#5 — Why are we so interested in the repression of Muslim women?
“What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in certain social and historical…
“What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world? Is it not a gross violation of women’s own understandings of what they are doing to simply denounce the burqa as a medieval imposition? One cannot reduce the diverse situations and attitudes of millions of Muslim women to a single item of clothing.” ~ Lila Abu-Lughod in ‘Do Muslim Women Need Saving?’
At a given point of time, one has about 24 friends in their life. I consider myself rather social and ‘extroverted’, so I think this number could apply to me. I am also self-indulgent enough to say I can pass off as ‘liberal’ and ‘woke’ and ‘moralistic’ by those looking to classify people with such labels. So, what I’m getting at is.. if Muslims make up ~11% of my country’s population, I should at least have 2–3 close friends who are also Muslim. No? No.
I can only think of one close friend who’s a Muslim — 67% less than ideal. Most others are — and it has always gone without saying — Savarna (upper caste) Hindu friends. Growing up too, I don’t recall my elders having close friends who were Muslim. When there were inter-faith marriages, they were only ever talked about as an aberration (bad, even if it worked) or a lesson (bad, and it didn’t even work). All this while we considered ourselves progressive. And to be fair, we are not uniquely racist — 86% Indians say their closest friends are from their own religious group. And Hindus and Muslims are no different from each other when it comes to this practice. 99% of married couples in India surveyed in 2019 shared religion with their spouse. This, too, is unsurprising given how couples who do dare to marry outside of their faith are brutally terrorized if not actually murdered. It’s often (insincerely) argued that this segregation is not from some inimical hatred or bias but really just “the way we have lived together for centuries”. But this segregation has also erased knowledge about one another and led to a reliance on stereotypes which are increasingly informed by divisive political narratives.
Despite how violently we assert our differences, we seemingly care a lot about the rights of Muslim women. I was fed with many narratives about how Muslim women in India were deeply repressed. I thought that they were barred from entering mosques; their husbands were polygamous and could divorce them on whim; and many other half-truths I never checked given I never knew many Muslim people myself. This distance was never exercised explicitly (although sometimes it was) but it was implicit and well-understood.
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Importantly, I learnt of the repression of Muslim women before I understood that of Hindu women. I imagined a Muslim woman clad in her burqa unable to tell pavement from road without feeling any dissonance as a Hindu woman who herself was afraid to step out in clothes I wore out of my own choice. All this feminism for Muslim women before I acknowledged and understood how women are ill-treated according to my own religion’s scriptures and contemporary practices. Brahmanical patriarchy was rarely a place of inspection because the Muslim woman’s status was always worse.
“No woman wears hijab by choice. Did women ever accept triple talaq malpractice by choice? Ask those daughters and sisters.”
— Yogi Adityanath/ Ajay Singh Bisht, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh
P.S. Imagine what fresh heaven would break lose if Yogi Ji truly did ask and listen to Muslim daughters and sisters..
Why are we so interested in the special repression of Muslim women? This dilemma — although eternally relevant — has become acute recently as college authorities, violent mobs of unemployed men, and even judicial courts across India took issue with women wearing hijabs to attend their classes. As we all watched women being harassed by men who violently insisted they remove their hijabs, I wondered if India hates its Muslims more than it hates its women. I asked myself..
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Who — and what — are we freeing Muslim women from? For many Indian women, covering their heads (through hijabs, ghoonghats or other clothing) allows them to step out of the house to go to work or simply for leisure. 60% Indian women cover their heads when stepping out. When you take away this freedom to cover her head, are you not possibly coercing women to stay home? Are you not adding the additional threat of violence from Islamphobic mobs because they covered their head in addition to the threat of violence from simply being a woman in public space in India? [And to indulge in some fun what aboutery, why only the hijabs? What about turbans, which are an essential religious practice to Sikh men? And the ghoongat, which Hindu women use to veil themselves from men aside from their husbands? Why are other head coverings such as the ghoongat and turbans tolerable and respectable but the hijab is not?]
Who are the oppressors of Muslim women and are they really that different from the oppressors of other women? Indians have long demonized the young Muslim man as barbaric, predatory and criminal. We see this stereotype in popular Bollywood movies such as Sooryavanshi, Padmavat, Slumdog Millionaire, The Hero: Love Story of a Spy, and many more. The Hindu man’s masculinity seems to always be in crisis. Today, the Hindu man is asked to bulk up and arm himself with rightwing camps in small towns so he can protect his Hindu sisters from love jihad (the holy war for love — if irony was spelled in five words). During India’s partition from Pakistan too, there were similar narratives to anathemize violence by Muslims while at the same time condoning and rationalizing violence by Hindus and Sikhs against Muslims.
