Indian Muslims Should Adopt A Realistic Approach To Hijab Issue
Islam Does
Not Mandate Face Veil
Main
Points
1. Growing
trend of wearing Hijab is s recent phenomenon.
2. In some
Muslim families in India, Hijab is forced on even three year olds.
3. Arab
identity is not Islamic identity.
-----
New
Age Islam Correspondent
26 February
2022
Meriem
Helie, a sociologist and women's rights activist based in Algeria has been
closely watching the Hijab controversy which started in Karnataka recently. She
belongs to a country where the Muslims form 100 per cent of the population but
she does not have a majoritarian outlook on the issue.
She says
that in her country there is no threat to the identity of Muslims and the
Muslim women in Algeria and African countries freely wore colourful ethnic and
traditional dresses. But gradually Islamists in the country fostered the Arab
identity as true Muslim identity and imposed long body covering dresses as
Islamic dress. She has seen a similar trend of veil or Hijab growing in India
where Muslims are in the minority.
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Also
Read: Hijab Row Is Now Taking
A Toll On Muslim Girls' Education
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Ms Helie
has seen India very closely and so is of the opinion that this growing trend of
wearing head scarf or Hijab among women, particularly among girls is a recent
phenomenon. She saw a small girl of three years in Hijab in India in 2004 and
prior to that she saw a three year old girl in Hijab with her mother who was in
Burqa in New York. It can be noted that the Taliban had captured power in 1996
and had imposed full covering Burqa in Afghanistan.
Therefore,
it seems that Taliban had a great impact on Muslim psyche across the world so
far as veil is concerned. Ms Helie suggests to the secularists and Muslim
intellectuals should not fall prey of the Arab or Middle eastern identity.
----
The
Hijab Controversy: Open Letter To Our Secular Muslim Friends In India
By
Meriem Helie Lucas
18 Feb 2022
Friends,
I am following
closely the events in Karnataka university/colleges and the controversy about
female students wearing various head covering in class – whether hijab, burqa,
etc... Let me first tell you that I realize everyday how lucky I am to be a
citizen of a virtually 100% “Muslim” country (Algeria): we were spared
attempting to analyse the hijab/burqa conflict (and other similar conflicts)
through the majority/minority lens and Hindu perpetrators/ Muslim victims
dichotomy. In our case, there was no ‘other’ religious majority oppressing us.
Not that I have any doubt about the ugly reality of massacres led by a rising
communal Hindu extreme-right majority attacking minorities, including Muslims
in India.
This
unfortunately has been a blatant fact for decades and recent developments under
Modi government only confirm the trend. But the problem you presently face with
the hijab controversy cannot be limited to it, nor should it be blurred by it.
In countries with heavily Muslim majorities, whether in North Africa, in the
Sahel, in the Middle East, in the Indian subcontinent as a whole or now even
spreading at the moment to Southern Africa and other places, we can witness the
very same situation of rising political Islam and the promotion of its most
blatant flag: the women covering (in increasing order, from hair/head covering
to face covering: scarf, hijab, burqa). In other words: “the veil”. (I will
avoid, for the moment, the issue of our diasporas in the West, in order not to
go into more political complexities). It is striking that in most places I
know, there appear to be a continuum from the mildest covering towards the
fuller one.
In other
words, the head scarf prepares the ground for the hijab, which prepares the
ground for the burqa. Interestingly, in most places, none of these outfits were
indigenous, rather they have been recently imported from specific places in the
Middle East. For decades and sometimes centuries, on different continents,
people have lived as Muslims without feeling the need to dress as if they were
middle -easterners. Let me just for one minute ponder upon the origin of the
head, body and face covering and how it came to represent Muslims worldwide – I
am intentionally not limiting its representativity to female Muslims but to the
entire community whose identity women bear the burden of carrying; nor am I
linking it to Islam itself, for this feminine outfit is highly contested by
progressive Muslim scholars as being part of religious requirements. I kept
coming regularly to India for long stretches of time for the past more than 40
years. I am an eye witness to the fact that burqa is a very recent acquisition
to Indian female “Muslim” fashion. In your country - like in mine – women for
centuries were wearing traditional outfits other than burqa which was unheard
of till a few decades ago. In most places I know, there appear to be a
continuum from the mildest covering towards the fuller one. In other words, the
head scarf prepares the ground for the hijab, which prepares the ground for the
burqa.
