ISLAM HIJAB & KASHMIR
The author is grand daughter of Himayun Kabir ,iIndias first group of Ministers in Nehru Cabinet incharge of Petro Chemichal.
Ananya is phd & scholar at OXFORDCANBRIDGE trinity college in England
Veiled Revolution’ (On Islam, Hijab and Kashmir) The Telegraph Kolkata, 29th January 2001
http://www.telegraphindia.com/archive/1010129/index.htm
VEILED REVOLUTION
BY ANANYA JAHANARA KABIR On January 5, 2001, newspapers carried a photograph of Asiya Andrabi, head of the pro-Pakistan Duhktarane Milat, and three other women at a press conference in Srinagar. The women are clothed in black, except for their hands and their eyes. An average reader would describe their dress as burkha. It is perhaps more accurate to describe it as hijab. While burkha conjures up images of obsc
rantism, illiteracy and oppression, hijab bears very different connotations. As a Muslim student of mine at the University of California, Berkeley, declared, the muhajjaba (hijab-wearing woman) willingly covers her head. She participates not in patriarchy, but in a ?contra-modern revolution?.
I left India two months before December 6, 1992, still basking in the cosy glow of secularism. At Oxford, I encountered, among other things, the topsy-turvy world of pan-Islamism. I was bewildered by all those Muslim women at Oxbridge who were articulate and ambitious, but who foregrounded their Muslimness by wearing a headscarf. This was clearly a choice, not a compromise. To discover its reasons, I spoke to Muslim women from Malaysia, Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan and Chechnya, to British and American Muslims from Bengali, Punjabi, Hyderabadi and Kashmiri families. I wanted to understand, through these diverse women, the pull of the hijab, and not condemn it outright (much the easier option in the circles in which I move).
In the process I learnt that the terms burkha and purdah are not in currency among such women. Iranians wear the chador ? an overgarment resembling the south Asian burkha, but not necessarily black, teamed with an often rather fancy headscarf. Most Sunni Muslim women describe their Islamic dress as hijab (Arabic for ?modesty?). This can range from trousers and a turban-like headscarf to a long skirt and loose headscarf framing the neck and shoulders. The lowest common denominator is the headscarf, which signals ?I am Muslim and proud of being so?.
Secondly, hijab has more to do with constructing a neo-Islamic identity than remembering south Asian traditions. Most south Asian muhajjabas reject the salwar-kameez-dupatta or sari worn by their mothers (who are not necessarily burkha-clad) as ?un-Islamic?. They thereby bypass such inherited identities as Pakistani/ Bangladeshi/Indian, which in any case remain insufficiently defined in the case of families that left south Asia around the time of the Partition (and who prefer, therefore, ethnic labels such as Kashmiri, Bengali or Punjabi over national ones). By adopting, instead, the headscarf and modest ?Western clothes? they tap into a subculture of self-definition for various non-white women growing up in first world milieux ? be it France, Belgium or Germany.
Hijab enables such women to negotiate diasporic identity and participate in a wider discourse of ?discovering the truth about Western imperialism?. This discourse, disseminated ironically through the electronic media, constantly connects modernity with the colonialism of various ?Muslim peoples? and with American neo-imperialism. It brands 20th century ?modernizers? such as Mustapha Kemal Ataturk and the Shah of Iran as elitist and atheist genuflectors to Western culture, whose misguidedness crystallized in their mass unveiling of women. Hence the support of the chador by many Iranian feminists and the agitations by women in Turkish universities against Ataturk?s ban on headscarves in campuses.
This highly politicized Islam grants an agency to Muslim women in the Western world, finding visible expression in the headscarf and/or other forms of Islamic dress. For many young women, of course, it is simply a way of being different and, as some men might admit, seductively so (remember Pakeezah?). I once asked an extremely stylish Afghan student whether she would ever consider hijab. Her reply: ?My parents would never insist on it. But one day, after Jumma namaz, I walked out on the street with my headscarf. I sensed people looking at me strangely. Suddenly, I was different, and it felt powerful.? This power hit me when, on the streets of Copenhagen, I saw a young woman in headscarf and sequinned jeans, smoking a cigarette with insouciance. It struck me again when, at a San Francisco evening of ?Islamic protest poetry?, a woman, scarf as tight around head as trousers around hips, spoke of Allah and against the taliban?s treatment of her sisters.
Does all this have any relevance for India? The day after the Andrabi photograph appeared, I attended a symposium on Kashmir at Netaji Bhavan. A packed audience listened to the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front leader, Mohammed Yasin Malik, the vice president of the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party, Mehbooba Mufti, the senior journalist, Ved Bhasin, and others. We also heard questions testifying to the deep paranoia within members of the Indian mainstream (if we may thus characterize the predominantly Bengali Hindu, educated, male audience) regarding the capacity of the Kashmiris to govern themselves and their minority populations if granted autonomy and/or independence.
Amidst predictable questions about the JKLF?s setting of watches to Pakistani time, a senior academic asked whether Kashmiri Muslims would be able to protect the rights of women by preventing the imposition of the burkha. That the Andrabi photograph had done its ideological work was evident in the academic?s reference to that very photograph within his question. Was it not astonishing, I wondered, that those thus concerned about the rights of Kashmiri women were silent about the targeted rape of countless such women, young and old, about which we had just heard? Was it not astonishing that our intellectuals so readily transfer stereotypes of Islamic anti-feminism ? effectively congealed in the image of the burkha-clad (usually poor and illiterate) Muslim woman ? to a woman in hijab capable of summoning a press conference?
In dismissing what she called ?the burkha thing?, Mehbooba Mufti declared, ?People from outside do not have to teach us Kashmiris about Islam.? She was probably referring to hardline Muslim groups parading a particular mode of hijab as the only way to interpret the Quranic injunction (Sura Noor, 24:31) that believing women ?draw their veils over their bosoms?. Mufti?s dupatta-covered head was perhaps her own interpretation of that injunction. What even our most well-meaning ?secularists? need to remember is wearing Islam on one?s sleeve, or one?s head, does not per se signal, ?here is an oppressed/fundamentalist woman?. Choice and context are more important than the outward form of female dress.
We require, instead, a nuanced understanding of which pan-Islamic trends have an impact on south Asian Muslims, and why. Simultaneously, we urgently need to unpack that lumpen category, ?the minority community?, in terms of region and socio-economic status before assessing the diverse ways in which Muslim women seek empowerment while exercising their right to retain the framework of faith. Only then can we distinguish between Shah Bano and Asiya Andrabi, for instance. Only then can we ask why in highly literate Kerala, Muslim women increasingly wear the headscarf (rather than burkha) and demand entry into the masjid, while Indian Muslim women elsewhere remain ignorant that Islam does not prevent them from praying in masjids any more than it insists they don the burkha.
The author is research fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge
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“Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.” – Unknown