Rising Intolerance
They are creating a legitimate democratic space for themselves within Constitutional boundaries, without being apologetic about their cultural identity.
PK Yasser Arafath
A woman at a polling booth in Kashmir in 2019. | Tauseef Mustafa/ AFP
Over the last few years, debates about the complexity of gender relations within Islamic societies have generated a range of arguments about the complex relationship Muslim women have with the hijab.
The headscarf, like any sartorial marking, acquires new meanings as political and social contexts change, even though it continues to carry the residues of the Eurocentric reading of it as an instrument of oppression.
In India, a section of non-Muslim liberals views the hijab as a discardable irritation, while Hindutva politics identifies it as an Islamist refusal to demonstrate allegiance to the nation.
However, since the last quarter of the 20th century, some Muslim feminist scholars have argued against such orientalist, liberal and neo-nationalist espousals of the hijab. New feminist research examines the constantly changing meanings of the hijab, looking at how young, educated, and working Muslim women adopt the headscarf to achieve certain kinds of moral and pietistic authority, political voice and autonomy.
Reactions to Karnataka order
The debate about headscarves is back again after a college in Karnataka last month stopped hijab-wearing Muslim students from entering class. In other places in the state, Hindu students began to don saffron scarves and turbans to pressure college administrations to adopt a similar ban on the hijab.
Visuals of such groups menacing women students with headscarves in few colleges have created a huge uproar across the world. Influential intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky have expressed deep concern at the turn of events, viewing such incidents as a reflection of rising Islamophobic vigilantism in India today.
In a Twitter message, Nobel laureate Malala Yusufzai stated that “refusing to let girls go to school in their hijabs is horrifying. Objectification of women persists – for wearing less or more. Indian leaders must stop the marginalisation of Muslim women.”
Attacks by vigilante groups on “deviant” cultural markers, especially Islamic ones, have increased across Karnataka, immediately after the recent urban local body elections in which the Bharatiya Janata Party received a setback at the hands of the Congress. Hindutva groups are wasting no time in continuously insinuating secularphobic narratives, challenging the very foundation of India’s Constitutional rights.
A variety of meanings
The hijab has a very long history, and the Muslim women have covered their head in a variety of ways in the past. Like their physical diversity, headscarves have evoked different meanings across cultures and political times. The hijab has no fixed meaning.
Several Muslim women scholars, including Lila Abu Lughod, Amina Wadud, Fatema Mernissi and Saba Mahmood, have explained why urbane, educated Muslim women from different ethno-cultural regions have taken to wearing the hijab since the last quarter of the 20th century.
For Lughod, one of the world’s foremost anthropologists, the modern use of the headscarf among the educated Muslim women emerged as political action against power structures in the Arab world in the late 1970s.
My own ethnographic examination (published in Malayalam) in Kerala on this very question, way back in 2016, showed the sociological, cultural, economic, material, corporeal, security, aesthetic, pietistic, and identarian factors through which Muslim women negotiated with hijab and purdha (covering coat).
Complex meaning
Today, the headscarf is acquiring a complex meaning in India where young Muslim women – educated and English-speaking – began to look at it as a conduit of dissent and resentment, echoing attitudes in the late 1970s in the Arab Islamic world where the body of Muslim women became the site of political and ideological contestations.
As a result, placing the hijabed Muslim women within the predictable “oppression-liberation” binary erases numerous meanings that they carry in the ever-changing Islamophobic neo-liberal world.
As Muslims undergo constant motion across the globalised world, they cease to exist as a concrete community. They are no different from other communities whose identity formation and sense of allegiance is complicated due to continuous motion and mobility. Physical motion leads them to a different stages of emotional, material, intellectual and cognitive motion as well.
These multiple motions are enabling a section of Muslim women to be unconventional in the realms of education and employment cease to exist as a concrete community. In the process, many of them began to consider sartorial markers that include headscarves as a stabiliser of their legitimate identity as Muslims, and register them as a counter-signification against the stereotype of it being an instrument of oppression.
