Why EU’s Hijab Campaign Promotes Islamism
By Arshad Alam, New Age Islam
8 November 2021
Rather
Than Mounting A Critique, The Campaign Ends Up Celebrating The Veil As The
Choice Of All Muslim Women
Main
Points:
1. Recently the Council of
Europe put up a diversity campaign which showed Muslim women in hijab.
2. The advert has now been
pulled down but it shows that the EU’s thinking about Islam and Muslim women is
deeply problematic.
3. Rather than critique the
hijab as an imposition of Islamist politics across Muslim societies, the advert
promotes the view that only hijabi women are the true representatives of Islam.
4. This attitude hurts the
prospects of scores of Muslim women who are struggling to remove such impositions
on the bodies.
-----
Hijab or not — no one is smiling about the Council of
Europe's ill-fated online campaign
------
The Council of Europe is the European
Union’s most important arm to defend human rights and uphold the rule of law.
Faced with increasing Muslim migration into Europe, the Council seeks to
showcase the principle of diversity; allowing it to represent the continent as
a multicultural and multireligious space. Recently, it made an advertisement
campaign where the subtext was the appreciation of diversity and pluralism.
However, in trying to do so, it ended up showing hijab in a positive light and
at places even endorsing it. One of its campaigns had the slogan, ‘Beauty is in
diversity as freedom is in Hijab.’ The campaign was subsequently withdrawn
after a huge outcry from secularists, right wing nationalists as well as
sections of Muslims. For very different reasons, these groups argued that the
Council of Europe’s campaign ended up legitimizing the veil which has been
forced on multitudes of Muslim women without their choice.
Although the campaign has been withdrawn,
the episode underscores how the European Union thinks about diversity,
inclusivity and the place of Islam within a new Europe. Conflating the hijab
with all Muslim women and portraying it as a symbol of diversity is deeply
problematic on a number of levels. For one, the campaign needed to be clear
about whether they wanted the inclusion of Muslims who are internally very
diverse or of Islam which is a set of prescriptions, the interpretation of
which, is again, varied. In privileging the hijab, the Council of Europe seems
to be buying into a very strict and regressive interpretation of Islam which
prescribes the veil as a mandatory piece of dressing for Muslim girls. One fails
to understand why the European Union thinks that this is the only Islam
possible: an Islam which derives its power from outmoded centuries old
traditions and deeply sexist imagination of Muslim woman.
Council Of Europe
Image caption, The posters were
released as part of a campaign opposing discrimination and celebrating
diversity
-----
Muslim women themselves have critiqued
their deprivileged position within the Islamic scriptures and have rejected
such impositions as products of patriarchy. Why is it that the European Union
is loathe to go with such a modernist interpretation? Is it that the Union
believes in some sort of a true Islam and locates it within the discourse of
the traditionalist Ulama rather than progressive currents within Islam?
Moreover, across the Muslim world, it is not that all Muslim women draw the
veil; the practice varies across cultures. But it is also true that most Muslim
cultures are now trying to impose a stricter and narrower definition of their
religion and women are the first victims of this new found zeal. In the once
moderate Indonesia, for example, women are now regularly flogged for being lax
in Islamic behaviour, which includes appearing without veil in the public.
The veil is nearly compulsory in half the
Muslim world. Extremist regimes like Iran, Saudi and Taliban have enforced it
with all the requirements of law. In the other half of the Muslim world, the
veil might not be legally compulsory but there is huge societal pressure on
girls and women to cover themselves up. If women in these societies do not pay
attention to this societal norm, then they might face ostracism, ridicule or
even downright assault in some cases. Muslim Parents are seen in such societies
to teach their young daughters, some still children, to take the veil as a mark
of respect for their religion. The reality is that Muslim parents fear their
own children: they think that they might leave this practice when they grow up.
Hence the best strategy is to catch them young and indoctrinate their minds so
that strict religiosity becomes their second nature. And as we all know too
well; it is the girls who become the focus of such regressive experiment.
Despite such regimes, political and social,
which constrains Muslim women’s mobility and freedom, and imposes external
strictures on them in the form of the burqa and the veil, women throughout the
Muslim world have been struggling against such an imposition on their bodies.
In Iran, there are weekly protests against the imposition of the veil and
Muslim feminists in multiple societies are trying to educate men and women
about the importance of freedom and movement which should be available to both
genders.
In trying to make the veil synonymous with
Muslim womanhood, the European Union is basically debasing its own commitment
to gender rights by invisibilizing the struggles of Muslim feminists. After
all, through its campaigns it is asking the wider European society to accept
the veil, despite the fact that it is a symbol of visible oppression for scores
of Muslim women, particularly those living in Islamist regimes.
A woman wearing a hijab, an islamic veil, walks in a
street in Nanterre, outside Paris | Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images
------
The veil is part of a seventh century value system which should have no place today, except perhaps in the imagination of people like Imran Khan who want to bring back the ‘glorious’ days of the past. European feminists need to understand that by celebrating the hijab and endorsing events like the World Hijab Day, they are not helping Muslim women or even countering Islamophobia. They are in fact enabling a particular reading of Islam, one that is regressive, paternalistic and misogynist.
European men and women have gained their
freedoms by struggling against the church mandated religion; why is it so hard
for them to extend the same courtesy to Muslims who are doing the same?
----
A regular columnist for NewAgeIslam.com, Arshad Alam
is a writer and researcher on Islam and Muslims in South Asia.
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islam-west/eu-hijab-campaign-islamism/d/125732
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism