The recent burqa debate spurred by French President Sarkozy has invited extreme views ranging from the indignant to the defensive.
He undoubtedly disturbed a hornet’s nest by his cavalier attitude and insensitive tirade against the burqa. There have been backlashes of defensive support for the burqa all over the world. The rhetoric is ironic especially seen in the context of the various instances where Carla Bruni’s nude pictures have figured regularly on websites. Don’t teach us what civilisation and progress means, Sarkozy is the general crux of messages being flung at him.
Being an Indian I would be equally outraged if I was not allowed to wear a saree or a salwar kameez in any other part of the world. It is true that every culture has the right to uphold it’s traditions and ethos. But in this obvious East verses West debate, aren’t we being churlish enough to uphold and condone a symbol of female subjugation. In India we have our own forms of the viel—the ghunghat, the odhni or the pallu. But the burqa is more than a garment. It is less a piece of clothing and more a shroud that reduces the person wearing it into a shadow, a blur. Can anybody from the non-Muslim world recall or remember even one admirable or famous burqa-clad lady? The answer is an emphatic no.
One of the most recognised faces of Muslim women in this century, Benazir Bhutto while describing her views on the burqa in her autobiography ‘Daughter of the East’ wrote
“My father’s reaction was just as welcome the day my mother covered me in a burqa for the first time. We had been on the train from Karachi to Larkana when my mother took the black, gauzy cloth out of her bag and draped it over me. ‘Pinkie(Benazir’s pet name) wore her burqa for the first time today,’ my mother told my father when we reached Al Murtaza. There was a long pause. ‘She doesn’t need to wear it,’ my father finally said. ‘ The Prophet himself said that the best veil is the veil of the eyes. Let her be judged by her character and her mind, not by her clothing.’ And I became the first Bhutto woman to
be released from a life spent in perpetual twilight.”
For a moment let us not take it as a Muslim verses non Muslim debate. Let us take it as a feminist issue. Would any community today want it’s one half to be these obscure, faceless, shapeless black blobs of enigmatic mystery? And for what purpose? So that the other half does not transgress it’s sanctity? We have these debates on in India, too. How women should dress and what is Bharatiya sanskriti. Many states recently wanted to ban jeans from colleges. Is this the only way we can think of maintaining the safety of women in our society?
In Western society, Feminism as a term was first used after the First International Women’s Conference in Paris in 1892. Derived from the French féministe, it meant a belief in and advocacy of equal rights for women based on the idea of the equality of the sexes.
The second wave exemplified by Betty Freidan’s 1963 bestseller ‘The Feminine Mystique’, was more intellectual, sombre in its emotional tone, reformist in its goals and overwhelmingly white in terms of its most visible spokeswomen. In this wave, feminists pushed beyond the early quest for political rights to fight for greater equality across the board, e.g., in education, the workplace and at home, laws against domestic violence and reproductive rights.
But the movement often saw men and not sex discrimination as the enemy, viewing domesticity and family life as a drudgery rather than a potential source of pleasure for both the sexes. It goes without saying that a movement that dubbed men as the enemy could never even take off in the conservative societies of Asia where women were expected to walk two steps behind, leave alone locking horns with their men.
However Eastern societies have not been living in a vacuum either. We have had our own traditions and norms for safeguarding the well being of women. Islam prohibited the killing of girls and gave women the right to divorce, child custody, alimony, and inheritance long before Western societies adopted
these principles.
So today it is not upto the figure heads of the Western world but upto each man in the Muslim world to take that significant step towards modernisation and logic. To release their women from the shackles of oblivion and obscurity. Of course, women in conservative societies of Asia have to be strong and enlightened enough to decide for themselves how much freedom is right for them. Each one of us has to coerce, cajole and extract from our habitat the optimum level of freedom required to evolve and flower to our true potential.
The key here is to evolve. If we go purely by tradition, then many of our traditional customs included sati, child marriage, illiteracy amongst females, chastity belts, dowry, ostracising of widows and female foeticide. But it is for us to strive to move away from these ills, step by step, consciously and deliberately. There is no salvation in clinging on to outdated customs that have lost their relevance long ago.
We need to remove the cobwebs of our minds and the mental burqas that restrain. The burqas of social conditioning, the centuries of diktats that tell us what we can do and what we can not do.
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