Unlike post-Partition Muslim women who discarded the hijab in public places for the fear of exclusion and “othering”, educated Muslim women in post-Mandal India do not seem to harbour such anxieties. The post-Mandal women in scarves seem to have the political conviction to change mainstream perceptions by integrating secular and democratic ideas with their pietistic and sartorial choices, like scholars like Sama Abdurraqib have pointed out in the case of Muslim women in American diaspora.
As the hijab acquires multiple meanings, educated Muslim women, with a voice of their own, seem to be creating a legitimate democratic space for themselves within the boundaries of the Constitution, without being apologetic about their cultural identity.
Agents of change
Along with the multiple mobilities of the past two decades, the increasing familiarity of educated Muslim women with hijab discourses in contested cultural and ethnic sites across the world also played a crucial role in making them believe in themselves as agents of change.
However, their sartorial assertion can only be fully explained along with the shifts in the Indian social and political landscape in the last few years. This period has witnessed a great divide in several interactive spaces. The insistence on a new sartorial identity, thus, cannot also be removed from the new interactional, emotional, material and political circumstances that emerged out of this divide.
Living consciously in the everydayness of an alienating cultural hegemony that pushes them away through subterfuge, the headscarf is turning out to be a conduit for solidarity, kinship, and self- care in India’s shrinking public spaces.
Amina Wadud, the eminent Muslim feminist scholar who challenged the male centric interpretation of Islam, identified such a sartorial shift when Muslim women became “the visible public target of American anxiety”, in the early 2000s.
At present, there is a growing consensus among a section of Muslim intelligentsia and certain progressives on the instrumentality of headscarf as an expression of impactful dissent in the expanding Islamophobic world, while a section within them continues to make hard criticism about the tradition of veiling (nikhab) and covering (purdha).
For the former, sartorial assertion has become the most effective, non-violent conduit of dissent and subversion in the wake of the all-encompassing cultural nationalisms across the world. Therefore, the focal point of the women in hijab in Karnataka or elsewhere needs to be transferred from the framework of the Right to Education to a more appropriate theoretical premise – the Right to Dissent – in the most difficult political time in the history of independent India.
When livid bigotry has become a pervasive normalcy in South Karnataka districts, young Muslim women seem to look at new sartorial choices as impactful instruments of dissent, confidence, and, possibly a corporeal shield from male vigilantes, a common sight in the region.
In such contexts, religiosity and backwardness has become an obsolete framework to locate the increasing number hijab-wearing women from the second-generation post-Mandal Muslim women in colleges and universities.
They need to be analysed along with the factors of assertion, autonomy, social mobility, political consciousness and constitutional literacy, apart from the elements of piety.
An organic continuum
Today, a
number Muslim women are wearing the hijab, sometimes in opposition to their
unsupportive parents who were part of a more tolerable political past. For
these
women in scarves, pietistic submission to God, adhesion to a secular
Constitution, democratic expression of dissent, and the reclamation of public
places have all become an organic continuum of their being as Indian citizens
and Muslim. In such coterminous existence, one does not challenge the other.
Then, why is the hijab a problem now?
This takes us to the larger question of how majoritarian cultural national nationalism looks at minority sartoriality and corporeality. Violent protests for the hijab to be banned, from the US to India, reiterate the deceitful substratum of cultural nationalisms in a world in which religious minorities are made to accept cultural and social attributions from people and parties in power.
It wants to demark the body of cultural minorities. In any case, the visuals of a critical mass of educated women with their own sartorial choices and body markers in public places challenges the rational tarmac of far-right vigilantes in India, who cannot stomach anything beyond the tripodial matrix of assent, obedience and silence when it comes to women, irrespective of religion.
The only difference is that they seem to have left with no human conscience when sartorial and corporeal significations bear anything remotely Islamic.
PK Yasser Arafath is an Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Delhi. He has just published a volume (with Haris Qadeer) titled Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction, Routledge.
Source: linkedin
