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Can Hijab Be A Health Hazard?
Q-News International, No. 171 (July 1995)

Following the Letters page of The Independent over the last couple of weeks readers may have noticed that the dreaded hijab has become a bone of contention again. Not content, it seems, with the conventional explanation that the headscarf is a sign of feminine modesty and decency, opponents have trotted out a new gripe. Like cigarettes, they say, hijab is bad for your body and should carry a public health warning.

The new line of attack runs thus. Studies have shown that life-long hijab wearers are more susceptible to osteoporosis ("brittle bone disease"), a bone-weakening disease caused by Vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D is produced naturally in the skin on exposure to sunlight which, it is assumed, muhajibas don't get enough of because they are covered up most of the time. "Surely this proves that God did not intend us to be shrouded in black from head to toe?" concludes a convinced Julie Hynds from sun-baked Harrogate, North Yorkshire.

The assumptions behind the question are, at first appearance, equally unshakeable. A democratic society can concede the right of Muslim women to dress as they please, but the proper exercise of that right presumes that the choice be a free and informed one, not swayed by incorrect or misleading information. If evidence comes to light that covering up is damaging, then that must be made public. After all, good health for all is almost as sacrosanct as life itself. It is the duty of the experts to inform. Just as the doctor who knowingly fails to inform his patient of a cure, or prescribes him the wrong one, for his ailment is acting negligently, so too is the society whichwithholds valuable information from its members.

Mistress Hynds was actually being a little economical with the truth. She was referring to the conclusions of a recent investigation into the higher incidence of osteoporosis amongst Asian women. But before all you sisters out there start ripping off your headscarves and reworking your chadors into curtains, was there not just a hint of prejudice in Hynds' all too readily extended advice, and worse still, could it in fact have been malice dressed up as benevolence?

Needless to say, the letter from Mistress Hynds, who also, quite incredibly, believes she "can walk down any street in Britain in my normal loose top and trousers without attracting unwelcome attentions", did not go unanswered. Dr Abdul Majid Katme replied, "This is a common fallacy among the people of the West. It is a medical fact that diet is the main cause of Vitamin D deficiency among some Asians, and not lack of exposure to the sun. We Muslims who live in the East and Asia are exposed to the sun all the time and our houses, yards and private gardens are full of sunshine."

Ah! So we have two medical facts vying for primary cause. Not being a doctor in even the simplest sense of the word, I decided to do a little research.

Well, sort of. I asked a doctor friend who simplified the explanation like this. Vitamin D lines the wall of the stomach and 'grabs" calcium from within to feed the bones. The Asian diet is one which, he said, contains a lot of phytates (don't bother looking in the dictionary, it's not there). These substances mix with the calcium and actually prevent it from being drawn into the body by the Vitamin D.But the issue was far from settled. Enter Mr Malcolm Swinbank, from the little more sunny town of Surbiton. Striking a blow for the non-muhajibas he recounted meeting three different health workers from the Middle East, all of whom reported a high incidence of pelvic deformity among young women in their maternity units, the result they believed, of Vitamin D deficiency which they attributed to the covering of girls since adolescence. "It does not seem unreasonable that a sudden limiting of exposure to sunlight following a comparatively sun-filled childhood and unaccompanied by any dietary compensation could have serious effects."

Boy, Oh boy! Has the discussion come to a decisive contest between Islamic Law and modern medicine? Not quite. As one Haruza Baig was to say in a letter of the same edition, there is nothing in the Islamic tradition which requires women to be shrouded from head to toe in black, nor anything which restricts absorbing sunlight by scantily clad sunbathing to their hearts' content in the privacy of their own homes and gardens. And to that I added my own observation that, in an age where vitamin supplements are available as freely as candy, walking around in a chador need not be harmful.

There were other complications too, to the "hijab is bad for your health" diagnosis. For one, most Asian women, Muslim or otherwise, don't wear the hijab at all. Secondly, Britain isn't exactly that sunny a country that experiments about lack of exposure to sunlight should take place here. And, thirdly, even if we concede that some Muslim women might be starved of sunshine and Vitamin D, it cannot approach the physical damage that can be done by skin cancer - attributed to overexposure - of which there has been a phenomenal rise since the sun-tan came into vogue with Coco Chanel. In fact, overexposing, or more bluntly, nudity, is probably itself a cause of the reaction that is seeing more and more Muslim women taking to the chador. On reflection, pointing the finger at hijab seems to he somewhat mischievous, considering that there are a lot of hot countries out there where women have to cover up, or smear themselves with sun-block, to protect against searing sunlight. And what about the hole in the ozone layer?

Faisal Bodi. Wasalam.