Many Olivia travelers had the opportunity to travel to Egypt in the summer of 2000, and as a guest lecturer on that Mediterranean cruise I took plenty of questions about whether women had to or should wear headscarves as visitors to a Muslim country. Was obeying local etiquette the right thing to do? As lesbian feminists, weren’t we entitled to resist patriarchal traditions? Who started the whole deal about women’s hair being evil? Why do women, and not men, have to cover up?

These questions interest my students, too. What I can tell them is that the first recorded code of laws in the history of settled civilization—the Code of Hammurabi, named for the Babylonian king—had 282 laws, and 73 of them dealt with control of women. Those laws obsessively detailed the differences between “good” women and bad, with nasty punishments for disobedient gals. Adulterous women were put to death, and a woman accused of sexual misbehavior had to jump into the river to prove her virtue. But most significantly, the code of Hammurabi also declared that a harlot may not cover her hair.

 The laws are inscribed on an 8 foot stele

What do these words, set down in 1760 BC, tell us? Mainly, that “non-harlot,” or respectable Babylonian women, covered their heads. That custom has given us 3,767 years of head covering in Middle Eastern custom, with interesting variations in Judaism and Christianity, as well as Islam. References to good wives submitting to their husbands and wearing the veil are right there in the new testament (I Corinthians 11), and many a pre-Vatican II-era Catholic schoolgirl recalls having to grab some sort of head covering before going to church—often, a doily-like item called a “chapel veil.” So, it’s a mistake to attribute the headscarf debate to Islam alone—and don’t get me started on Orthodox Judaism, which dictates that married women shave their hair and don artificial wigs, so that only your husband sees the “beauty” of the real (though raggedly shorn) you.

In our era, though, head covering is a mega-loaded, divisive issue, since it sets up a very visual means of identifying and/or isolating traditional Muslim women and girls at a time of cultural conflict. It also makes Western women easily identifiable when we go about scarf less as travelers to Islamic lands. Do we then “deserve” the harassment some of us experience, stereotyped as loose American women? Should we have to cover up to avoid harassment? Who’s coercing whom?

All of these issues came to a head (no pun intended!) on the different occasions when I led women’s tour groups to the Pyramids—first with Semester At Sea college students in 1993, and later with Olivia. I compromised by wearing a rainbow scarf, mainly because I wanted to greet Egyptian women with sisterly respect. I had worn a scarf when visiting Morocco, and my reward was that the first two Moroccan women I met greeted me with “Welcome!” and kisses on both cheeks.