Yasmine al-Mehairy did not even really want to be there. She had been invited to a friend’s birthday party at an upmarket nightclub called 35, in the Four Seasons hotel. She was parked illegally but only planned to hand over a bouquet and spend ten minutes inside. But when the bouncer pointed at her headscarf as the reason she could not enter, Ms al-Mehairy decided to fight.

“I ended up arguing with the guy for longer than I would have stayed in the first place if he just let me in,” said the 29-year-old IT professional, who eventually gave up and called her friend to meet her at the door and accept her birthday flowers.

Egypt’s steady drift towards religion has been well documented. But now there are signs of a backlash. In trendy clubs and cafés across Cairo, the hair and neck-covering scarf known as the hijab is increasingly being shunned as unacceptable dress.

Several bars and restaurants where alcohol is served now essentially ban veiled women from entering. The policy is more open in some places than others but seems to apply to at least half a dozen Cairo venues.

“They always give you the ‘there’s going to be alcohol’ reason,” said a Western-raised veiled Arab woman who has lived in Cairo since 2006. “In Egypt it’s mostly that they don’t like the look of it. They want to maintain some sort of prestige,” the woman, who did not want her name to be published, told The Times.

Club and restaurant managers refused to comment on the record about the ban, but several questioned why a devout veiled woman would even want to attend venues that served alcohol. One manager of a Cairo club, however, said that the restrictions were less about protecting the veiled women from “sinful” environments than about shielding the club’s core clients from having to look at veiled women. “It causes a lot of discomfort and doesn’t create the atmosphere I need to make money,” the manager said. “I can either make my regulars comfortable or I make the other 1 per cent comfortable.”

Ms al-Mehairy, who adopted the veil when she was 19, acknowledged that she generally did not like going to bars or nightclubs. But if a group of friends plan to meet in a club or trendy restaurant, she now calls ahead to confirm its policy on the hijab. “I just don’t want to put myself in a position to be turned away at the door,” she said.

The establishment of the new de facto hijab-free zones highlights a curious resistance to Egypt’s tilt towards religion. A prominent segment of the population feels alarmed and besieged by the trend, and is willing to accept — and even embrace — the kind of steps that would prompt an immediate discrimination lawsuit and cries of “Islamophobia” if they were attempted in the US or Europe.

“Our relationship with religion has become so schizophrenic and love-hate,” said Ethar al-Katatney, a young veiled journalist and regular contributor to the Muslimah Media Watch website, which tracks global issues relating to Muslim women. “We’re actually more judgmental to muhajabat [veiled women] than they would be in the West.”

Ms al-Katatney, who began to wear the veil when she was 13, said that a male friend once told her that the last thing he wanted to see while having a beer was someone’s hijab. “He told me that he wishes restaurants had hijabi and non-hijabi sections the same way they have no-smoking sections.” Egypt’s complicated relationship with class could play just as big a role in the suspicion. “I’m sure there’s an element of class dynamics,” one regular nightclub patron said. “It’s a remnant of the old days when the hijab was considered low class.”

Egypt’s westernised classes traditionally regarded such overt piety as the province of the lower and middle classes. “We want to be like the West and the hijab is regarded as a throwback,” Ms al-Katatney said. “The people who go to these places are a certain segment of society. In this segment the hijab is considered tacky.”

Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article7043445.ece