The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside.

Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above.

The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shifted from Delhi to Kerala, I taught in a school which had a few Muslim students. Some of the girls wore the hijab, a few just made a show of it by putting it around the neck like an adornment, and one or two went to the extent of removing it totally once they reached the school. The school chose to ignore the issue. I think that was the wisest decision. That piece of cloth didn’t really make any remarkable difference to the school uniform.

Once I asked a girl why she wore that headgear and the answer was: “tradition”. I was reminded of a song in the movie The Fiddler on the Roof. The life of the Jews in the movie is as precarious as that of the man who stands on top of a sloping roof and plays his fiddle, a powerful metaphor in the movie. “How do we keep our balance?” The protagonist asks. And he says that he can answer that question in one word: tradition.

Tradition imposed a lot of restrictions on Muslim women, mostly because of the masculine fear of women. Caliph Ali (c 600-661) said that “Almighty Allah created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.” The Prophet and a lot of other men thought that women’s sexual desire was “untameable, dangerous and thus requiring repression through strict codes of conduct” (Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms).

Tariq Ali points out that the origin of this fear of women lay in the pre-Islamic Arab society where women played a central role in commerce, tribal politics and sex. Islam put an end to that feminine dominance with a lot of codes of conduct including the hijab, niqab, and chador.

As Muslim writer and sociologist Fatema Mernissi said, that veil from the Arab world “which was intended to protect them from violence in the street, would accompany them for centuries, whatever the security situation of the city.” The hijab and other similar dress items are vestiges of a ceaseless “civil war” in Mernissi’s view: war within Islam between the masculine and the feminine. The veil is a symbol of the repressed femininity.

I could only pity my Muslim girl students. I couldn’t tell them that the piece of cloth they carried as an appendage to the school uniform was a symbol of their subordination to a repressive patriarchal system. Their men would have rushed to school to chop my head off.

Yes, I had been warned from the time I landed in Kerala to be wary of Muslims, particularly because I had the habit of questioning certain traditions irreverently and vociferously, especially in my writings. When I chose to buy a particular house in 2015, the year I shifted to Kerala from Delhi, my relatives objected vehemently because the house stood in a Muslim neighbourhood. “Dangerous,” I was told in no uncertain terms. I bowed to their counsel.

My Muslim students weren’t any different from the other students, however. Their menfolk outside were remarkably different, I learnt gradually.

The girl in the Kochi school mentioned at the start of this post was forced to wear the hijab to school by certain fundamentalist men who wished to mark the Muslim identity on the Christian campus. It was a political act. Nothing to do with religion. It was much more than the “civil war” of Mernissi too. It was one of the many attempts made by the Muslims to assert their dominance in the state. It is easy to do that on a Christian campus. Imagine them trying to do something like that in North India!

The Quran never asks the women to wear any such headgear. It asks women to dress modestly and cover “their adornments.” The word “adornments” has been interpreted variously by later male exegetists. The design of that female dress code depends on the libido of the male exegetist, in simple words.

Many Muslim writers like Leila Ahmed and Fatima Mernissi think that the hijab and such other dress items are a symbol of male control of the female. They argue that the veil is patriarchal and not religious: an attempt to confine women’s influence by controlling their visibility. The veil is a male tool to domesticate the feminine vitality.

At any rate, I don’t wish to meddle with any religion’s traditions and dress codes. My view is that each individual should be left to their personal choices when it comes to things like dress. Simple.

A short story of mine inspired by one of my Muslim girl students: Shahina lets her hair down