http://www.gulfnews.com/opinion/columns/nation/10327998.html
Illustration: Nino Jose Heredia/Gulf News
Finding freedom in Dubai
By Habiba Hamid, Special to Gulf News
Published: July 02, 2009, 22:48
I remember the first time I donned the niqab (or what some term the
burqa). At the time, I was very young and living an ardently religious life in
Jeddah - but my feminist conscience was burning away at me, insisting it was
the right thing to do.
To the consternation of my orthodox Muslim parents and peers alike, I
began to wear it - went shopping, bought the gear and stepped out into the
glaring sunlight of a Saudi day.
I categorically believed it defined the complete removal of my physical
self from the oppression of being subjected to scrutiny.
It was a tool against conforming to gendered expectations of
presentation, of being sexually objectified. It was the highest form of
assertion for my humanity as a female - going against the grain of the
strictures of fashion, media, and all those who choose to claim and dissect and
conquer the female self as if it were their right.
That, indeed, was the paradigm against which we all railed against as
civilised humans. How brutal is the life of a Muslim brown woman after all?
We all know the answer to that. As the most oppressed global group
particularly ravaged by colonialist aggressions, subject to rape as a tool of
war and at the same time to demilitarisation, we are even denied our rights to
agency and self-defence.
The trope of white women saving brown women from brown men was another
diktat which I sought to escape. Even the idea of "false consciousness"
infuriated with its patronising undercurrents; the only person I would need
saving from was the archetypal white woman, thank you very much.
Although it was my decision, the sheer hatred and intolerance I faced
from peers was painful so I eventually took it off, sticking to the hijab (head
scarf) alone.
Later in London, even adopting hijab became an arduous challenge. Could I
wear it and be allowed to freely contribute to society? I found glass ceilings
everywhere I looked. At sixteen, I challenged the dreadful home secretary in
the UK, Michael Howard QC, as to my right to wear the hijab, but to no avail.
To this day I can be actively discriminated against with no legal protection,
given that I hail from diverse ethnic origins (that is, no racial laws would
apply to me). I even had it ripped off my head by local hooligans.
One is prevented from grasping that ideal of human security in Britain if
one is either a niqabi or hijabi. I took the scarf off for this reason and also
because morality is decidedly not synonymous with apparel and I had failed to
live up to the standing of Islam.
And then it happened. Once I had removed any vestige of religious apparel
at British boardrooms, I at once felt exactly the kind of oppression I sought
to avoid by wearing the niqab. The scrutiny of being checked out and observed,
leered at as a young woman in predominantly old white male environment left me
with a sense of disgust no matter how conservatively dressed I was.
The feeling that I was right all along in wearing the niqab remains with
me to this day. I felt freer in niqab than in those boardrooms. What right does
anyone else have to scrutinise my person after all?
A friend advised me in Karachi once: "Habiba," he said, "people will
always judge you even if [you are] simply standing on the street." That changed
everything for me. Although I now observe no dress code whatsoever, I remain
internally a hijabi and retain a profound respect for the right to wear either
the hijab or niqab, believing in the inherent validity of the idea and of the
practice.
And then I found myself in Dubai. I was struck by its freedom - for the
first time in the East I lived the liberty which is so often boasted of in the
West but rarely experienced. French President Nicolas Sarkozy's secularists
will never know the freedom their constitution so arrogantly proclaims is
accorded to them - liberté and égalité indeed.
The irony is that Sarkozy's UAE/French accords were drafted by
extraordinarily sophisticated hijabi/niqabi government officers alike (the
majority in central government being women in the UAE). And they'll benefit his
nation in ways he decidedly won't be able to because of his views.
Women can't run to the beach, work and the mosque in France without
raising eyebrows, yet here it's easy. Perhaps Sarkozy should look more closely
at who wrote his economic agreements.
And to those Western burka wearing Muslim women, my message is this: If
you should seek to develop your minds and contribute to society but obviously
can't, because your own freedom is their domain, you should come to Dubai.
Habiba Hamid is an independent writer based in Dubai.
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