Veils Of Ignorance

Sipping chai with an elderly friend in Azamgarh one evening, we talked of various issues confronting the Muslims. Seeing women in burqa across the street, my elderly friend remarked, with utmost disgust, that be-purdagi had increased manifold. What he meant was that Muslim women were hardly observing purdah. This was astonishing for me, to say the least. For, in the last two months that I had been staying in Azamgarh, I had seen very few women without the burqa. When I expressed my surprise on his statement, he forcefully remarked: ‘But there are so many of them (women) on the street!’  

The problem was that with my modernist lens, I was looking only at the burqa and not the person behind it; my elderly friend, with years of history and memory behind him, was seeing the very public presence of women on the Muslim street. Purdah for him meant the seclusion of women and he was a witness to the breakdown of that traditional institution of seclusion and a fundamental transformation of the Muslim public sphere. The role of the burqa for him was pivotal in this transformation.

It is precisely this transformation of the Muslim public sphere that escapes the imagination of someone like Taslima Nasrin who argues that the burqa is an oppressive symbol which secludes Muslim women from participating in public life as normal citizens. Muslim societies are witnessing, what some would call a paradox: that as these societies are getting modernized, the burqa is getting more and more visible. What needs to be understood perhaps is that the burqa itself is a modern symbol. 

In earlier times, man and women shared different and distinct social spaces. Today that segregation no longer exists due to the exigencies of modern life. And if the burqa enables Muslim girls to cross the barriers of gender segregation by accessing schools and colleges, what is the problem? To her credit, Taslima has spent her life fighting for a gender-just Muslim society and that fight should continue. Yet one cannot help but disagree with her when she argues that it is the burqa which is keeping Muslim women backward. It is ironic, to say the least, that she ends up vilifying the same piece of cloth, which for scores of Muslim women, has meant access to the outer world.

That she fails to contextualise the burqa comes from her methodological problem of privileging the text. Marshalling evidence from the Quran and Hadis in order to prove that they sanction the burqa is arguing that Muslims are simply the caricatures of their holy texts. It is Orientalism of the worst kind -- it implies that in order to understand Muslims, all you need to do is to study the Quran and the Hadis. There is another breed of Muslims who follow the same method and they are the Muslim orthodoxy, the very same people against whom Taslima is fighting.  Again, it is very ironic that while they are opposed to each other, they share the very same assumptions about Muslims. 

It is too simplistic and crude to understand Muslims through texts; rather texts need to be understood in different but specific contexts. Otherwise, how does one understand the various interpretations of Quran and Hadis that exist within Muslim societies? How does one understand that the same Quran gets marshalled to support suicide bombing in the context of Palestine and condemn the same in India?

Taslima’s position on the burqa thus makes it very difficult to defend her writing. However, her freedom to write is a separate issue. She has every right to make her argument and to make it known to the world. Freedom to write should be an inalienable right even if it offends some sensibilities. Any attempt to browbeat her or to silence her through force and demonstrative violence is highly condemnable. 

However, it is a fact that not only the religious orthodox, but even parties as different as the Congress, the CPM and MIM have used her at some point to reconnect with their alienated Muslim votebank. So why is it that only moderate Muslims need to defend her? Why it is that it never occurs to people like Sugata Srinivasaraju to ask the so called secular political parties to come out in support of Taslima and condemn the Muslim violence, most recently in parts of Karnataka? Why must this onus to defend freedom of expression lie with the 'moderate Muslims'? 

Sugata is right when he says that the moderate Muslim voice is meek. But that is a smaller problem. The bigger problem is that the moderate Muslim voice has been neglected time and again by the Indian state. One only needs to recollect what happened during the Shah Bano controversy and how the Congress bent over backwards to please the Muslim orthodoxy. Given this state of affairs, moderate Muslims are sandwiched between religious conservatives and an apathetic state. Having almost nothing to fall back upon, there are not too many individuals willing to challenge the status quo.

Things are not going to change till the time the state realizes that ordinary Muslims do not treat their Ulama as their custodians. Till that time too, the false debate between Nasrin and the orthodox will also continue.

Arshad Alam is with the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia