There is much debate around the concept of the veil in Islam. In my city of Srinagar, in the predominantly Muslim province of Kashmir in India, the attitudes towards females covering up for modesty were always conservative but turned quite ugly in 1990 with the breakout of the Pakistan-backed Islamist insurgency in Kashmir against the Indian State.
Before 1990, attitudes about female modesty were similar to those in the rest of the Hindu majority, multi-ethnic Indian subcontinent – a certain restriction of dress and behaviour on girls after puberty. I remember when I was told to stop wearing jeans and skirts, and to start wearing the shalwar kameez, traditional South Asian female clothing, with a dupatta or chunni, a long-flowing piece of cloth that covers the upper torso and can be adjusted to cover the hair as needed, typically in the presence of elders or while praying. The instructions weren't strict, and the attitude was lackadaisical with no enforcement of the dress code except when visiting a shrine or praying and handling the Quran.
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The launch of the Islamist militancy brought with it the first diktats of the newly appeared militant guerrilla organisations, the tanzeems, which started issuing farmans, or official orders, that any Muslim girl or woman found wearing jeans or not having her head covered would have acid thrown on her or be shot at. Hindu girls and women were mandated to identify themselves as such with the bindi, a vermillion red dot otherwise worn cosmetically on the forehead.
I remember these farman being laughed at initially, but then reports started coming in of women being shot in the legs and knees for wearing jeans. There was panic. Mothers, aunts, grandmothers rushed to cloth shops for black fabric and tailors were swamped with orders to stitch up clothing that met the approval of the armed Islamist enforcers. Old burqas and abayas, mostly those that our grandmothers had long discarded, were dug up and girls and women held try out sessions to match everyone to the burqa that fitted them. We laughed about how on earth our grandmothers had been able to get around with only a net for vision and breathing. But it turned serious when they said this was 'taawan', a curse.
They said they had given it up as it had come to be considered backward and very rural to not show their faces. My grandmother talked particularly about using hers only when she went to the mosque to hear the khutba (Friday sermon) as that was a tradition. These matriarchs were the most vociferous of all the women about the explosion of tanzeems and their farmans, cursing the 'misguided youth' on the "Islam they were bringing".
My mother’s generation of women however had a different problem altogether – rebellious daughters who refused to get behind the veil, come what may. Mama spent many a sleepless nights worrying about what could happen if the Islamists diktat was not followed.
Soon enough, the militants clashing with the Indian armed forces made the streets of the city unsafe. Curfews became routine. The population became virtually confined indoors. The veil became something to be put on if we went out so as not to attract the ire of the militants or some zealous lunatic.
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I started to realize then that the women who were advocating the veil the most were the ones who found meaning in the approval of the Islamist frat boys that they earned through subjugating themselves with the 'penguin dress'.
Muslims opposing the hijab have to face arguments about personal choice from hijabi women, but it’s not about freedom of choice at all. It’s about hijabi women wanting to preserve the roles, responsibilities, obligations and limitations of women in Muslim society. That this results in pressure on all women to fall into line is not a problem for the hijabis because they think it perfectly right for women to know and occupy their proper place.
So the millions of women who are forced into the hijab, face not just the men who command it, but also the women who agree with those men, and dress it up as “freedom of choice”.
It is my experience and looking at the motivations of hijabis I have known even as some of us are making the assertion that the hijab is an instrument of oppression of women in Muslim society, a number of hijabi women, supported by Western feminists, are defending the hijab as a matter of a woman's freedom to choose what she wears. On the surface, that seems a reasonable assertion. However, these women are not defending the freedom of clothing choice of women. These are women who are in agreement about the position of women with the men who bully women about the Hijab.
What is in question is not the freedom to choose to wear the hijab but the freedom for a woman to choose the position in Muslim society for themselves that the imams and the mullahs decree. That's a right they have, but in pretending that it’s about the freedom of choice of clothing, they contribute to the firmness of the mullah's decree and so assist in denying space and freedom to those women who would prefer to reject the hijab and the oppression it represents. The "freedom to wear what I choose" argument is in fact an insidious dynamic of women sustaining the mullah directed patriarchal order of Muslim society, and treating those women who reject it as enemies of the correct and proper order of Muslim society.
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So I find it very hard to accept the efforts of women in free countries to use the symbol of oppression as a means of showing solidarity. I can only label it as either ignorance of the Liberals of the West, or outright appeasment by the regressive Left of the backward, oppressive, misogynistic attitudes of Muslim society.
I am still unable to understand the desperate desire in the Western democratic Left to appease and coddle the most regressive aspects of the conservative Muslim right.
