http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\02\16\story_16-2-2010_pg3_2
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 view: The burqa champions -Ishtiaq Ahmed When Field Marshal Ayub Khan introduced the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, he was assailed by all the reactionary ulema because it regulated polygamy, introduced a minimum age for marriage and gave a share in property to grandchildren from their grandfather's property even when their own father had passed away My recent op-ed, 'The French burqa ban' (Daily Times, February 2, 2010), has elicited spirited responses in the Pakistani English-language newspapers. That is a sign of healthy exchange of views. As always the liberal-left defence of reactionary practices is the most hypocritical because it derives from not some deeply held commitment to reactionary culture. When the Taliban or al Qaeda defend the burqa as obligatory dress for pious women and then use the same to carry out terrorist attacks in their twisted reasoning, the burqa has served a double purpose: it has preserved the chastity of their female suicide bombers while enabling them to fight in the jihad. Additionally, if the burqa can be used by men to evade inspection then too it has served a 'noble' purpose. In 'The French burqa ban', I had based my opposition to it on two factual bases: one, that it can be used to mortally harm other, innocent human beings, and two, that it was a later accretion to the Muslim female dress code and was not part of the pristine Islamic community founded by the Prophet (PBUH). Nobody challenged my second argument, so I will not go over it again. I will address the first argument because on that occasion I only mentioned that the burqa can be used for terrorist activities. Now, I will give concrete evidence that should incontrovertibly establish the burqa as a dress code that has been used in recent times on a number of occasions to carry out terrorist acts in not only Pakistan and Afghanistan but elsewhere too. The Kuwait Times of December 12, 2009, under the caption 'Veiled suicide bomber was Danish says Somali Speaker' (http://www.kuwaittimes.net/read_news.php?newsid=MTE5Mjc4MzEwOA) narrates the tragic story of a suicide bomber, allegedly a 26-year-old Danish citizen of Somali descent, who killed 22 people including three government ministers in Mogadishu disguised as a veiled woman. The Speaker of the Somalian Parliament, Sheikh Aden Mohamed Madobe, remarked: "It is unfortunate that a child whose parents escaped Somalia's conflict and raised him in Europe came home with extremist ideologies and blew himself and innocent people up." His father denied the charges, but the fact remains that whosoever succeeded in getting close to the Somalian politicians was wearing a burqa. The Daily Times of February 9, 2010, informed that the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has dispatched eight female suicide bombers to target Punjab. Intelligence reports suggested that they were veiled and wore gloves and socks to conceal their identity. During 2007-2009, the Afghan and Pakistani media have reported several cases of burqa-clad terrorists. I need not labour the point that a similar crime can be committed anywhere in the world, including Europe, with the help of a burqa. Some years earlier, the French had banned the headscarf in school for girls because it was realised that a concerted campaign of the ulema in combination with mainly young male adults from families were preventing Muslim girls getting a modern education and developing awareness about their rights under French secular law, which upholds equality of both the sexes. The ban did not apply to girls who had become majors or when they were not at school. There were protests on that occasion but when the French government (a socialist one at that time) did not give in, the protests petered out quickly because by and large the young Muslim girls favoured an end to their inferior status in the conservative Maghreb culture. Another time when the sob-story about a powerless minuscule minority did not hold much water was when cases of female genital mutilation or female circumcision were reported from all over Europe. This barbaric practice was found among both Muslim and Christian immigrants in France from sub-Saharan Africa. I remember some crazy female American postmodernist freak protesting that it was white European men interfering in the cultural autonomy of African immigrants! When Field Marshal Ayub Khan introduced the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, he was assailed by all the reactionary ulema because it regulated polygamy, introduced a minimum age for marriage and gave a share in property to grandchildren from their grandfather's property even when their own father had passed away. The government stood its ground and the first step towards social reform was taken after 1,400 years. I am reminded of the Shah Bano Case (1985) in India in which cultural rights and freedom of choice were put forth as arguments to disqualify divorced aged Muslim women from claiming financial support from their ex-husbands. On that occasion it was not a question of the freedom of an individual but that of a community. Shah Bano, 64, was divorced by her husband of several decades, Mr Khan. On the advice of some well-wishers she applied for financial help from him as was granted to Indian citizens in such situations. Muslim conservatives took the stand that in Islam the ex-husband has no other obligation to support his former wife beyond iddat (a period of roughly four months to check if pregnancy had not occurred prior to divorce). The Indian Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Madhya Pradesh High Court that had fixed a nominal amount per month. Conservative Muslims, including the ulema, mobilised the largely uneducated and ignorant Muslim masses against the reform. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi caved in because he did not want to risk alienating the Muslim vote bank. Therefore, the Indian Parliament passed a law exempting Muslim women from benefitting from a progressive change in law. The opponents took the position that the Indian state had no right to interfere in the internal affairs of the Muslim community. On that occasion the Hindu Right came out in favour of abolition of Muslim personal law, but earlier when in the 1950s Jawaharlal Nehru had introduced legislation to reform Hindu personal law to improve the rights and status of Hindu women, the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS had opposed such measures. Their support of the abolition of Muslim personal law was surely hypocritical, but should that have been enough to dissuade progressives from supporting reform? I wonder. I probed this strange attitude of Pakistani progressives with the grand old man of the Pakistani left movement, Dada Amir Haider, in 1972. I wanted to understand why characters who pretended to uphold the emancipatory ethos of the French and Russian revolutions were no different in practice from those who believe that since the end of the Islamic Golden Age the world is constantly going astray. He gave a wry smile and said, "Such progressives have grown their beards deep inside their stomachs." Ishtiaq Ahmed is a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) and the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. He is also a Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University. He has published extensively on South Asian politics. At ISAS, he is currently working on a book, Is Pakistan a Garrison State? He can be reached at isa...@nus.edu.sg [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
