Wearing the Veil in Greece: How Greeks Are Reacting to the Influx of Refugees

Talking about the hijab in the post-Paris-attacks-Europe strikes a lot of chords. Anything iconically related to the coordinated terrorist atrocities of 10 gunmen and the death of 129 people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time feeds the ISIS-penetration-in-Europe scare. Greece, a country lately more famed for its seven years in deep recession than its historic past, has allegedly served as the entry point for one of the arch-slaughterers of the Paris bloodshed. With an unprecedented influx of refugees and migrants from Africa and the East, one person in twenty is an undocumented migrant in Greece. Amidst skepticism about national sovereignty, the rhetoric of Golden Dawn, a far-right Greek political party, which in 1996 received just 0.07 percent of the vote in national parliamentary elections and in 2015 skyrocketed to 7.0, is gaining hefty traction. “Illegal alien-invaders amount to an irregular foreign army, one bent on attacking the country’s social fabric and corrupting its national identity,” is one of Golden Dawn’s popular mottos. It’s well in accord with the mottos of other European far-right parties, alarmingly on the rise as well. Making Muslim adherents, nearly 25 per cent of the world population, the punching bag for the crimes of ISIS is a preposterous suggestion. Yet, as 2000 refugees are flooding Greek islands every day and worldwide media are shouting that complete mayhem will break out in Europe, xenophobia is picking up. And in Greece as in elsewhere, the most visible sign of Muslim difference is the veil.

“I wear it because I want it. There are other Muslim women who don’t wear the hijab,” tells me a convivial Pakistani woman, pushing a stroller with two wide-eyed toddlers gaping at the high-school students dashing by on an overcast Athenian Friday noon. She goes on to say that the crimes of a “few crazy people” cannot vilify the whole Muslim population that respects Jesus, worships peace and believes in a religion preaching love. The woman is Rabia Hayad, a 37-year-old native of Pakistan, mother of three and migrant into Greece with her husband, Mohammed, who works as a cook. She speaks Greek and English fairly well, and is confident about the future prospects of Pakistan and likes Europe.

Another member of the Muslim minority in the same country is Yasmin S., a 21-year-old Turkish-Greek student of Law. She confesses that the veil allows her to move freely outside the confines of her home and redefines her identity, enabling her to attend classes, discussion groups and seminars at the Democritus University of Thrace, where she studies.

“I don’t like feeling sexually fetished. Many of my fellow students often engage in superficial comparisons with each other, but I choose to spend my time more productively,” says the aspiring maritime lawyer, fixing her hijab and tucking her what-seems-like-long-brown-hair behind her ears.

Mona Eltahawy, Egyptian-American journalist and commentator, with a massive body of work on the Islamic world in her publishing palmare, wore the hijab for nine years. “For years, despite my inner doubts, I represented to others my choice to veil as a feminist one. If a woman could choose to wear a miniskirt, surely I could choose to cover my hair?” she says to New York Times. Eventually, she understood that this line of thinking was objectification in reverse and after eight years of struggling with leaving or taking the hijab off, she chose the second.

Dimitris Samir, a 54-year-olf Syrian political refugee in Greece, feels flabbergasted every time he comes across women carrying along such a custom to Europe. “You are given a chance to live in a democratic continent and you bring remnants of religious darkness with you, why don’t you respect your host-country?” says Samir, getting his dander up, a bitterness that tends to overwhelm his good nature.

Samir’s reported sufferings under the regime of former Syrian President Hafez-al-Assad—electrocution and nail-pulling—back in 1979, in Damascus, where he also studied Law, made him “fiercely opposed to all types of Alawites, Sunnis, Ismailis and Christians” (though he was born into a Christian family himself). Despite the unappealing current economic climate in Southern Europe, Samir, who is also an actor in Greece, expresses gratitude for the chance to flee the Middle East and its “oppression of human rights”. And what does the hijab denote? “Look at me, I’m different!” says Samir.

His views are shared by countries like France and Belgium, which have long banned the veil, as well as towns of Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Russia while in the wake of the Paris attacks and the Sharia scare other cities are rapidly  following suit.

Interpretations of the hijab in the Qur’an are quite a headache. There are five mentions of it in the Islamic Scripture and three more mentions to garbs of similar functions. Take this for example: “And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their khimaar over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to […] (Qur’an 24:31). Not exactly enfranchizing for women. Yet, Islam scholars point out that the correct interpretation of verses got lost in historical translation. In some historians’ view, Mohamed wished to distinguish his followers from the nonbelievers and, as, at the time women wore the khimaar over their heads (but would wear it tied behind so their neck and upper chest were visible), the veil actually served as a means of differentiating Muslim women from the non-Muslim ones, the vast majority back then.

If the historical roots of the hijab had better be left to theologians to return a verdict on, there is little doubt that the overall position of women in Sharian societies is contemptible to the mind of the average European. Where Europe saw suffragettes taking to the streets in the late 19th century and a move towards equality between the sexes from the 1960s, in 2016 women in most Islamic countries lag far behind their Western counterparts. Still, the compassion for human beings unlucky enough to have been conditioned into integrating repression pales in comparison to the dynamics of the Islamic State scare (mongering), and the allegedly insidious ways of its members to infiltrate Europe as asylum seekers.

With the Mediterranean transformed into a liquid grave for more than 3700 people, refugees from war-torn countries and migrants from poverty-stricken areas are passing daily through its treacherous waters in pursuit of a better life. Refugee registration systems officials in main entry points are being inundated with asylum petitions, sifting through claims of nationalities that will grant the so-coveted green light to Europe. One such nationality is the Syrian one. A Syrian passport comes at a price; it can be bought at $250. That’s what probably one of the Paris bombers did to gain footing in Paris. Europeans are coming to grips with the fact that “those people living backwards somewhere far enough” don’t evaporate from the conscience at the flip of a channel.

Whether we are going through times of a swift, unexpected demographic change in Europe will be recorded by history. In the meantime, Yasmin’s and Rabia’s hijabs might be overwhelming sights in the eyes of Greeks who, up until recently, composed a homogeneous society with tight religious and cultural ties—unlike Canadians or Australians, citizens of multicultural-mosaics-settler-nations. And how will Europe altogether address the plight of a stylistic symbol which provokes such mixed reactions now that the hijab is popping up in its streets more often?