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there had been a recent setback when two of the mosque’s leading lights were put on trial for treason.
    The South African kept glancing uncomfortably at her Islamic sister from Guinea. This tall, stately woman would have stood out in any crowd, but in this one she was particularly eye-catching. Instead of shapeless black, she wore a length of lilac fabric wrapped closely around her sinuous curves. An end of the fabric draped loosely over her head, leaving most of one smooth coppery shoulder bare. Naked toes peeped from under the hem of her lovely robe. Over the next few days I would notice one or another of the Islamic sisters standing on tippy-toe, trying to tug the robe up over that shoulder or to wrap the end piece more closely around her hair. Guineans and Iranians clearly had a different definition of hijab.
    The word “hijab” literally means “curtain,” and it is used in the Koran as an instruction to believers of Muhammad’s day on how they should deal with the prophet’s wives: “If you ask his wives for anything, speak to them from behind a curtain. This is purer for your hearts and their hearts.” The revelation on hijab came to Muhammad on one of his wedding nights, just as he was about to bed Zeinab, the most controversial of his brides.
    Islamic scholars generally agree that the marriage to Zeinab caused the most serious of several scandals surrounding the prophet’s ever growing number of wives. Visiting the house of his adopted son, Muhammad had glimpsed the young man’s wife only partially dressed. The woman was beautiful, and Muhammad quickly turned away, muttering a prayer against temptation. Believing Muhammad desired his wife, the young man divorced her. Muhammad’s subsequent marriage to Zeinab provoked uproar in the community, since it violated the rules of incest already set down in the Koran. The uproar subsided only when Muhammad had a new revelation proclaiming all adoptions invalid, and therefore exempting himself from the rule that barred a father from marrying the wife of his son.
    The revelation of hijab put the prophet’s wives, includingZeinab, into seclusion where they would be safer from scandal. The Koran’s instructions for women outside the prophet’s household weren’t as severe: ‘Tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest, and to display of their adornment only that which is apparent, and to draw their veils over their bosoms.”
    In Cairo, when Sahar began wearing hijab, I dug out this quote and argued with her that it made no reference at all to covering hair. What it seemed to me to be asking was that women conform to conservative norms of dress—in our day, to shun see-through blouses and skimpy miniskirts. But Sahar replied that it was necessary to go beyond the Koran for guidance on such matters. She said that the sunnah, the “trodden path” of Muhammad—those things which he had said, done or permitted to be done in his presence—made it clear that “that which is apparent” meant only a woman’s face and hands. The rest of her “adornment”—including ankles, wrists, neck—should be hidden from all men except her husband and a carefully specified list of close male relatives to whom the Koran forbids marriage. That is, her father, brothers, father-in-law, nephews, sons and stepsons. She can also be unveiled, the Koran says, before prepubescent boys and “male attendants who lack vigor,” which in Muhammad’s era probably meant eunuchs or old slaves.
    But Sahar’s interpretation wasn’t universal. Some Muslim women believed, as I did, that the religion only required them to dress within contemporary limits of modesty. Others insisted on going beyond a covered head to gloved hands and veiled faces, arguing that the corruption of the modern world made more extreme measures necessary now than in the prophet’s day.
    At Cairo airport, the great crossroads of the Islamic world, it was possible to see almost every interpretation of