On 16 September 2022, a 17-year-old Iranian girl lost her life over a piece of cloth. The morality police in the capital city arrested Mahsa Amini and kept her in custody for a while over “the charge” of not wearing the headscarf “properly.” Later, she was moved to a hospital where she died under “suspicious” circumstances. The uprising that followed Amini’s death was massive in strength and rage, and 476 participants became martyrs.

On 1 January 2022, eight girls were asked to choose between their education and the piece of cloth they wore on their heads. These students from India were denied entry into their college because of their headscarves. The college principal demanded that they remove the headscarves to ensure uniformity in classrooms, saying they did not conform to the college rules and regulations. The students responded with protests, starting from Udupi, Karnataka, which gradually spread across the country. When the matter reached the High Court, the “hijab ban”, as it was called, was justified on the grounds that “hijab was not an essential religious practice.” When the matter reached the Supreme Court, the bench could not agree with each other and a split verdict ensued.

What is this piece of cloth, and why does it seem to cause such chaos in women’s lives?

Nowadays “hijab” is understood to be the headscarf that is predominantly worn by Muslim women. Yet, the headscarf is not limited to the Muslim community and has been part of many traditions in many cultures and has evolved to mean different things over the years. In the 21st century however, the headscarf, especially “hijab,” appears to be the focus of a global debate.

Amini’s death caused a worldwide uproar. A large number of celebrities, such as authors including J.K Rowling, activists, and politicians came in support of Iranian women. Women globally cut their hair in protest. The list of individuals who expressed solidarity with such a token of protest is diverse and endless— Oscar-winning Marion Cotillard, Juliette Binoche and other French stars and musicians, Angelina Jolie and her kids, Swedish lawmaker Abir-Al-Sahlani, Turkish singer Melek Mosso, and Indian actor Priyanka Chopra.

In India, the noise fizzled out with the split verdict from the Supreme Court. No celebrity spoke for these young girls who had been barred from getting an education because of the way they dressed, which was not, in the first place, completely strange to the Indian sub-continent. Nobody expressed support through social media videos wearing headscarves. Many right-wing handles on social media even mocked Indian Muslims for not learning from Iran who were “rightfully” discarding the piece of cloth and on the right path to progress and secularism.

Clearly, the noise found itself where the cloth had to be torn, burnt, and discarded.

But it was not the first time that women were resisting to get into clothes, rather than get out of it. Women’s attire in athletics is a testimony to a history of resistance in fashion and clothing. Multiple times, the Norwegian women’s Beach Handball team, for instance, requested a change in their sports attire, which was bikini bottoms, only to face rejection from the authorities. They went on to play in shorts and were heavily fined by the European Handball Federation. Serena Williams, the icon, was heavily criticised for choosing to wear a full-covering bodysuit for one of her matches. It was said that she was “going too far” with her choice of attire, even though she had clear health reasons for doing so. Sarah Voss, the 22-year-old gymnast, is known to have spurred an international sensation by wearing a full bodysuit to the European Gymnastics Championship in Basel. One article even mentions that “what was known from starters from other countries at international competitions from time to time for religious motives, the Hessian [Sarah Voss] made a demonstration [of wearing the body-suit] for self-determination.” This statement implies very clearly two things: first, “religious motives” are divorced from self-respect, self-determination and self-will; second, Sarah Voss’s decision to cover up and a Muslim woman’s decision to cover for the same activity (in this case, international sports) is never the same. Somehow, the former’s act is seen as resistance against misogyny and sexism, while the latter is simply understood as incapable of resisting the oppressive tool of misogyny— the headscarf.

What exactly is this specific misogyny that manifests itself in headscarves? The bearded, kohl-eyed, skullcap-donning men who unleash all possible terror and violence in the world. Headscarves, being understood as created by these men, then become a grave threat to a nation’s integrity and secular values. Therefore, countries like France go on to impose full blanket bans on any kind of head-covering, followed by Belgium, Sweden, Netherlands, China among others.

