Intent on hiding them away, the burkha has instead made Muslim women the centre of global attention
Could this be the mother of all ironies, a delightful one at that? Whatever your view on the subject, one thing is beyond dispute: desexualising the female body, rendering a Muslim woman invisible in the public space is what the burkha (or niqab, a head-to-toe veil) is all about. Yet this very garment continues to draw global attention to the Muslim woman, generating heat and igniting passions as nothing else does. Muslim women were headline news last year when France decided to enact a law banning the burkha. Several other European countries are also heading in the same direction. With the new law having been set in motion on April 11 (a 150-euro fine or a crash course in citizenship for any woman who refuses to unveil before a French policeman), there’s great excitement all over: cyberspace, print and electronic media across the West and the Muslim world, including the Urdu media in India.
The irony is delightful too for those who acknowledge that truth does not always dress up in black or white; it often comes clothed in shades of grey. If you think this debate is about the clash of civilisations, between the West and the Muslim world, about the burkha vs the bikini, think again. In this battle over the burkha, it is West vs West, secularists vs secularists, liberals vs liberals, right vs right, feminists vs feminists, ulema vs ulema, Muslims vs Muslims and women vs women.
If you have a view on the subject, you have a point. But rest assured that someone with a diametrically opposite opinion also has a point. It is a bhool bhulaiyya, a maze out there with no familiar markers to guide the bewildered. Only one thing seems clear: if the most passionate supporters of the ban are Muslim women, the most ardent defenders of the burkha are also Muslim women.
Welcome to the maze, one step at a time. Banish the thought, as many in the West will tell you, that the French action is motivated by lofty principles such as gender justice, keeping religion out of the public sphere or upholding the 222-year-old ideals of the French revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity. With over five million followers of Islam, France is home to the largest number of Muslims anywhere in the western world. Why then is an increasingly migrant-unfriendly France so concerned about just 2,000 (itself a highly exaggerated figure according to many) Muslim women who wear the burkha in France? The answer lies in politics: in the presidential elections due next year, the right-wing Sarkozy faces a serious threat from his ultra-right rival Marine Le Pen. Sarkozy is trying to outsmart Ms Le Pen by stealing her agenda and so what if this adds more fuel to Islamophobia in the country and the continent?
Critics in the West who believe Sarkozy and France are playing with fire invoke the foundational values of the Enlightenment. Among the numerous editorials and columns that have been published in the last few days, here is one from Timothy Garton Ash in the Los Angeles Times on the meaning of freedom: “We may not like their choice. We may find it disturbing and offensive. But that’s the deal in a free society: The burkha wearer has to put up with the cartoons (of Prophet Muhammad); the cartoonist has to put up with the burkhas.”
If there is a debate, for and against, in the West, there is one raging in the Muslim world as well. In late 2009, in the midst of the storm then raked up by Sarkozy with his “no place for the burkha in France”, Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, the then grand sheikh of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, stunned the Muslim world with a fatwa that led to an official notification banning any burkha-clad female teacher or student from entering the Al-Azhar campus or any affiliated institution. Muslim-majority Syria has just relaxed its law prohibiting women in burkhas from entering educational institutions. The reason is simple: containing the spreading Arab revolution!
Egypt’s Tantawy, since deceased, was not the only important Muslim voice against covering up in the name of Islam. Among those who argue that the veil is a cultural practice which has nothing to do with Islam are influential voices in the Muslim world: the octogenarian Egyptian Gamal al-Banna (elder brother of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna), Sudanese theologian and politician Hasan al-Turabi (interestingly, a man accused by many in the West of promoting radical Islam across the world) and the late Abdurrahman Wahid (for years the leader of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest organisation of ulema anywhere in the world).
It is impossible to list here all the well-known Muslim men and women who across the time-space continuum have opposed the burkha/ niqab. Even the fact that the right-wing Sarkozys have their own political agenda is no argument as far as many Muslims are concerned. “I am appalled to hear the defence of the niqab or burkha in Europe,” opined Ms Mona Eltahawy last year. “A bizarre political correctness has tied the tongues of those who would normally rally to defend women’s rights but who are now instead sacrificing those very rights in the name of fighting an increasingly powerful right wing. The best way to support Muslim women would be to say we oppose both the racist right wing and the niqabs and burkhas which are products of what I call the Muslim right wing”. Among Muslims opposed to the burkha there is a near consensus that the spread of this infection “like swine flu” (Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The Independent, UK) has little to do with individual choice and everything to do with petrodollar-promoted Islamic revivalism across the globe in recent years.
How then does one negotiate one’s way through this maze? The “location principle”, enunciated years ago by the US-based scholar of Indian origin, Akeel Bilgrami, comes to mind. When an Indian Muslim calls for a common civil code, it is a progressive demand. But when someone from the sangh parivar makes the same demand, it is clearly communal, he argued. Perhaps the same principle could be applied to the burkha debate.
Archived from Communalism Combat, May 2011. Year 17, No.157 – Gender Justice.