Women who believe that modest dressing can be demonstrated without observing hijab are coming under pressure. — Photo by Reuters

It is rather startling to note how the powerful ‘Women’s Lib’ movement in the 1970s was manhandled by certain sections of western society. They scrapped the intellectual aspects of the movement and used its fruits by simply exhibiting it as a way to justify nudity and questionable sense of dressing. This is what most frontline women activists of the movement bemoaned, alluding to the fact that their movement had been misinterpreted and its many positive social outcomes were misused.

Such is also the view of a majority of conservative Muslim thinkers — especially those who have been at the forefront of encouraging the use of the veil among Muslim women. Interestingly, a lot of young Muslim women who adorn hijab/burqa suggest that veiling demonstrates their liberation from becoming a slavish object of the pitfalls of the Women’s Lib movement. But just as one is correct to point out that these pitfalls involve ‘emancipated’ women who shroud their obvious objectification by describing it as liberation, one isn’t too far off the mark to also question the other side of the divide.

For example, can it be that when a woman who observes hijab and explains it as a liberating act, may as well be submitting to the historical Muslim male-driven tradition of claiming control over women? The immediate history of the misinterpreted aspects of the Women’s Lib movement suggests that its negative pitfalls, such as the widespread proliferation of commercial objectification of the female body, was/is largely the handiwork of men. At the other end, various Muslim women authors and thinkers believe that the observance of veil remains a dictate of Muslim men.

They say that the practice is an outcome of laws and social mores constructed over the last many centuries by judges, ulema, scholars and lawmakers who were all men. The Quran addresses ‘the faithful women’ who are told to shield their private parts and not to display their adornment ‘except what is apparent of it’. Scholarly disputes in the Muslim world revolve around what this last phrase means.

To modern Muslim thinkers like Professor Ziauddin Sardar, Iranian woman activist and art historian, Dr Faegheh Shirazi and a renowned Algerian scholar, Muhammad Arkoun, much of the Quran must be understood allegorically. This means its message is largely in the abstract domain that when comprehended and related in a literal manner may lead to misinterpretation. Such scholars believe that Muslim women enjoyed great autonomy in public and private life during the time of the Prophet (PBUH) — an autonomy that later Muslim rulers and ulema took away.

According to Prof Omid Safi, and Muslim women activists such as Asra Nomani and Amina Wadud, the issue of hijab is often used by conservative Muslims as a weapon against the struggle by those Muslim women who want to understand the autonomy enjoyed by women during the Prophet’s time, and who want to undo what came afterwards in the shape of various gender-biased laws and social practices aimed at subduing and controlling women. Reacting to the forced veiling practiced in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and in some parts of Pakistan, Prof Ziauddin Sardar says that modesty should not be reduced to a piece of cloth; rather it should be a total package of behaviour and a distinctive moral outlook.

He says that when the Quran talks about the ‘garment of piety’, it is suggesting a state of mind and of being as opposed to actual garments. He adds that (thus), no style of veiling will be sufficient if the moral intention of righteousness is not within the heart and mind of the person and that pieces of cloth have no moral conscience in and of themselves. For years, most progressive Muslim scholars have accused traditional and literalist interpretations of the faith on this issue. They practically propagate that it is women who alone are responsible for the lack of moral probity and modesty in society, and not men’s obsession with sex.

There have been cases in various Muslim countries where men after assaulting or raping a woman said that they did so because ‘she was asking for it’; meaning that not observing the veil amounted to an invitation to abuse. Such thinking unfortunately is not uncommon amongst many men in Muslim countries. While we busy ourselves in discussing the veil issue in western counties like France and secular Muslim republics like Turkey, bemoaning the discrimination faced by Muslim women there who observe the veil, we conveniently forget that in most Muslim countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and increasingly, Pakistan, women who believe that modest dressing can be demonstrated without observing hijab are coming under pressure.

Much of this pressure, of course, is coming from men — most of who blame an unveiled woman for their own sinful thoughts. Yet unveiled women also face a telling pressure from the ever-increasing numbers of veiled women. This begs the question: is it really liberation that a woman feels behind a veil, or is this liberation only about freeing oneself from the thought of ever daring to challenge male-dominated interpretations of exactly how a Muslim woman should dress and behave?