On December 22, when Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah hinted that the restrictions on wearing hijab (headscarf) in educational institutions in the state would soon be lifted, the reaction of an overjoyed Muskan Khan was, “I had given up my education over the hijab. Now… I will continue my education.”
Khan, a second-year B.Com student in Mandya, hit the headlines in February 2022 for standing up to a group of Hindu boys who tried to bully her into removing her hijab inside her college. After the Karnataka government banned hijab in schools and colleges, she discontinued her education and “refused to take up” opportunities from colleges in other cities. Khan’s attitude indicates that if the ban is not lifted she wouldn’t mind remaining incompletely educated.
The ban was certainly unwarranted because the wearing of hijab does not affect any legitimate state interest, public order, health, or morality. But the bigger question is: What makes young Muslims such as Khan prioritise religious symbolism over something as important as education to the extent of giving it up?
Muskan Khan has been reportedly wearing the hijab since she was seven or eight years old. At such a young age, she could not have been intellectually mature enough to make an informed decision about any marker of religious identity. Her parents, in all probability, must have chosen the hijab for her, and wearing it over the years would have conditioned her into accepting its religious importance.
If this is the case, it would mean that even when courts uphold the Muslim students’ right to cover their heads, agreeing in good faith with their claim to decisional autonomy or conscientious belief as the case may be, it can still be asked if their volition is free from the constraints of another’s choice. In his 1958 essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, political theorist Isaiah Berlin called freedom from external constraints “negative liberty”, and “positive liberty” the freedom to pursue one’s choices with full autonomy.
In other words, if a court upholds the Muslim students’ positive liberty to wear the hijab, their negative liberty can still be questioned because coercion does not always take the form of physical threats or intimidation. An individual’s free will can be subverted through propaganda, indoctrination, or advertisement. This is the subject of Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: Life Without Free Will (2023).
For instance, there are several “Islamic” CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) schools in South India today — many of them controlled by traditionalist Muslim elite opposed to religious
reforms — where the hijab and skull cap are part of the uniform from classes I-XII, without which students are not allowed to enter the classrooms. Besides, many conservative Muslim families make their female members wear the hijab from a very young age.
Then there are rebarbative illustrations that depict Muslim women as two candies, one wrapped and the other unwrapped with flies devouring it. The disgusting insinuation is that only hijab-wearing women (represented by the wrapped candy) will remain unmolested; in contrast, women who don’t wear the hijab could excite sexual predators like unwrapped candies attracting flies.
These facts suggest that the conditioning of Muslim girls to adopt an “Islamic” attire does happen. Hence, the speculation about the free will of Muslim students who want to wear the hijab both inside and outside their classrooms.
The fact is that the Quran does not specify any attire for women except modest clothing (24:31, 33:59). It instructs them to “lower their gaze” (24:30-31) which would make sense only when they are not shrouded in a head-to-toe burqa.
Interestingly, the word hijab occurs eight times in the Quran (7:46, 17:45, 19:17, 33:53, 38:32, 41:5, 42:51 and 83:15) but not once in the meaning of headscarf as understood by Muslims today. It refers to an imaginary or real barrier between people or things.
In the Indian subcontinent, the most influential votary of feminine seclusion was Abul Ala Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami. His book Purdah and the Status of Women in Islam has been so widely quoted by Muslim theologians that it is now a byword for Muslim patriarchy.
In Maududi’s understanding of Islam, a Muslim woman cannot “wear glamorous clothes that attract attention, nor should she cherish the desire to display the charms of the face and the hand, nor should she walk in a manner as may invite the attention of others.”
He goes on to warn that according to Islam, “the real place for the woman is the house and she has been exempted from the outdoor duties so that she may lead a dignified and peaceful life at home and carry out her domestic responsibilities efficiently.”
And if any woman dissents from this view, it is because of “modern democracy [which] looks upon man as wholly independent and unaccountable and makes him his own legislator, and so renders all legislative business dependent on majority opinion.” The biggest culprit, of course, is the “concept of liberty [that] gave birth to the democratic system of government”.
Maududi wrote Purdah in 1939, which means that for more than eight decades his shocking misinterpretations of Islam have been percolating in Muslim minds, and now, have engendered a paradox where freedom of conscience is being used by liberated Muslim women to impose on themselves a symbol of patriarchy in the name of a religion that does not mandate it.
The writer is secretary-general of the Islamic Forum for the Promotion of Moderate Thought
Karnataka hijab ban row raises a question: Why is education not the priority for Muslim girls?
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18.01.2024
On December 22, when Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah hinted that the restrictions on wearing hijab (headscarf) in educational institutions in the state would soon be lifted, the reaction of an overjoyed Muskan Khan was, “I had given up my education over the hijab. Now… I will continue my education.”
Khan, a second-year B.Com student in Mandya, hit the headlines in February 2022 for standing up to a group of Hindu boys who tried to bully her into removing her hijab inside her college. After the Karnataka government banned hijab in schools and colleges, she discontinued her education and “refused to take up” opportunities from colleges in other cities. Khan’s attitude indicates that if the ban is not lifted she wouldn’t mind remaining incompletely educated.
The ban was certainly unwarranted because the wearing of hijab does not affect any legitimate state interest, public order, health, or morality. But the bigger question is: What makes young Muslims such as Khan prioritise religious symbolism over something as important as education to the extent of giving it up?
Muskan Khan has been reportedly wearing the hijab since she was seven or eight years old. At such a young age, she could not have been intellectually mature enough to make an informed decision about any marker of religious identity. Her parents, in all probability, must have chosen the hijab for her, and wearing it........
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