Meanings of the Hijab: Views of Canadian Muslim women

Abstract

This study demonstrates the individualized phenomenological experiences of Muslim-Canadian women through their relationships with head covering, most commonly known as the hijab. By conducting in-depth interviews with ten women, five who cover and five who do not, we sought to understand their day-to-day experiences with covering, and how their interpretations of these experiences were related to them as individuals, as well as to broader social contexts. Through the use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, we found that the women's experiences can be regarded as an interplay between internal experience, that is, the personal meanings that the women placed on wearing or not wearing a headscarf, and external experience, that is, their interpretations of outside events and treatment by others as related to the headscarf. Their experiences were also embedded in the contexts of their cultural and religious communities, and broader Canadian society. Consistent with previous work, themes such as Muslim identity, religiosity and modesty were highlighted by the women, however, rather than focusing on general experiences across participants, we give primary attention to how these themes unfolded in the individual women's lives.The second author carried out subsequent analysis of the transcripts with the assistance of two senior undergraduate students. All the themes were reviewed, their meanings were examined, and each theme was organized with reference to relevant quotations and narratives from the transcripts. Subsequently, the three researchers (i.e., the second author and the two students who were both familiar with Islamic practices) developed items for a new scale based on participants' narratives. This process identified the same themes that are presented here, which has increased our confidence in the reliability of our findings.

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A living room in the city: the place of public space in the everyday lives of Middle Eastern women in Greater Brisbane

“…Women's veils or Hijabs, as a religious phenomenon, is in vogue in feminist research as well as political and religious fields due to controversies that have occurred on local and international levels about the legal and religious enforcement of [un]veiling in public spaces of countries like Iran, Turkey, and France (Read and Bartkowski 2000, Secor 2002, Bartkowski and Read 2003, Afshar 2008, Dwyer 2008, Moruzzi 2008, Benhabib 2010, Gokariksel and Secor 2010, Syed and Pio 2010, Ahmed 2011, Tissot 2011, Welborne 2011, Gökarıksel 2012, Hamzeh and Oliver 2012, Hebbani and Wills 2012, Kloek, Peters et al 2013, McGinty 2014, Litchmore and Safdar 2016, Strabac, Aalberg et al 2016 (Mazumdar 2001, Thompson 2003, Mills 2005, Haddad 2006, Afshar 2007, Aitchison, Hopkins et al 2007, Freedman 2007, Dwyer 2008, Schielke 2008, Schroeder 2009, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2010, Shahram and Joshua 2011, Tissot 2011, Krämer 2013, Lagasi 2013, Mohammad 2013, Johnson and Miles 2014, Foroutan 2015…”