The Secret Intimate Benefits of Hijab

I once recall telling a non-Muslim woman that Muslim men (who are married and their wife’s wear hijab) appreciate the full beauty of their wives more than men whose wives do not cover because the Muslim men see the hijab as obedience to Allah (which is beautiful in its own right) and a sign of the women sharing their beauty only with them. I was able to convince this woman with strong feminist beliefs that the hijab was more than what meets the eyes – it was a way of furthering the love and intimacy between a husband and a wife.

That conversation was over a year ago, but I think non-Muslim women are starting to realize that as point. I recently read this comment by New York Magazine’s Naomi Wolf:

I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.”

When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

Compare that steaminess with a conversation I had at Northwestern, after I had talked about the effect of porn on relationships. “Why have sex right away?” a boy with tousled hair and Bambi eyes was explaining. “Things are always a little tense and uncomfortable when you just start seeing someone,” he said. “I prefer to have sex right away just to get it over with. You know it’s going to happen anyway, and it gets rid of the tension.”

“Isn’t the tension kind of fun?” I asked. “Doesn’t that also get rid of the mystery?”

“Mystery?” He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”

I think that the new generation of teenagers and twenty something year olds are all missing out on this secret aspect of intimacy between lovers. Although Naomi Wolf’s friend is a Orthodox Jewish woman who covers and shares her secret love with her husband, we can not readily find many Muslim sisters in the States who cover for the sake of Allah and the added benefit of appreciation from their husbands that their covering is a protection of the intimacy they share. Its sad that this person Wolf interviewed had lost notions of sex being perhaps mysterious.