I have lost count of the times that I have been admonished, chastised, ordered, requested, advised, politely reminded to cover my face. My usual stance is one of insolence. I invariably refuse with a ‘Why should I?’ partly because I can’t stand being told what to do and partly because to draw a veil over my face just because someone has told me to and not due to religious conviction is nothing short of hypocrisy. Concomitantly, I have had many confrontations with those self-appointed vigilante types who want to give me free spiritual guidance.
“Sister,” they begin. “You should really cover your face.” “But there are hadith that state the contrary,” I retort in my defense.
“It is forbidden for women on pilgrimage to cover their faces. And besides, why can’t we follow the verse in the Qur’an that tells both men and women to ‘lower their gaze and guard their modesty’?”
I can’t help but find it rather odd that men here find themselves exempt from this simple commandment and leer with impunity. “Why is that never questioned?” I rhetorically wonder to myself. “How comes it’s always the women who are to blame?”
The point is that the veiling of the face has much more to do with cultural considerations than religious ones. This is why I was rather amazed on my recent trip to England to find several women who were definitely not of Arab extraction donning the face veil.
I grew up in London, was educated there and other than on the Edgware Road or other favorite shabaab tourist haunts, you’d be hard-placed to have spotted a woman with a niqaab. Way before the whole “clash of civilizations” debate had begun and prior to the advent of “Islamic fundamentalism” dominating the headlines, headscarves were not uncommon, but face covers? In suburbia? Never.
Jack Straw recently created a furor with his comments requesting his constituents to unveil their faces when visiting him. As usual, the Muslim reaction was overstated, ineffectual and, in my estimation, wholly counterproductive.
Women took to the streets, faces veiled in defiance, protesting the right to dress how they wanted. “How would you like it,” they demanded of the beleaguered politician, “if we asked you to remove your clothing?” Muslim voters threatened to boycott the Speaker of the House at the next election, inadvertently bringing in the fascist BNP candidate as their member of Parliament instead.
To me the whole scenario was nothing short of the kind of irony-loaded pathos that only serves to further reinforce the abhorrent bigoted stereotypes that I thought we were supposed to be working hard to distance ourselves from. If anything, this latching onto a non-issue that is not even based in religion compounds and confuses the legitimate and viable right for Muslim women to wear hijab.
Take the decision by the French state to ban headscarves in schools, thereby depriving certain students from being educated. This argument, funnily enough, is at the diametrically polar end of compulsory veiling.
After all, in the name of secularism or democracy or freedom or whatever you want to call it, how can you justify forcing people to not wear a garment on the basis that they are being forced to wear it? If the objective of this policy is to enlighten, emancipate or liberate these women from their male oppressors, then surely the most sensible thing to do would be to educate them rather than force them to stay within the confines of such a stifling environment? Effigies of the veiled Virgin Mary or pictures of nuns in their habits always conjure up images of piety and devotion to God. However, when it comes to a Muslim woman choosing to express her modesty through hijab, the entire concept is greeted by feminists and human rights groups as an affront to civil liberty and a symbol of suppression. There is this implicit double standard in the inequality and iniquity between the choice to cover and not to cover.
The less you wear, it seems, the more liberated and progressive you are.
Strange, considering the suffragette struggle was underpinned by the ambition to prevent women from appearing as mere sex objects. Stranger still when you consider a recent US poll that found over 30 percent of Americans asked believed that rape victims “were responsible” for this hideous assault because of their dress or provocative appearance.
Islam encourages its practitioners to abide by the laws of the country they live in. Muslims are always encouraged to adopt the path of moderation. We are commanded not to dwell upon insignificant matters and hence make religion burdensome. And yet this is exactly what we do best.
We spend valuable time playing Islamic trivial pursuit in lieu of following God’s orders and enriching ourselves and the communities we live in.
I can well imagine that the veiling of the face in a society where there is already so much misconception about our religion would only further fuel suspicion and intolerance. I think that British Muslims have more serious issues to contend with than alienating the society that plays host to them. Unlike their French counterparts, they enjoy the liberty of observing the Islamic dress code and their democratically elected government has engaged in major initiatives to accommodate the free practice of their religion.
I wonder why it is that this is never highlighted or appreciated?
As seems to be the case with the majority of Muslim immigrant populations much of the problems that they face stem from educational backwardness and resulting economic marginalization. Instead of haranguing about what it is that the government has done for them, they should seriously be asking themselves what it is that they have done for society. Such introspection might lead them to the conclusion that other than demanding the rights that are often denied to them in the countries that they came from and creating controversy and disunity they have contributed little else.