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Also Read: On The Hijab Controversy
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I remember
flipping with a friend through her before Partition family photo-albums: her
grand-mothers, grand-aunts, cousins were all wearing Saris despite being devout
Muslims. Women my age and younger were mostly wearing alternatively Saris (for
social occasions) and Shalwar-Kurta (for everyday convenience). During our
conversation, it became clear that pressure has been mounting on Muslim women
throughout the subcontinent – i. e. whether they belonged to the majority
community (as in Pakistan and Bangladesh) or the minority one (as in India and
Sri Lanka) - to abandon Saris to the benefit of Shalwar-Kurta in a first step,
in order to visibly separate religious communities; and then more recently to
done the totally alien Middle Eastern Burqa. This trend is equally true in
India, in Pakistan and in Bangladesh.
In Algeria,
peasant women were wearing colorful dresses with an equally colorful headwear
which was perched high on top of their beautiful hair with no purpose of
concealing it; and definitely no veil – a far cry from what is now imposed in
the name of “Muslim” identity. Meanwhile, urban women did have different forms
of veil depending on the geographical area: thin, flowery and transparent, worn
openly hanging from the head in the South; black and full body-concealing in
the area of Constantine/Ksentina; white, upper body covering but hardly leg
covering, with a lace mouth-covering in the region of Algiers; etc… It is only
in the early 70ies, i.e. nearly a decade after independence, that was first introduced
in Algeria an “Islamic” outfit consisting at the time of a feet-long beige or
grey coat worn with a matching scarf covering hair, head and shoulders, tied
under the chin.
This outfit
was distributed for free to university students by our first openly Islamist
groups; they called it at the time: ‘the student’s dress”. Decades later, it is
the black burqa – Iran and Saudi style – which they distribute for free in
Algeria. I remember the first time I saw a tiny little girl who could not have
been older than 3 wearing an Islamist outfit in India; it was during the World
Social Forum in Bombay (2004) and she was playing with other little girls whose
outfits were not identity-laden, at the entrance of the building in a Muslim
area where I stayed. I remember the first time I saw a tiny even tinier little
girl in a pushchair wearing a hijab; it was in New York, close to a
conservative mosque; the woman who was pushing her, presumably her mother, was
burqa clad. That was in year 2000.
I witnessed
in the past two decades, the spreading of the black Saudi-style burqa
throughout predominantly Muslim areas in Africa and South East Asia, with the
progressive disappearance of what used to be women’s local traditional dresses.
To my utter surprise, it seems no one from our cultural rights advocates has
taken the task to defend our various cultures by attempting to preserve saris,
boubous, sarongs, etc… as valuable elements of cultural diversity - including
Muslim cultural diversity.
With Islam spreading on all continents, it
seems without doubt that there must be a cultural diversity to acknowledge and
defend? No one seems worried about the enforced homogenization of a
transcultural Islamist (not Islamic) identity which carries so much of a
reactionary political program. In India itself, it seems progressives have been
stuck within the fascist Hinduist political program of eradication of
minorities and the defense of these oppressed minorities to the point that even
suggesting that another reactionary religious political program is also at work
within the endangered minority has, so far, not been audible. I have been
blasted in New Delhi intellectual progressive circles for decades for doing
just that: trying to draw your attention, friends, to the trend I could see easily
in your country, for having lived the same process in my virtually 100% Muslim
country. I have witnessed the first burqas appearing in the streets of my
beloved Nizamuddin “village” in Delhi, and then their multiplication … My
saying so was repeatedly branded as “Islamophobic”. It was just an attempt to
share my Algerian experience (and beyond) and to alert you on the rise of what
such experiences allowed me to see rising in your country … Now the question
remains: how to defend the endangered Muslim minority against the new Hinduist
extreme right without giving-in to the Muslim extreme-right which active
political presence within the Muslim community you, friends, have refused for
so long to acknowledge? In India itself, it seems progressives have been stuck
within the fascist Hinduist political program of eradication of minorities and
the defense of these oppressed minorities to the point that even suggesting
that another reactionary religious political program is also at work within the
endangered minority has, so far, not been audible.
I do think
we have to take a long view and while, of course, protecting and defending the
basic human rights and freedoms of the individuals – for instance the hijab or
burqa clad women students‘ right to education in Karnataka - , one should also
firmly refuse to promote women covering either as a religious right (contested
unanimously, may I remind you, by all progressive scholars of Islam on
different continents, who paid with their lives their political courage and religious
integrity), nor as an individual choice. Wearing a hijab or a burqa today
cannot be seen as an individual choice when we witness the world over how women
are induced or coerced into wearing it, and more often than not at the cost of
their lives – as was the case in Algeria in the 90ies, more recently in Mali,
in Daesh-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq, in neighbouring Afghanistan under
the Taliban (then and now), and for past long decades in Iran, just to take a
few examples. (I do not imply by saying this that burqa clad women in India are
aware of the role they are made to play on the global arena. But we must be.)
