HUTCHEON: Dalia and Sherif’s wedding is a typically Egyptian celebration, a hybrid of East and West – Arabic food and music on a terrace overlooking a mini-golf course. While the bride isn’t veiled, many of her friends wear the Islamic headscarf, even if it’s used as a fashion accessory. A few decades ago it was virtually unheard of to see wealthy Egyptian society awash with veils.

It wasn’t always so.

[MOVIE]: This was Cairo in the early Twenties.

[NARRATION FROM MOVIE]: Cairo had been likened to a fashionable piece of furniture placed upon an eastern run.

HUTCHEON: Veiled women were veiled as backward and unsophisticated.

[NARRATION FROM MOVIE]: Here’s another overloaded taxi.

HUTCHEON: Egypt experienced its own women’s liberation movement early last century when the nation struggled to throw off Britain Colonial rule. Part of that independence movement was about throwing off the veil so that by the sixties and seventies, a veiled woman was virtually a thing of the past.

Even by the fifties, it was hard to find a veiled middle-class woman and despite being an Islamic nation, in 1954 it was liberal enough that an Egyptian beauty took out the Miss World title.

Now, another former beauty queen is contributing to a very different set of numbers. Thousands of middle class educated Egyptian woman who are putting the veil back on.

Nerine Salem began wearing the hejab three years ago after watching a television programme about what it means to be a good Muslim.

And it said something to you?

NERINE: A lot. It changed my life and I discovered you know bit by bit that I had a lot of faults in me and I needed to change all that so I started working on it and one of these things was the veil.

HUTCHEON: What made her new feelings all the more unusual was Nerine’s background. A former Miss Egypt 1989 she was also one of just a handful of the country’s female pilots.

How were you treated then?

NERINE: Oh like a queen! Yeah I was all over sudden very famous. I was on the TV shows and on the magazines and I mean people knew me wherever I went and yeah it was a lot of fame back then.

HUTCHEON: But when she turned up for work in a veil it was a different story.

NERINE: I was asked to take my veil off if I wanted to fly and from my point of view I have gone through the law, I have gone through the internal regulation of the company and I didn’t break any laws. I was fired because I wouldn’t take the veil off.

HUTCHEON: The private airline she flew for has since closed down but Nerine is fighting for compensation through the courts.

NERINE: All my life I wanted to be a pilot ever since I was a child. I mean it’s something that I was struggling for all my life and when it happened and it came true, three years later I just lost it because I’m covering my hair it’s, but, but I believe, I believe in this. I truly believe in it so I really don’t care about the results.

HUTCHEON: Nerine’s experience is far from unique. In the coastal city of Alexandria, Amany Sayed is on her way to meet her high profile client. Amany Sayed is a lawyer and devout Muslim who began wearing the hejab or headscarf seven years ago but when her client, a television presenter did the same thing in August last year, she was taken off the air.

AMANY SAYED: Egypt is an Islamic country. It is written in the Constitution that it’s an Islamic country. Islam is the religion and Arabic is the language. So I follow according to the Islamic religion and wear the hejab. Why stop me? It’s against the law, against human rights – insane.

HUTCHEON: The presenter, Grade Tawil, is only allowed to do voiceovers now and the government banned her from talking to us. More than a dozen female personalities are fighting for their on-air jobs. Some are no longer allowed to show their faces, only their hands.

Amany Sayed is suing the government and Egyptian television. She says her client was unreasonably dismissed.

Do you think the day will come soon when Egyptian women can wear the veil on television?

AMANY SAYED: I don’t think so.

HUTCHEON: Since coming to power more than twenty years ago, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak has ruled with an iron hand, maintaining a state of emergency and cracking down on religious radicals and political opponents.

What has happened here over the last few decades?

HASHEM KASSEM [FMR PUBLISHER, CAIRO TIMES]: Continuous political repression from bad to worse you see? Continuous destruction of all political institutions where it became, where we got to the point where politics as it should have developed in Egypt never really happened you see and the only way to make a political statement and the only existing discourse became political Islam.

HUTCHEON: Now the government’s goal is to keep the lid on rising Islamisation but critics say that’s simply creating more frustration.

HASHEM KASSEM: When you begin to get you know stagnation in a society and the lack of a development and a morale vacuum is created, you begin to resort to the past. It’s the only thing you have.

HUTCHEON: And wearing the veil is returning to the past?

HASHEM KASSEM: Yes, certainly, yes.

HUTCHEON: Religion is a sensitive issue in Cairo. Friday prayers at one of the city’s key mosques and despite our filming permit, the police wouldn’t allow us to interview people.

Nearby hundreds of riot troops were on hand to prevent possible demonstrations. The Mubarak government wants to control the political forces behind Egypt’s hardline religious groups, fearful of their rising popularity.

HASHEM KASSEM: There’s growing frustration and more and more resorting to, to religiosity. The only way to reverse this process is political liberalisation.

HUTCHEON: Anan Helal is an environmental engineer on her way to a conference. She’s a devout Muslim and was brought up at a time where women were encouraged to be independent and seek a good education.

ANAN HELAL: Whenever I go even to a conference I look around and I find that nowadays few of us are not wearing these so now we are going back, backwards. It’s really amazing. It’s really amazing.

HUTCHEON: Anan Helal has been on the Muslim pilgrimage known as the “Hajj”. Many women begin to wear a veil after making the journey but Ms Helal sought the Koran and religious experts to reach her conclusion.

Do you feel comfortable with your decision not to wear a veil?

ANAN HELAL: Oh yeah. If not I would have wear it.

HUTCHEON: Anan Helal says many women simply take up the headscarf because it’s the fashion, not necessarily because they’re sincere in their religious beliefs but for many women, it goes much further than a political statement or a look. For Nerine Salem it was a spiritual revival that was worth the pain.

NERINE SALEM: What I am after is to make what’s right right and I don’t care about the results. I really don’t care because what I have to do I’m doing and I feel inside my heart that I’m very strong.

HUTCHEON: In a world where views have become sharply polarised, to the west the veil represents a conservative throwback but for many Egyptian women, it stands for an awakening and the more the government tries to stifle freedom of expression, the more determined the women become.