The Trend Of Wearing Hijab Is A Recent Practice In India: It Was Never Considered Obligatory In Islam
Hijab
Does Not Find Authority In Islamic Sacred Texts
Main
Points:
1. 1.Hijab does
mean a garment.
2. Hijab is a
new practice introduced in Islam.
3. Qur'an uses
the word hijab to mean a curtain.
4. Hijab has
revived orthodoxy in Indian Muslim society.
----
By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
19 March
2022
Ibn Khaldun
Bharati's article looks at the hijab controversy from a multicultural point of
view. He says that wearing of hijab among girls in India was only a recent
development. Two decades ago, Muslim girls in India wore the same dress as
their female counterparts from other religions to schools, colleges and
universities did. He quotes a Moroccan Islamic feminist Asma Lambrate as saying
that in Qur'an hijab means a curtain, a separating wall. It does not mean a
garment.
Muslim
girls started wearing hijab to be invisible but in the process their religious
identity became hyper visible and created problems for themselves. Some radical
Islamic scholars of the Indian sub-continent spread their personal views on
veil and made Muslims believe that the hijab was an essential part of a Muslim
woman. The speed with which this belief is growing among Muslims, the day is
not too far when a Muslim woman not wearing hijab may be considered a
non-Muslim. Two months ago, a Muslim girl was shot dead by Taliban in Afghanistan
for not wearing hijab. The author says that the hijab is only a religious
assertion in a secular society and has its implications.
Hijab is
only a product of a new culture and not an Islamic practice, says the author
and asks Muslim intelligentsia to prevent this radical practice of hijab and
Niqab from spreading in Muslim society to facilitate their better assimilation
in the mainstream and their educational empowerment.
------
Forget
‘Essential’, Hijab Isn’t That Islamic. Muslim Women Just Made Western Tees
‘Halaal’
By
Ibn Khaldun Bharati
17 March,
2022
Women wearing hijab (representational
image) | Bloomberg
----
Hijab is
not Islamic. It’s Western. It’s not essential to Islam but an accretion to it.
Unlike Islam, its origin is not in the seventh-century Middle East but in the
late 20th century West. Therefore, at best, it could be called ‘Westo-Islamic’.
And, insofar as it’s an accretion to the pristine religion, the right
theological terminology for it would be bid’at — a new practice that has no
authority in the sacred texts, and therefore, essentialises that which goes
beyond the divine sanction and Prophet Muhammad’s call.
In the
Arabic lexicon and the Quran, the word ‘hijab’ means a curtain, not a veil or a
scarf. According to Asma Lamrabet, a Moroccan Islamic feminist, the term is
reiterated seven times in the Quran, referring to the same meaning each time.
“Hijab means curtain, separation, wall, and in other words, anything that
hides, masks, and protects something,” she says. Never in Islamic history was
this word used for a garment or a piece of clothing.
Product
Of New Culture
The hijab,
in its current form, is not older than two decades in India. As late as 2001,
when this scribe stumbled upon an online matrimonial ad in which an American
Muslim woman had said, “I wear hijab”, he, reasonably well-versed in Islamic
idioms, couldn’t help wondering how hijab could be worn at all. He wasn’t aware
that the said word had become a terminology that connoted a stylised head
bandage worn to emphasise that the wearer belonged to a different religion and
community and that she prided in her difference from those around her who did
not belong to the same faith.
Although
couched in the discourse of modesty, this was clearly a marker of identity,
which soon became the uniform for religious assertion in societies where Islam
wasn’t the dominant political force. The politics of this sartorial semiotics
was neither lost on its proponents nor those who came to resent it.
Whether the
case for hijab is argued from the vantage point of religiosity or identity, in
neither case the proffered arguments could be regarded as liberal and secular.
So, why can’t the liberal-secular intelligentsia tell the supporters of hijab
that their insistence on displaying religious symbols in sanitised public
spaces like schools is illiberal, un-secular, regressive, and militant? After
all, wouldn’t it eventually harm those the most who have the greatest stake in
India’s liberal secularism — the Muslim minority? Is it because the liberals,
having completely lost the script and unable to fight their own battle, have
been counting on the Muslim identitarian politics to keep them in the
reckoning? Have they developed the same vested interest in Muslim communalism
as did the British earlier?
Not A
Choice
Two key
terminologies that have been bandied about liberally (pun intended) during the
ongoing controversy — one in affirmation and the other in negation — are
‘choice’ and ‘patriarchy’. It has been argued that wearing any dress is a
matter of individual choice. Of course, it is. However, one might ask whether
the votaries of the hijab concede this right to all women to wear any dress of
their choice. Would the very girls who have been exercising their “individual
choice” to wear the hijab to school be able to walk freely, if they so chose,
without it through their Muslim neighbourhoods and not compromise their
families’ honour or invite opprobrium on themselves?
Hijab is
not an individual choice, it’s a communal compulsion.
The pace at
which it has been spreading hints that the day is not far when Muslim women not
conforming to it may no longer be recognised as Muslims. This is what was going
to happen if the Karnataka High Court’s judgment had gone the other way.
Equally
insidious has been the narrative that the assertive display of the hijab is a
setback to Islamic patriarchy. Far from it. Both in form and content, and very
consciously too, this trend signifies the revival of orthodoxy, including its
patriarchal presumptions. The religious sanction for man’s supremacy and his
right to decide for women is not being questioned. Instead, what rankles is the
loss of political supremacy of the supposed Muslim community. Muslim women,
too, are supposed to have suffered from this loss.
Therefore,
they, instead of seeking equality with men, are engaged in the higher pursuit
of reviving supremacy over other religions. Their gender is not only secondary
to Islam, but, as seen in the use of the hijab as a tool of religious
assertion, also deployed in service of the religion. The capability and agency
gained as blessings of education and modernity are ploughed back into the
religious-political discourse.
Towards
Communal Visibility
Another
myth being circulated is that the hijab is an enabler for education, which is
to say that had it not been for the hijab, Muslim girls wouldn’t be able to go
out for studies. The fact, however, is that till the very end of the 20th
century — before it became a common sight — most Muslim girls attended schools
and colleges dressed in the same attire as other girls. The same trend would
have continued if religious radicalisation had not permeated the
socio-political atmosphere.
Therefore,
before educating Muslim women on the hijab, so that a case could be made for the
latter’s essentiality, our liberal-secular intelligentsia should have done
better to wonder why an outer covering over the regular dress, which was not
considered necessary earlier, became a precondition for going for studies.
This is
despite the fact that the nature of the Muslim woman’s modest dressing
underwent a change through the years. Before the head-wrap became trendy wear,
there were three moot questions — Should a Muslim woman freely go out of her
house? Should her face be covered with the Niqab? Can she, like men at home,
wear Western attire?
The new
hijab took care of all the questions. Women could go out. The face was exposed,
but instead, the head and the neck had to be covered in a particular style,
and, if topped with the hijab, Western dresses such as jeans and tee shirts
became halaal.
Hijab
replaced the earlier invisibility of the Muslim woman with a hypervisibility of
her religious identity. Whether this identity should compulsively be asserted
in public spaces is the question that Indian Muslims need to resolve wisely.
-------
Ibn
Khaldun Bharati is a private student of Islamic history. He tweets
@IbnKhaldunIndic. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra
Laeeq)
Source: Forget ‘Essential’, Hijab Isn’t That
Islamic. Muslim Women Just Made Western Tees ‘Halaal’
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/wearing-hijab-india-obligatory-islam/d/126605
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