Politics of veiling

One does not need to be an apologist for the marginalisation of women within the Muslim world, nor sympathetic to the varied forms of their exclusion from public life, to realise how these issues have become politicised in problematic ways.

The issue of Muslim women’s empowerment and disempowerment are no longer issues for debate within Muslim societies. Especially visible markers such as veiling amongst Muslim women have now become internationally contested issues.

The issue of veiling by Muslim women is a major source of contestation within the West. Besides official moves to prevent women in burkinis to use beaches or banning use of the niqabs, even donning a hijab is enough to provoke harassment in public. However, the issue of veiling is not only viewed as an overt sign of women’s subjugation within the Western public discourse, veiling has also been used to justify incursions in other parts of the world.

The imposition of a veiling ban and other atrocities against women under the Taliban regime, for instance, provided a convenient excuse to justify the invasion of Afghanistan within the post-9/11 context.

The prominent Muslim anthropologist Laila Abu Lughod wrote eloquently about how women’s suppression by the Taliban was used to create justification for the US war in Afghanistan. Dissecting addresses given by Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, she demonstrates how the cause of rescuing Afghan women from the Taliban was used to gain support for the Nato intervention in Afghanistan.

The above analysis also importantly reveals how drawing attention to the unfair treatment of Afghan women also served the purpose of shifting attention away from exploring the history of the development of repressive regimes in the region and the US role in this history.

Such tactics are not new however. Consider, for instance, how colonialism created a justification for its empire by opposing sati or child marriage in the Indian subcontinent, or the selective concern about the plight of Egyptian women that focused on the veil as a sign of oppression. Such examples of colonial and post-colonial feminism have been described as the phenomenon of “white men saving brown women from brown men.”

Again, Laila Lughod or other prominent Muslim women’s voices, which speak of these issues, do not condone prevalent gender biases against women in Muslim countries. They do, however, urge a more sophisticated understanding of culture. Most importantly, Muslim anthropologists have rightly argued that veiling should not be confused with the lack of agency of Muslim women. Some have even spoken of veiling as a “portable seclusion”, allowing for relative mobility in societies where women’s movement otherwise remains restricted.

Not only was the cause of Afghani women politicised to intervene in Afghanistan, discussions surrounding post-conflict rebuilding have also revealed significant tensions and differences of opinion. Ill-conceived gender empowerment campaigns make local women activists vulnerable to denunciations by conservatives of various shades, whether Islamist or nationalist.

While the Taliban were pushed out of power a decade and a half ago, how much better is the life of an Afghani citizen and that of Afghani women as a whole? It is vital to avoid polarisations that place feminism on the side of the West, and make Afghani women fighting for their empowerment to be labelled as traitors.

It is unfortunate how political manipulations of women’s rights and imposed notions of feminism confuse and complicate the empowerment of women in Muslim countries.

Similar challenges have also emerged in Pakistan and many Arab countries pitting religio-cultural values against what are perceived to be imported notions of liberty. These tensions are a sign of our inability to sufficiently articulate and adopt indigenous and culturally appropriate agendas of empowerment.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 29^th, 2017.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.