In case you didn’t know, before ’67, women in Cairo, Beirut, Kabul, and Tehran mostly wore Western style clothes. Veiling was rare.

After the Arab defeat to Israel in 1967, Arab leaders and religious thinkers were desperate to explain the humiliation. Instead of blaming it on bad politics or weaker armies, some religious leaders claimed it was because women had abandoned the hijab.

This idea spread: that the community’s downfall was linked to women showing their hair, dressing Western, and straying from “true Islam.” By the 70s and 80s, veiling made a dramatic comeback across the middle east (Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, Kuwait, etc). What had been a rare practice under Nasser’s secular Arab nationalism suddenly became a widespread political and religious symbol.

So the modern revival of the hijab wasn’t just about modesty. It was fueled by leaders turning a military defeat into a moral crisis and instead putting the blame on women’s heads, literally.

It goes without saying… how did that work out for us today?