On her 26th birthday, Sarah (pseudonym), a village girl, left her rented house in Cairo in a state of psychological turmoil and with her heart racing. Upon reaching a cafe in Tahrir Square in the center of the Egyptian capital, she took off her hijab and felt free for the first time in her life.

For four years, Sarah had been wondering what her fate would be if she removed her hijab. When she finally did, she was not spared psychological violence from her relatives and neighbors in the Sharqia governorate in northern Egypt — her cousin even claimed that she was in an illegal relationship with a young man her age in Cairo, advising her mother to throw her out into the streets. 

Sarah told Al-Monitor that this made her spiral into a mental breakdown from which she is still trying to recover.

Sarah’s experience cannot be separated from the experience of many Egyptian women over the past years. With the outbreak of the Egyptian revolution on Jan. 25, 2011, Egyptian society witnessed a “clear drop in the number of women wearing veils in the street,” according to 2020 research conducted by the Khotwa Center for Documentation and Studies.