Mullahs and Veil

Daily Times, August 14, 2006
EDITORIAL: Mullahs cannot win battle of veil for women

Of all people, Gamal al Banna, a brother of the founder of Egypt’s Ikhwan al Muslimun, Hasan al Banna, has declared that “neither the Quran nor the authentic Sunnah demands that women wear the hijab or cover their hair”. This is going to disturb the hornets’ nest of Islamic ‘scholars’ of all stripes, who will now start condemning him for suggesting a relatively permissive order for Muslim women. Al Banna twists the knife a bit more, saying that “the veil is not an Islamic tradition, but a pre-Islamic one, when Arab women covered their heads and left the upper parts of their chest uncovered”. He thinks the relevant Quranic verse commands women to cover their chests, not necessarily their heads.

The Arab world has gone where the Saudi conservatives wanted it to go. Nasserism was followed by veiled girl students at Al Azhar demanding the imposition of Shariah, and soon there were youths belonging to Gamaa Islamiyya willing to thrash women who refused to veil themselves in public. When the Arabs came to Afghanistan in 1996 to fight for the Taliban, the call for “true Islam” was already a slogan that was heard loud and clear in Pakistan. Ironically, “true Islam” usually applies to women and had begun spreading with General Zia’s Hudood Ordinance, ordaining that women anchors and announcers on PTV cover their heads. But the ulema on the right of Zia wanted more. In fact they wanted nothing short of a “shuttlecock”, a brutally punitive covering that renders women half blind.

Pakistan was reluctant to take the veil because of the embarrassing fact that Fatima Jinnah and Begum Liaquat Ali Khan were national icons without the veil, but the order of the Taliban affected many parts of the country nonetheless. After a few incidents on The Mall in Lahore, religious seminarians found that it was no use threatening Pakistani women to take the veil if the government was not willing and the Constitution allowed a woman to become head of government and state. But the environment was scary enough to force Benazir Bhutto to start fingering beads in public and Hasina Wajid of Bangladesh to wear a pious head-band. The Taliban whipped unveiled women in Kabul, but could not do so in Mazar-e-Sharif. When foreign-inspired Islamists began beating up unveiled women in the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, no one really took them seriously.

The truth is that the veil has become involved in a discussion of culture, and Islam allows all kinds of regional and local cultures to flourish under Shariah. While all clerics agree on the covering of the “zeenat” of women, they can’t agree on the precise nature of the veil. Yet, as culture retreats in the face of extremist thinking, there are unhealthy signs of repression in societies heretofore known as liberal. Eastward of India, Islam was always seen as having a soft tolerant face given to it by early Muslim missionaries who grasped the importance of local cultures in people’s lives. Neither Bangladesh nor Indonesia could have dreamed 20 years ago that there would be violence against unveiled women. Funnily, today the Pattani Muslims of southern Thailand — “revived” after their leader paid a visit to Saudi Arabia — proudly display prescriptive photos of a complete head-to-foot covering for women in a climate that is sure to suffocate them to death.

Bangladesh has been bedevilled by jihadi militias in the north and south of the country acting as social police in the areas they control. The cleric, who has empowered himself at the cost of the government that feels less and less able to enforce a moderate Constitution, has been dealing out harsh punishments to women in the countryside, among people who had never known strict Islam. Bengali Muslim women complain that Bangladesh is falling under the interpretation by Maulana Maududi of a Quranic edict of the strict veil that was actually meant only for the wives of the Prophet (peace be upon him), and that too in a specific case. And although the spiritual leader of Sudan, Hasan al Turabi, has muddied the waters for the hardline clerics by saying that women are not required to cover their heads and faces, many Muslims in Sudan and Somalia still continue to circumcise their daughters!

To impose the veil, a country needs theocratic rule, but theocracy doesn’t tend to last, as happened in Afghanistan. In Iran, where it survives, an imposed veil awaits the day of release. In Turkey, which punishes women who take the veil, at least one Islamic party went around illegally punishing unveiled women in cities where it had won the local elections. But today the Islamic party in government wants to join Europe where France disallows the veil as part of its cultural policy. If Turkey joins the EU, the Shariah will go, together with the veil and an interfering army!

By choosing the veil as a battlefront, the clergy has made a fatal mistake in the Islamic world. This is a battle it can never win because no one agrees on the nature of the veil prescribed by Islam. *