Reclaiming
Hijab Or Declining Freedom?
By
Lopa
Hassan
From head-to-toe Burqa to long cloak-Chador to black silky
Hijab- each of these attires has become one of the most visible instruments
and ideological symbols of political Islam for the last few decades.
A number of great articles have already been written in this website on
the background and history of veils and on how Islam justified them to
be the strict dress code for women. In this article I would like to focus
on the ongoing controversies over the justification of wearing hijab in a
modern perspective and also see how some western-educated young Muslim
women are internalizing the antiquated view
of their own status imposed by an inherently misogynistic religion.
“Today
young Muslim women are reclaiming the hijab, reinterpreting it in light of
its original purpose - to give back to women the ultimate control of their
own bodies….....I wear hijab because
it gives me freedom. I do this because I am a Muslim woman
who believes her body is her own private concern.” This is an excerpt
from an essay written by a Canadian-born college-educated Muslim woman who
suddenly decided to reclaim hijab at age twenty one. While being totally
respectful of all the notions of civil liberties and a woman’s freedom
of choice to wear anything she wants in a democratic society, I can’t
help wondering what could drive a college-educated woman, of a North
American upbringing, to throw away her freedom of clothing and embrace the
veil or hijab and thus deluding herself that she is now liberated.
Just by wearing hijab she thinks she has
full control of her body. What an illusive idea of liberation!
We need to go to the origin of such notion and examine how veiling
is anyway related to women’s freedom. Since the whole idea of cladding
with veils emanates from the direct instructions of Qur’an, let’s
first take a look at a few Ayats from the Holy Scriptures to examine how
much control Allah Has allowed for women to have over their own body.
Volume 7, Book 62, Number 81:
Narrated
'Uqba:
The Prophet said: “The stipulations most entitled to
be abided by are those with which you are given the right to enjoy the
(women's) private parts (i.e. the stipulations
of the marriage contract).”
m5.4
(Ref: 8, p526):
Husband’s rights:
A husband possesses full right to enjoy his wife’s person (A:
from the top of her head to the bottoms of her feet, though anal
intercourse (dis: p75.20) is absolutely unlawful) in what does not
physically harm her.
Imam Ghazali
A
woman must keep her sexual organs ready for service at all times. (Ref: 7:
vol. I, p235)
(Shahih Muslim)
Book 008, Number 3366:
When a woman spends the night away from the bed of her husband, the
angels curse her until morning.
(Sunaan Abu Dawud 11.2142)Book
11, Number 2142:
Narrated Umar ibn al-Khattab: The
Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) said: “A
man will not be asked as to why he beat his wife.”
Looks like Allah’s law guaranteed a man every right to go
into his wife ‘anyway’ he wants, to discipline her anytime he wishes,
and the wife has no say of her own about this. We don’t need to look
hard into Muslim societies to find the terrible consequences the
millennium-old Shariah law has brought for women. Due to the absence of
premarital dating, the customary arranged marriage compels a Muslim woman
to surrender herself to a complete strange man giving him the full
ownership of her body. My question, what veil comes to her defense when
she ends up being raped at her wedding night? What protection her hijab
gives her when she must hasten to fulfill her husband’s desire even if
she herself doesn’t feel compel to? Why can’t she take over and claim the so-called ‘ultimate
control over her own body’ to protect herself when the husband exercises
his Hadith-sanctioned right to discipline her?
The Canadian young woman made some
interesting points in her essay, “Wearing the hijab has given me freedom
from constant attention to my physical self. Because my appearance is not
subjected to public scrutiny, my beauty, or perhaps lack of it, has been
removed from the realm of what can legitimately be discussed. No one knows
whether my hair looks as if I just stepped out of a salon, whether or not
I can pinch an inch, or even if I have unsightly stretch marks. And
because no one knows, no one cares.” This apparently logical assertion
of ‘not being displayed to public scrutiny’ might give the impression
that Muslim women are probably free from being subjected to meet the
impossible male standards of female beauty and therefore are actually
taken as equal human beings in their society. Sounds more like feminist
fantasyland than Islamic paradise! Is there any such Muslim society where
the evaluation criteria don’t include a woman’s
physical features when searching for a potential bride for a traditional
arranged marriage? I’m sorry, my hijab-loving sisters, there are people
(like your potential in-laws) who would ‘know’ and ‘care’ if you
have an unsightly stretch mark on your
forehead or if you have a bad hair day when those people will examine you
like a piece of furniture. Yes, judging women’s worth
proportional to their attractiveness is indeed a
universal male attitude. Perhaps Islam saved Muslim men a little shame on
this issue by making it part of the divine decree like the following:
(Ibid,
p228) : Her dowry should be
reasonable. The Prophet said: “The best of the women are the beautiful
in face and the least in dowry.
