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Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Wearing the burqa is neither Islamic nor socially acceptable

Monday, 13 July 2009 16:52

Yasmin Alibhai Brown picks up in the Independent today where Rahila Gupta left off, on the burqa debate.

She writes:

‘I am a Shia Muslim and I abhor the burqa. I am offended by the unchallenged presumption that women covering their heads and bodies and now faces are more pious and true than am I.'

‘Islam in all its diverse forms entitles believers to a personal relationship with Allah – it cuts out middlemen, one reason its appeal extended to so many across the world. You can seek advice from learned scholars and imams, but they cannot come between your faith and the light of God.

‘Today control freaks who claim they have a special line to the Almighty have turned our world dark....The disease is progressive. It started 20 years ago with the hijab, donned then as a defiant symbol of identity, now a conscript's uniform. Then came the jilbab, the cloak, fought over in courts when schoolgirls were manipulated into claiming it as an essential Islamic garment. If so, hell awaits the female leaders of Pakistan and Bangladesh.’

Mark the irony of her claims that Islam embodies a direct relationship with God, shorn of intermediaries, so that believers are free to shape their relationship with the Divine in a personal manner, and then going on to claim that the hijab and jilbab are not manifestations of this direct, personal relationship devised by Muslim women of their own volition and on their own reading of Scripture, but a uniform exhorted upon them by ‘control freaks’. Is it so difficult for Alibhai-Brown to accept that though she may choose not to cover her head, her body, or her face, there are many Muslim women who would choose to do so?

‘White liberals frame this sinister development in terms of free choice and tolerance. Some write letters to this paper: What is the problem? It is all part of the rich diversity of our nation. They can rise to this challenge, show they are superhuman when it comes to liberty and forbearance.

‘They might not be quite so sanguine if their own daughters decided to be fully veiled or their sons became fanatic Islamicists and imposed purdah in the family. Such converts are springing up in Muslim families all over the land. Veils predate Islam and were never an injunction (modesty of attire for men and women is). Cultural protectionism has long been extended to those who came from old colonies, in part to atone for imperial hauteur. Redress was necessary then, not now’, she says.

No Muslim, male or female, could justify the ‘imposing’ of purdah on any other. The form of veiling adopted by a Muslim woman, or not, should always be the result of a decision entered into without coercion or sanction. ‘There is no compulsion in religion’, the Qur'an says, as Muslims well know.

‘Muslim women who show their hair are becoming an endangered species. We must fight back. Our covered-up sisters do not understand history, politics, struggles, their faith or equality', she says and quotes Gupta:

"This is a cloth that comes soaked in blood. We cannot debate the burqa or the hijab without reference to women in Iran, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia where the wearing of it are heavily policed and any slippages are met with violence.”

Which is paradoxical in the extreme. Is the best response to authoritarianism and the frustration of female will abroad, an authoritarianism and frustration of the female will at home? Is it right to blame Muslim women who adopt the veil for the subjugation of women elsewhere? And if so, might Muslim women who are discriminated against in societies that ban the veil (Turkey, some German states) blame their non covered counterparts for the obstacles they face?

Yusuf Smith posted a rejoinder to Gupta's ignorant 'soaked in blood' remarks which you can read here.

‘Naturists can't parade on the streets, go to school or take up jobs unless they cover their nakedness. Why should burqaed women get special consideration?’ Alibhai Brown asks.

What ‘special considerations’ have burqaed women espoused other than the right to express themselves and wear them?

‘Our social environment, fragile and precious, matters more than choice and custom should to British Muslims. If we don't compromise for the greater good, the future looks only more bitter and bleak.

‘Saying so doesn't make me the enemy of my people’, she writes. Well, in the urgent, open conversation on the burqa that she champions, why not let the people themselves decide?

Comments

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Hakim

|2009-07-14 08:51:40

Lets get something clear, she is Agha Khani who believe in the divinity of the Agha Khan, thus taking them outside the fold of orthodox Islam. The anecdote below is an example of the tradition she continues to champion.

In 1887, the colonial rulers of India, the British Raj, gave the Aga Khan rank and nobility in recognition of the help in suppressing a Muslim rebellion against the British. In recognition of helping the British suppress Muslim uprising against the British, the Aga Khan was hailed as a great leader by the British and thus the Aga Khan became the only religious or community leader in British India granted a personal gun salute

Yakoub - Bonkers

|2009-07-15 07:16:40

YAB has written some intelligent comment over the years, but since she threw in her lot with Taj Hargey, her comment pieces about Muslims have descended into over-wrought hyperbole.

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