he shrill
opposition of many Muslims to the French ban on the face veil has only
reinforced my conviction that a thorough
reform, indeed nothing less than a paradigm shift, in the ways in which
Muslims understand Islam is more than overdue. My point is simple:
Muslims are by and large guilty of equating their own historically
produced and conventionally understood readings of Islam as equivalent
to and wholly synonymous with Islam itself or the divine will per se.
Since these understandings are humanly produced and hence necessarily
flawed and limited, to insist that these represent ‘true’ Islam or the
divine will itself is to be guilty of the cardinal sin of shirk,
or associationism. Such a claim is in effect (even if this is not the
perceived intention) tantamount to equating humans with god by equating
god’s word with human, producing therefore necessarily flawed
understandings of it.
At the outset, let me clarify that although I am
convinced that the face veil has no sanction whatsoever in the Koran and
I agree that it is extremely debilitating and degrading for women, I am
not convinced that banning it by law is the best way to reform the
custom out of existence. That said, I also insist, contrary to what many
Muslim critics of the French ban argue, that banning the veil is not
tantamount to an attack on Islam although it may be an assault on Muslim
communal sentiments that seem in this case to be premised on the visible
degradation of Muslim women. To claim, as, for instance, the ignorant
mullahs of Deoband recently did (in an appeal to the government of India
to sever ties with France), that the face veil is an integral part of
Islamic belief is wholly erroneous. This ridiculous argument only
reflects the general tendency, pointed out earlier, of Muslims, led by
their ignorant mullahs, daring to equate their own fallible and humanly
conditioned understandings of Islam with Islam or the divine will per
se.
It should be obvious to anyone who has read the Koran
that nowhere does it specify that Muslim women should wear a specific
sort of dress. Neither does it state that women should cover their
faces. It is true that the Koran lays down certain principles of modesty
in dressing but it does not specify precisely what people should wear,
this being left to personal discretion and open to variation depending
on local custom. Such principles apply both to males and females and are
not specific to females alone. Unlike what the mullahs urge, based on
rules that they have themselves devised, the Koran does not insist that
Muslim women must be wrapped up in black sacks. To insist that this is a
compulsory uniform for Muslim women is to be guilty of inventing rules
and restrictions that have no Koranic warrant. To impose such rules in
the name of Islam is a crime, for it is tantamount to claim to know the
Koran better than the One whose word it is believed to be.
To insist, as the mullahs do, on a trap-like medieval
Arab dress for women that effectively subjects them to enforced
domesticity and abject subservience to men reflects another painful
reality of conventional Muslim (mis)understandings of Islam: the notion
that Arab culture is somehow integral to Islam and inseparable from it.
Hence the widespread belief that Arabs are more ‘authentic’ Muslims than
we are, that Arabs are superior to non-Arab Muslims (hence the
prohibition on Arab women marrying non-Arab men in some schools of
fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence), that the Arab syeds have special
privileges and deserve particular honour, that Arabic mosque
architecture is more ‘Islamic’ than other styles, that Arab dates are
more ‘holy’ than non-Arab dates, that Arabic is the language spoken in
heaven and so on.
Arab cultural supremacism has played havoc with the
notion, so integral to the Koran, of Islam as the universal faith – as
the faith not just of the Prophet Muhammad but indeed that of all the
other prophets of god, whom god has sent to every people, only few of
whom were possibly conversant in Arabic, prayed and preached in that
language or called their faith by the particular Arabic term ‘Islam’. (I
suppose that if they used any term to define their ‘Islam’, it would
have been in their own languages and would have conveyed the same sense
as what ‘Islam’ means in Arabic i.e. submission to god). To privilege
Arabic culture in the manner that many Muslims, including those
hollering for the face veil, do, is surely a form of cultural idolatry
(defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “extreme admiration, love, or
reverence for something or someone”) that has no warrant in the Koran
whatsoever.
By conflating Islam with Arabic culture and, on this
basis, insisting that the face veil is normative for all Muslim women
and for all time, the mullahs and their ignorant followers effectively
declare that to be Muslim one must conform to, or at least privilege,
seventh century Arabic cultural practices and norms. In making this
audacious claim that freezes lived Islam into a fixed cultural mould and
renders it incapable of adjusting to new cultural contexts, the ignorant
mullahs are completely unmindful of the immense practical difficulties
as well as psychological traumas that their ridiculous pronouncements
produce for non-Arab Muslims, who happen to form the vast majority of
the world’s Muslim population.
Much has been written about the shameless hypocrisy of
many Muslim men, brainwashed by their ignorant and scheming clerics, in
insisting on rules of ‘modesty’, including in matters of dress, for
Muslim women while conveniently ignoring that modesty, as the Koran
suggests, is for both genders to observe. I do not wish to revisit that
debate here but only want to point to the blatant double standards of
the champions of the face veil. Women, they insist, based on some
(probably fabricated) Hadith reports and not the Koran, are
wholly awrah, something to be concealed fully and hidden from
public gaze, allegedly because women are by definition, by their very
biology as it were, sources of temptation and fitna (strife).