“…the theme that the Muslim is strongly sexual, with an uncontrolled libido, and if you allow it free expression, then the Hindu and Sikh woman’s sexuality, till now kept in check by men of their communities, will be equally freed and become very dangerous. Built on it is the narrative of the masculinity of Muslims and the lack of it in Hindus — they are shown as weak, emasculated, non-meat eating — what rubbish. Thus, Hindus are shown suffering because of Muslims. The Hindu isn’t abducting or raping women. If he is indeed raping women, it is either because there has been a terrible provocation or it is an aberration. This is the narrative they are building all the time.” — Urvashi Butalia
What is the freedom we are gifting women? Will we stand for the freedom to choose even if the choice doesn’t suit our narrative and our privileged status in society? Let’s say we forced Muslim women to be free of their hijab. Can they wear anything they want or only clothing deemed ‘respectable’ and ‘tolerable’ by our intolerant republic? Can they go out in public without fearing sexual violence? Will we stand for their freedom from violence by the Indian state in Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat? Or are these violences acceptable but the hijab is not?
To draw some analogies (none of them perfect), why should we be surprised that Afghan women did not throw off their burqas when we know perfectly well that in our society it would not be appropriate to wear shorts to the Metropolitan Opera? … People wear the appropriate form of dress for their social communities and their social classes. They are guided by socially shared standards and signals of social status.. The ability to afford proper and appropriate cover affects choice. If we think that U.S. women live in a world of choice regarding clothing, we might also remind ourselves of the expression, “the tyranny of fashion.”
~Lila Abu-Lughod in Do Muslim Women Need Saving?
To be clear — Yes, Muslim women are subjugated. And yes, they are subjugated in ways specific to their religion. AS ARE OTHER WOMEN. To be clearer still, the interest we have shown in their subjugation — the kind that violates their privacy and harasses them in public spaces — comes from our intolerance, ignorance, and complete disinterest in understanding what freedoms they want. We have grown so distant and hateful that we will go to great lengths — even play pretend feminism — just so we can keep our unemployed mobs busy with violence against Muslim people in our country. Before we play feminist with our Islamophobic lens, let’s investigate how Brahmanical patriarchy subjugates women and Dalit people in our own homes and communities. Once we are standing up to these injustices, perhaps we can ask Muslim women what freedom to choose would mean for them?
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“Both instances — strict hijab in Iran and the prohibition of hijab in India and other countries — may appear to be antagonistic, but they aren’t really. Forcing a woman into a hijab, or forcing her out of one, isn’t about the hijab. It’s about the coercion. Robe her. Disrobe her. The age-old preoccupation of controlling and policing women.” ~Arundhati Roy
~
Truth also is the pursuit of it:
Like happiness, and it will not stand.
Even the verse begins to eat away
In the acid. Pursuit, pursuit;
A wind moves a little,
Moving in a circle, very cold.
How shall we say?
In ordinary discourse —
We must talk now. I am no longer sure of the words,
The clockwork of the world. What is inexplicable
Is the ‘preponderance of objects.’ The sky lights
Daily with that predominance
And we have become the present.
We must talk now. Fear
Is fear. But we abandon one another.
— George Oppen’s Leviathon
Things that informed this thought-web:
Lila Abu-Lughod’s “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?”
The dangerous twists and turns of Kannada TV media’s coverage of the hijab row, The News Minute
Video of a ‘reporter’ harassing a young girl who is wearing a hijab
The entire 2021 pew research report titled “Religion: tolerance and segregation in India”. You can also read this article for a quicker skim.
Urvashi Butalia’s book, “The other side of silence” which investigates real stories and made-up narratives about our partition from Pakistan
NewsLaundry’s article on How the Hindu man’s crisis of masculinity fuels Hindutva
The Hindu’s article on Love in the time of honour killings
Dynamics of inter-religious and inter-caste marriages in India, a paper by Kumudin Das, K. C. Das, T. K. Roy and P. K. Tripathy
Chandar Bhan Kaifi Dehelvi’s Hindu musalmanon ka ittihad, which was beautifully read by Fabeha Syed on her ‘Urdunama’ podcast. Excerpt from that ghazal below:
rahne meñ kuchh hai ‘kaifī’ barbād ho ke rahnā
kyā gosha-e-qafas meñ nāshād ho ke rahnā
sīkho vatan meñ apne āzād ho ke rahnā
gulzār-e-ārzū meñ shamshād ho ke rahnā
bāheñ gale meñ Daalo be-iḳhtiyār donoñ
haañ chhoḌ do ye ranjish ban jaao yaar donoñ