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THINKING ALOUD: Peddling the veil —Razi Azmi

To suggest that modesty and morality have any direct relationship to the veil is an insult to the vast majority of women — Muslim and non-Muslim — who choose not to veil themselves, as well as to the overwhelming majority of men who are not oglers and rapists

Two French hostages still remain in mortal danger in Iraq because of the French government ban on wearing the hijab (or any religious attire) in public schools. While few Muslims support violence to protest the French decision, a very large number of them all over the world, especially the West, are quite agitated over this issue. The hijab and burqa are important to some of them, and the ban is viewed as an act of deliberate discrimination against Muslims.

After the announcement of the French ban earlier this year, demonstrations were held across cities in Western countries. In at least one such demonstration, leaflets signed by Hizb-ut-Tahrir — containing “an open letter” to the French president and another addressed to the local French diplomatic mission — were distributed. Calling the prohibition “an act of injustice and religious persecution”, it warned that when the Muslims will have “put an end to the western hegemony over the Muslim lands [and] the Khilafah will be re-established, ... that day, the Muslims will bestow goodness upon those that displayed good, and will account those who displayed contempt”. Only time will tell who accounts whom!

Meanwhile, many educated Pakistani Muslim women, living both in the country and in the West, now wear not just the hijab but the full-length Taliban-style burqa. Some go around writing articles and making statements and speeches about its supposed liberating effect on them.

Yasmin Ataullah, a press officer for the Muslim Association of Britain, wrote in The Guardian (September 3) that “I feel more confident in my hijab, projecting myself as a progressive Muslim woman who has the courage to be true to her faith while living and working in Britain. ... I now feel an affinity with Muslims in London. ... I merely exercise my rights in a free society by choosing to wear the hijab”. To Mohtarma Yasmin, hijab “is a reflection of a woman’s modesty”.

Undoubtedly, for every Yasmin Ataullah there are many more Muslim women who feel more confident — and definitely more progressive — without the hijab or burqa. And if the hijab gives her a greater sense of affinity with some Muslims in London, it equally diminishes her affinity with the more numerous non-veiled Muslim women in UK, not to mention the non-Muslim population. It is a pity that in a country that has so much to offer in terms of social, economic, educational, political and other choices, she can find no better way of exercising her rights than by wearing the hijab. It remains, after all, a symbol of religious separatism frowned upon by liberal-minded Muslims, officially discouraged in some Muslim countries and banned in Turkish schools, universities and government offices.

For Mohtarma Yasmin, “the secularist arguments behind the hijab ban in France amount to nothing more than a denial of freedoms of expression and choice”. Muslims are the greatest votaries of freedom of expression and choice, of multiculturalism and secularism in those countries where they happen to be in a minority, as in the West and in India, but are the champions of Islamic hegemony wherever they are in a majority. Only the most diehard will deny that religious minorities get a very shoddy deal in all Muslim countries, where they are allowed to exist only at the sufferance of the Muslim majority.

Saudi Arabia, for one, does not even make a pretence of permitting religious freedom. According to a US State Department report: “Saudi Arabia is an Islamic monarchy without legal protection for freedom of religion, and such protection does not exist in practice. Islam is the official religion, and the law requires that all citizens be Muslims. The government prohibits the public practice of non-Muslim religions. The government recognises the right of non-Muslims to worship in private; however, it does not always respect this right in practice.”

Writing on a respected Pakistani Islamic website (www.tanzeem.org), Ayeza Nadeem goes even further than Yasmin Ataullah: “As a Muslim woman I don’t want to have affairs which could lead to adultery, bastards, divorces. ... The veil gives a big ‘no’ signal to all those people who have any kind of evil in their hearts. Firstly they cannot see me, which keeps them away.”

Mohtarma Ayeza will surely concede that hundreds of millions of women around the world lead perfectly normal family lives unaided by hijab or burqa, neither committing adultery nor conceiving bastards. Among those who are able to maintain their propriety, modesty and chastity without recourse to the veil are my wife, sisters, sisters-in-law and many nieces, as also the wives and daughters of my numerous Muslim and non-Muslim friends, most of whom are a credit to the female sex in their different ways. Indeed, to suggest that the veil and modesty and morality have any direct relationship is an insult to the vast majority of women — Muslim and non-Muslim — who choose not to veil themselves, as well as to the overwhelming majority of men who are not oglers and rapists.

Not to veil oneself is not an advertisement for sex nor an invitation to rape, and the hijab or burqa does not guarantee any kind of immunity from immorality. One can even make a case that the converse is true, that the greater the attempt to put women behind the veil, the greater the propensity of males to become peeping Toms, voyeurs or worse. Since Zia’s ‘Islamisation’ took hold in Pakistan, there has been a huge increase in rapes, gang rapes, rapes sanctioned by jirgas, so-called honour killings, stripping of women in public and other acts of violence against women. Almost all of these crimes against women occur in rural areas and small towns, where none of the victims can be accused of dressing themselves ‘immodestly’.

Much is made of the higher divorce rates in the West compared to Muslim countries. This is due to the economic independence enjoyed by women in the West and the fact that no stigma attaches to a divorced woman in a western society. It should not escape notice that the divorce rate in Pakistan is on the increase as women gain education and jobs, and the resulting relative economic independence and social acceptance of divorce.

The link between the veil and Islam is tenuous at best, as contended in many articles on these pages and elsewhere. It is not exclusive to Muslims, but can be found in many non-Muslim societies, including India, the countries of the Mediterranean region and Eastern Europe. Rather than extend the independence of women, the veil always was and still remains a vestige of male domination. One understands the protectionist or religious arguments in support of the veil. But to try to ascribe a higher moral value to the veil or to equate it with modesty is a bit disingenuous and to claim that it liberates women is a flight of fantasy.

The author, a former academic with a doctorate in modern history, is now a freelance writer and columnist

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