In all the above-mentioned cases, it must be noted that it is men of their own
Muslim community – in fact belonging to an extreme right political force which
hides under a Muslim identity – who are pursuing this policy and have become
the perpetrators of violations against women’s human rights. For it must be
noted that women are in most cases made to wear a covering – something we Algerians
have come to identify as the political flag of an Islamist far-right - in the
name of the defence of an oppressed identity.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Also Read: The Many Meanings of
Hijab
---------------------------------------------------------------
But how
come this Muslim identity is seen as threatened regardless of whether Muslims
are in a majority or a minority or represent 100% of the population? Whether
“Muslims” are heads of government? And even when laws are said to be derived
from Islamic faith interpretations? How come Islam is seen as in danger the
world over and Islamists are seen as its only legitimate representatives? To
me, this clearly points at the fact that the defense of the Muslim minority in
India must be linked to the fight for secularism: secular laws i.e. common laws
for all, and therefore equal rights, for all citizens of India. A landmark
legal end to communalism. The replacement of a community identity by a
citizen’s identity. Again, your situation in India makes me realize everyday
how lucky I am to be a citizen of a country which inherited from colonialism
the best conceptual weapon against communalism: Algeria was colonized by
France; you, friends, were colonized by the British. We inherited a different
understanding of the concept of secularism. The French revolution invented the
concept of secularism in-so-far as it wanted to free the newly proclaimed
Republic from the subjugation to the Vatican and its Catholic Church that had
plagued the Kingdom of France.
It therefore defined secularism as the total
separation of the State from religions: article 1 of the 1906 law on
secularism/separation states that citizens enjoy freedom of belief and of
practice of their cult; article 2 declares that the State will have nothing to
do with private belief systems; it will not officially recognize any religion,
nor their representatives, it will not fund them, etc… The State will be
totally separated from religions. This legal provision allowed, for instance,
to pass laws that the Church disagreed with on the ground that they did not
follow (their) god’s rules; this allowed laws on personal status to be voted
for all citizens, benefitting all; not granting different legal rights to
different unequal categories of citizens, according to one’s religious presumed
affiliation, it allowed for citizens not to be forced into a religious or caste
identity; it granted equal rights before the law to all citizens; etc…
This is the
original revolutionary definition of secularism. Wearing a hijab or a burqa
today cannot be seen as an individual choice when we witness the world over how
women are induced or coerced into wearing it, and more often than not at the
cost of their lives It is a far cry from the British re-definition of
secularism which ultimately aimed at legitimizing the double status of the
King/Queen of England as Head of State and as Head of the Anglican Church. It therefore
turned the original revolutionary definition of secularism into a situation
where the State becomes a sort of arbitrator between religions, which grants
equal rights to different religions and keeps the balance between their
privileges; not only does it acknowledge and negotiate with self-proclaimed
un-elected religious “representatives”, but it funds them, allows them to
manufacture un-voted laws of personal status said to be in accordance with the
principles of their religion – as interpreted by conservative religious
clerics-, and coerces willing or unwilling citizens into a religious and
community identity which is declared ‘theirs’ by birth – not by choice.
This is the
trap in which far too many progressive people have fallen when running to the
rescue of burqa-clad students assaulted by the Hindu right, and more generally
all the numerous caste and religious victims of rising extreme-right Hindu
nationalism. It seems to me that progressives in India could find a way out of
the trap in a French-revolution inspired redefinition of Indian - in fact
British colonial- secularism. The defense of victims of one (majority)
religious fundamentalist extreme right should not lead to supporting another
(be it minority) one. The battle for secularism is raging in so many countries
today, including in France itself, where successive both Left and Right
governments slowly de facto abandon the basic principles of separation between
religion and state; and where the British re-definition of secularism as equal tolerance
by the State vis-a-vis all religions is creeping, with the active support of
the European Union.
However, so
far, de jure, the legal provisions of separation still stand, as defined by the
French revolution and formalized in the 1906 law on secularism. The bigger
threat at the moment in France is the attempted appropriation of “secularism”
by the French extreme right for communal purposes – an appropriation which is
ardently combatted by progressive secularists in France, including political
and human rights exiled and migrants who fled Islamic fundamentalist
governments in their own countries. I hope and look forward for a
trans-communal coming together of secularists, both within national contexts
and internationally, at grass roots level, to force our unwilling governments
to let us make full use of the revolutionary concept of secularism.
-------
Meriem
Helie is an Algerian sociologist as well as an activist for women's rights and
secularism. She occupied leadership positions in human rights groups starting
in the 1980s.
Source: The
Hijab Controversy: Open Letter To Our Secular Muslim Friends In India
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/indian-muslims-hijab-niqab-issue/d/126461
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