Source: Los Angeles Times

When I was 13, one of my classmates came to school one morning wearing a beige head scarf. This was in the 1980s, in Morocco. Surprised by her attire, I joined a group of girls who gathered around her, watching them pepper her with questions. Our classmate calmly replied that she had decided to wear the hijab because that was what a “true” Muslim girl should do.

This struck us as strange. After all, we were Muslim girls too, but none of us, regardless of the degree of our piety, thought that our religion required us to cover. Yet just five years later, when I entered college in Rabat, the number of my classmates who had begun to wear the hijab had multiplied. And by the time I graduated, I was continually asked why I didn’t wear it. This phenomenon — the reappearance of the veil in the Muslim world, after several decades during which it had been on the verge of obsolescence — is the subject of “A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence From the Middle East to America” by feminist scholar and Harvard professor Leila Ahmed.

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