumed, or at least hoped, they were still using intricate handmade fabrics that were threaded during the time the beliefs actually came about. But no, no. Most of the burkas and hijabs I saw were made of a cheap black fabric, which to me felt like it added insult to injury.
These women are made to wear these fabrics 24/7 and the fabric isn’t even soft? For me, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Another thing I expected to see based on movies but didn’t get to see: a camel! The Middle East really needs to work on its PR.
I know this is starting to sound shallow, but what I’m trying to say is that the hijabs were especially jarring to me because they looked so modern. So . . . made in China. I guess the root of my confusion was that in this day and age, hijabs and burkas were still being manufactured. I figured, or at least hoped, that the women were still using leftover ones from when subjugating women was more universal. But no, they were still churning out new ones. It dawned on me that there was a factory that had many machines churning these things out. It blew my mind that a bunch of people go to work every day and their job is to make new batches of these oppressive garments. America still has corset factories or whatever, but they’re more for strippers and spicing up fading marriages, not because women are still required to wear them. I guess I was under the assumption that women having to cover themselves was being phased out, a tradition for the older generation, like VHS tapes or Quaaludes.
Even if younger girls were wearing them, I assumed theirs were passed on from generations before them, and that maybe there was something poignant or ceremonial about wearing your grandmother’s garments. Maybe that was part of why they wore them, for posterity, I rationalized. I’m not sure if I’m making sense, but it was just hard for me to process that new burkas were being made, that this wasn’t an obsolete trend that was on the way out. These weren’t like ephemeral jelly bracelets or stone-washed overall shorts. These getups were here to stay.
My theory was confirmed by the kiosks in the mall that sold hijabs. In America kiosks sell dream catchers; in Dubai they sold nightmares: cheap, tacky fabric that women are forced to wear because they’re thought of as inferior. As if that weren’t bad enough, they have to go to a mall to get one. As if being oppressed isn’t bad enough, they had to drive around and look for parking? There was no ceremony, no passing down the fabrics with harps playing and light hitting the gorgeous skin of the women receiving them? It was much less cinematic. They just grabbed some hijabs on sale between buying socks and picking up toilet paper.
I didn’t know how or what to feel, but from what I could tell, I was, per usual, in a state of total hypocrisy: insulted by the lack of respect toward a symbol I disdained. If these women had to be confined and hidden in these fabrics, they should at least be pretty, special, and breathable, I thought. I was, very obviously, missing the point.
I had a momentary crack in my self-righteousness long enough to realize that I was staring at these women very creepily. I looked them up and down as if they couldn’t see me. I was outraged by how they were treated as subhuman, yet there I was, objectifying them as if I was watching them on a TV screen.