A black and white video from half a century ago of former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser has resurfaced recently on YouTube. In it Nasser speaks from a podium to a large crowd, telling them about a meeting he had with the leader of the country’s Muslim Brotherhood movement in 1953. At this meeting Nasser was asked to make the headscarf mandatory for women to wear — such a preposterous thought at the time that Nasser’s audience breaks out in chuckles. “‘If you are unable to make one woman, who is your daughter, wear the hijab, how do you want me to put the hijab on 10 million women myself?’” Nasser retells the conversation into the microphone, and the audience thunders with applause. This sort of socially progressive thought seems to have gone into full-scale retreat in the decades since, not just in Egypt, but around the Middle East and
