Photos of How Women Dress in the MODERATE Middle East

Woman in Wahabi-Style Hijab Outfit (taken with telephoto lens, from moving car)

They DON’T dress like this! (Near the bottom of this post you can see several pictures of how typical women DO dress.)

Everyone in the West THINKS most Muslim women are forced to dress like the woman in black in this picture, throughout the Middle East. (I apologize for the fuzzy image, but I took the picture from a moving car, and using a telephoto lens!) Notice the woman walking NEXT to the woman in black. The first one is wearing a black scarf (rare in this country) and a brightly-colored blue and white tunic, something like you might commonly see here these days.

I live in a very moderate Middle Eastern country. When I first came here in 1991, you NEVER saw any sort of dress like this. In fact, you never even saw black. This style of dress is a recent import from Saudi Arabia, and is only worn by a very few women (maybe one woman in 250). The women dressing like this are practicing the fundamentalist, Wahabi version of Isalm. (Wahabi Islam could be equated with the fire-and-brimstone sort of Christian fundamentalism.)

When this style of dress first began to appear in my Middle Eastern country, around 1999-2000, a lot of people were really shocked. Westerners were afraid. I have since found that some educated women of this country that I know personally look down on that form of Islam as misguided and wrong; while those who follow it, do everything they can to promote it.

Now people are less nervous about seeing this sort of dress. Which sort of dress a woman follows is mostly viewed as her personal choice, and is not imposed by the society. The exception to this is in poor neighborhoods, where according to my former maid, neighbors make snide and derogatory comments about women who choose to follow more modern forms of Islamic dress (as is the case in her own neighborhood).

I had a couple of opportunities over the years to talk to women who dressed like this, and in one case, the husband of a woman dressed like this. In one case, I saw a woman in the post office who came in with her husband, and was covered in black from head to toe. She was wearing black gloves, black socks, and a black face veil that only showed her eyes. I had to wait at the counter next to this woman’s husband for about ten minutes, and so finally got up my nerve to talk to him. He was an extreme fundamentalist type in a skullcap with a long beard. I asked him (as politely as I could) if his wife was dressed like that because he asked her to do so. He replied, making sure not even to look at my face (as a very correct fundamentalist man would do) that no, it was his wife’s choice to dress like this.

My other big chance to talk with a woman dressed like this happened in a doctor’s waiting room. I was the last patient, when in walked two young women (aged 20-22); one of whom was dressed conservatively, while the other was dressed in black from head to toe, again even with black gloves and face veils. After about fifteen minutes, I got up my nerve to ask if I could ask the lady in black a personal question. She said of course. I asked if she was married, and if she was dressed like that because her husband required it. She told me that she was happily married, and that it was she, herself , who chose to dress like that. Then she pulled up her face veil to talk (keeping it ready to lower again in case a man entered the room) and told me her story.

Her story was that a few years before she had just been a normally-dressing girl, going to the local French school, wearing shorts and sleeveless blouses, and even having a boyfriend. But when she eventually gave in and slept with the boyfriend, she found he no longer respected her or wanted to be with her. (And yes, I was very surprised that she would tell me all this!)

She fell into a massive depression that lasted more than two years. She had no psychological help during this time (and most likely could not tell her parents either about the boyfriend, or that she was no longer a virgin). She said the only thing that got her out of her depression was that finally one day, she picked up the Koran. She began reading. She read each day.

Little by little, due to reading the Koran, her depression began to lift. She decided to begin dressing Islamically. She began by wearing the typical, traditional street wear of our country, but she found that men were looking at her speculatively on the street. So next, she started to wear a headscarf, but found that men were still looking at her. Next, she went to a more conservative dress, and found that men were still looking at her! So she finally went to black from head-to-toe, including a black face veil, and FINALLY found that men were no longer looking at her. Since that time, she got married (very happily). She probably told me how she met her husband, but I no longer remember, as this conversation took place several years ago.

Later, I separately related this woman’s story to several other middle-aged women of my country, and asked them what they thought about it. They all said that in their opinions, that most women who were dressing like this had something traumatic in their backgrounds.

Now here are a couple of pictures of how typical (traditional or Islamically-minded) women are dressing these days:

Traditional Women's Street Wear, with Non-Traditional Hat (taken with telephoto lens)

Two mature women in traditional dress at a public event (taken with telephoto lens). Center woman is a foreign tourist, whereas the second local lady is in back right corner in a tan outfit. A third local lady is without a headscarf, in normal slacks, next to the lady in back right corner. Between and behind the foreign tourist lady, and the lady in lavender, look carefully and you'll see another lady wearing a white band under her black headscarf, and a long multi-colored tunic.

Two local women in a public park (taken with telephoto lens)

Preteen girl in a modern form of Islamic dress (taken with telephoto lens)

Quite a few women choose entirely modern Western dress. Many times they are dressing in a manner even shocking to Western standards–low-cut necklines displaying cleavage, miniskirts (some Islamically-minded girls wear mini-skirts on top of jeans, as in the picture below), extremely tight blouses, and extremely tight jeans or slacks.

Muslim girl wearing a miniskirt on top of jeans, with hijab scarf (all the women in this photo are common ways of dressing in this moderate Muslim country) (Taken with telephoto lens.)

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Eileen

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