In an attempt to defend veiling, Islamic
apologists all too often point their fingers to western women accusing
them of reducing the definition of liberation to a right of wearing next
to nothing. To these people, a woman can only be either scantily-clad or
veil-clad; nothing could exist in between the two extremes! It is true
that women in the West are often judged on the basis of their appearance,
objectified, and very often suffer sexual harassments. Certainly every
society has its flaws. I personally don’t like to see women being
objectified everywhere in the media. We need to realize that North
American and European women enjoy a whole array of rights and freedom all
of which they had to earn through decades of movements and struggles. The
freedom of clothing is just one of their numerous civic rights. If we
unjustly reduce their achievements and contributions by stereotyping them
as mere ‘Baywatch sirens’, we would only do a disservice to women of
all backward societies(specially Muslim communities) by crushing their
hope of ever marching forward.
So what is the most
convincing reason for observing hijab according to Muslim scholars? They
argue ‘wearing headscarves or veils actually
stops men from treating women like sex objects. Veils make them ignore
women’s appearance and draw attention to their personalities and mind’.
Nice twisted logic! I argue veiling only
reinforces the idea that women are
nothing but sex objects which is why they
have to take the whole responsibility of ‘not exciting men in anyway’
by wrapping themselves up with a shapeless piece of garment. Burqas or
hijabs had not been able to raise women’s status to a liberated and
independent group of humans in last 1400 years. No matter how much
Islamists apologize in defense of veiling, it has been and will continue
to be a symbol of subjugation and oppression of Muslim women all over the
world. Segregating women from public life, controlling their freedom of
movement, and thereby institutionalizing a system of sexual apartheid are
just some of the best contributions that veiling has made so far.
Islamic apologists
always get the free ride in spreading their propaganda that Islam gave
women the ‘true liberation- and a place to actively contribute in
society’, simply because no moderate Muslim seems to stand up and pose
the obvious question, “Is this because of that ‘true liberation’ we
see such a high illiteracy rate among Muslim women in the Middle East?”,
or “Is that why the Arab world is being crippled by repression of women
and is thus marching toward stagnancy?” Nobody seems to point out the
fundamental fallacy of the argument of how veiling protects women from
male sexual advances. Why don’t we see any Muslim man being bothered by
the idea that implies each and every man of all age would lose every sense
of a rational thought at the sight of a girl’s bare arm or her uncovered
neck? And what kind of message does it send to a young Muslim girl when
she’s preparing to set her foot to the outside world? Doesn’t
she need to learn to have respect toward the opposite sex? Strange how we
never think about the various psychological traumas a young woman might
suffer while going through the process of mandatory veiling.
Muslim women need more than Quranic teachings; they need
moral guidance showing that they could be modest and virtuous without the
help of veils or hijabs. And why is it that women always have to worry
about what they should or should not wear? After all, what makes a woman
respectable has very little to do with her attire, and a lot to do with
what is inside her brain and how much she uses it.
Finally, returning to the young women’s assertion ‘I
wear hijab because I choose to……I find the experience liberating”;
I’m happy that she feels liberated and has the freedom to choose
the hijab. Only thing we need to be reminded is millions of Arab and
Iranian women simply don’t have that
freedom of choice; hijab for them is a forced legal requirement.
I think, for Muslim women, raised in a free society, to go and
advocate for veils or hijabs is just a cruel mockery to the sufferings of
hundreds and thousands of women who were slashed with razors, had acid
thrown in their faces, often were killed and imprisoned until the
Islamic regime in Iran and other Arab states were able to enforce
compulsory veiling and establish their rule. As for ‘liberation through
hijab’ concept, I only have one question- what is so conflicting with
the idea of liberation to demand a little freedom of feeling the wind
through my hair?
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