Dhuha Tawil

Excerpts from We The Interwoven

Dhuha Tawil was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to parents who were born in Jerusalem, Palestine. She is a small-business owner in Johnson County in property management. Her work with BIWF will explore her journey with the hijab in eastern Iowa. Her goal is for her experience to help people better understand the life of a Muslim woman and to show the human element behind the stereotypes.

“As the sexual revolution ascended in the West in the 1970s, a religious revolution began in the Middle East. When the oil industry developed in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, Saudi power grew tremendously, and their extreme patriarchal culture that stemmed from Wahhabism started to spread in all countries where Muslims lived. Fundamentalist male clerics who called themselves Islamic scholars started issuing fatwas on physical Islamic appearances, leading to a religious fracture with moderate Muslims.

As a child of parents who went through this religious revolution, I felt as if I had to wear the hijab to mark my identity as a Muslim. But with my new understanding of political jargon and geographic lines, I started to question rules such as why women were required to have a mahram while traveling and why women had to cover themselves from head to toe while men did not.

I wanted to see my religion without the cultural and traditional footnotes that I inherited in my upbringing, so I began attending an Islamic school in Chicago on the weekend where I could learn from world-renowned scholars. I was desperate to learn about the religion that I had represented my entire life. Little did I know, these courses would change my life forever.”