Even their voices, they quote another Hadith as declaring, are awrah
and so no woman should speak to an unrelated man. The justification the
mullahs proffer for this horrendously misogynist prohibition is that
women are supposedly so sexually stimulating that if men not just see
their faces but even so much as hear their voices, they would be thrown
into the throes of sexual excitement. And that would cause the entire
edifice of ‘morality’ to come tumbling down.
Those who have read the Koran (without the lenses
supplied by the mullahs) will know that there is nothing in the Koran
that sanctions this perspective. If men are so weak and so sexually
charged that the mere sound of a woman’s voice will drive them astray by
exciting their sexual desires, why should women be punished for the
sexual obsession of men? The Koran (and logic too) insists that no one
shall bear the burdens of the sins of others. That being the case, why
must women be punished – hidden behind veils, locked up in their
homes, denied access to the public sphere, left economically and
educationally completely deprived and therefore utterly dependent on
sexually frustrated men – just because men are supposedly unable to
control their overcharged libidos? To force women to pay for the sins of
men is certainly unjust by every reasonable standard. It definitely
contradicts the clear Koranic declaration: “No soul bears the sins of
another soul. Every human being is responsible for his own works” (53:
38-39). But will the mullahs, wedded to their own created
interpretations of Islam instead of to the Koran, listen to the voice of
reason?
Anyone who travels in the Middle East, the supposed
‘heartland of Islam’, will be confronted by the gross violation of the
above-mentioned Koranic dictum on a massive scale. He or she will be
faced with the frightening spectacle of women forced to hide behind
black sheets, their faces completely invisible, because the mullahs have
declared that this is how women must ‘preserve’ their modesty. On the
other hand, Muslim men will dress as they please, in as revealing and as
immodest a manner as they like, including in the latest western
fashions. (It is a different matter that many Middle Eastern women sport
the skimpiest of miniskirts and even the most tantalising belly dance
costumes under their burkhas, and that a vast number of them, as in
Iran, so I hear, simply itch to throw off the veils that have been
forced on them by the mullahs – such is the hypocrisy these gendered
dress codes necessarily generate.)
The fact that women, and not just men, have sexual
desires and that they too could be sexually excited at seeing ‘strange’
men doesn’t seem to matter a whit to the mullahs, who dare not impose on
Muslim men the same harsh rules they can on women. If the absurd logic
of the mullahs – that the mere sight or voice of a woman is bound to
sexually excite men and set off fitna on an uncontrollable scale,
and that therefore the former must be silenced by compulsory veiling
(not just of the body, including the face, but of the voice too) – is to
be taken to its logical culmination, let them order men, the guilty
gender, to be locked up in their homes rather than punishing women for
men’s crimes.
The neurotic (there is no better word to describe it)
obsession of the mullahs and their blind followers with the constant
policing of Muslim women constantly reinforces the deeply rooted notion
that women are simply tantalising sexual objects and that men constantly
obsess about sex. In this way this discourse completely over-sexualises
men as well as women. This has become so ingrained in the general Muslim
psyche as to be transformed into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Curiously,
this notion is wholly absent in the Koran but fully present in the
Hadith and in other humanly crafted texts (which are replete with
misogynist narrations that completely defy and contradict Koranic logic)
which the mullahs in effect privilege over god’s word by insisting that
the Koran can only be read in the light of their pronouncements.
The un-Koranic notion of women as simply sexual beings
pervades Muslim cultures and societies worldwide, making for all sorts
of enormities: the inability of Muslim men and women to relate to each
other sensibly or even to see each other in other than just sexual
terms. It leads to an enormous and painfully exaggerated obsession with
sex on the part of men. The more women are ‘sexualised’ by being
perceived as sexual beings and subjected to all sorts of ridiculous
restrictions on that account, the more men’s obsession with sex mounts,
producing a completely neurotic personality. The more women are denied
access to the public sphere, together with chances of normal, non-sexual
interaction with men, the greater the inability to conceive of the
possibility of interaction between the genders in anything but sexual
terms.
This accounts in large measure for the general
impression of Muslim men as sexually frustrated and sex-obsessed
creatures. That is not to say, of course, that this is a specifically
Muslim issue, hypersexuality being glorified in many non-Muslim cultures
too. I admit this is a somewhat exaggerated stereotype. Yet all
stereotypes, to gain acceptance, must contain at least a grain of truth.
Denied any opportunity for interacting on even a non-sexual level with
women, Muslim men, the mullahs insist, must inhabit an entirely male
public space. This in turn leads to all sorts of complications and
frustrations, including unhappy marriages that women find themselves
trapped in because Muslim men are trained to perceive women as sexual
beings and are generally rendered incapable of conceiving marriage as an
egalitarian relationship between two equals based on reciprocity.
In their dogged commitment to the fiercely patriarchal
and misogynist laws that they have themselves generated and falsely
attributed to the Koran and god, the mullahs and their ignorant blind
followers simply do not care what havoc they have created and continue
to insist on creating. And if anyone dares to challenge them, calling
them back to the Koran and appealing to them to desist from passing off
their ideas and rules as the word of god, they quickly pounce on him or
her as a ‘heretic’ and impute all sorts of false motives. This being the
case, the prospects for reasoned debate on the women’s question in
Muslim societies remain bleak.
(K. Itarwala is a regular columnist for the website
NewAgeIslam.com. This article was posted on the website on April 18,
2011.)