ould 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.