Iran, during the reign of Reza Shah (1923–41), enforced mandatory unveiling on women. In 1979, after the Iranian Revolution, veiling was made compulsory. “Both enforcements targeted women’s bodies and were met with significant resistance from within society.” (Arafath 2022)What does it mean when we say that both enforcements were met with resistance? If the problem was the veil, it was bound to end with the veil—either with the act of wearing it, or removing it. But it was not. Nothing starts and ends with the headscarf, but with power. Mahsa Amini died resisting the power that decided what was “moral” for her. Muslim women in India are resisting a power that has a career of committing anti-Muslim genocides and pogroms, and is growing increasingly fascist in nature. Both kinds of women are resisting a power structure that dehumanises them and strips them of their agency. Both forms of resistance are a fight for bodily sovereignty which is political in nature, but spiritual in its purpose. 

While the uprising in Iran was suspected to be a United States-led conspiracy to destabilise the Iranian government, protesters in India have been accused of having organisational links, even with Al-Qaeda. These accusations reflect nothing but misogyny inherent in the public and media when it comes to Muslim women’s agency “to think.” Their actions are almost always assumed to be controlled by a larger [masculine] authority, to lack any individualistic purpose, but to be guided by a political purpose that benefits those who puppet them; in this case, either the United States or terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda. Both of these power centers—either the imperialist, liberal-secular State or the violent Muslim masculine body with their opposing positions on the “headscarf”—are patriarchal in nature, and women’s bodies simply become battlefields in which they get into “international” conflicts. 

Nothing describes this better than Mona Eltahawy’s quote— “Muslim women are caught between a rock – an Islamophobic and racist right wing that is eager to demonize Muslim men, and to that end misuses our words and the ways we resist misogyny within our Muslim communities – and a hard place: our Muslim communities that are eager to defend Muslim men, and to that end try to silence us and shut down the ways we resist misogyny.”

The liberal-secular, progressive feminists of the world, instead of focusing on hegemonic bodies that snatch away Muslim women’s agency, shift their focus on to the cloth and the bodies that adorn them. They have endless conversations on headscarf; whether one should wear it, and whether wearing it really liberates, or oppresses them, etc. Who is largely absent from these conversations? Those who wear the veil, themselves. People who have never had to deal with the lived reality of a veil, and the religious and cultural aspects of it, spend excessive time contributing to and even dominating, these discourses, in the process victimising, hijacking, and even criminalising Muslim women.

And the hard place: while some Muslim men are visibly misogynistic and resort to violent practices in the name of Islam, the educated, literate, and well-versed ones among them who have the ideas of social justice, turn a blind eye to the violence within the community. Their eagerness to defend themselves and their community in front of a global Islamophobic population renders other visible injustices, most gendered ones, as “secondary” problems to be dealt with “later.”  This group of Muslim men will maintain an uncomfortable silence when women in Iran get murdered for not wearing headscarves “properly.”

Shirin Saidi writes, “The politicization of hijab impacts Muslim women’s sovereignty over their bodies most explicitly by dissuading women from practicing the skill and claiming their right to experience a full range of their own emotions.” The increased politicisation of a Muslim women’s headscarf is not limited to  headscarves. Everything about her existence becomes politicised and the image/visibility of a Muslim woman becomes volatile. She is alienated from the sovereignty over her body and she struggles to come to terms with her identity—social, religious, political and most importantly, spiritual. This is not to say that the experiences of those women who choose to wear headscarves citing political reasons, and associate the headscarf to their political identity, are invalid. The headscarf, being a non-homogenous entity in a non-homogenous community, carries a different religious and spiritual meaning to each and every Muslim woman. It is her right to be able to love it, hate it, or struggle with it. And to take away this right from her is a violation of her larger spiritual self, and her connection with God.

When I sat down to write an article titled “hijab: its presence and absence” during the Karnataka hijab ban, it was the first time I had decided to write about this dual battle in which every believing Muslim woman finds herself. Years had passed defending my men and my community to a population that would jump on any opportunity to demonise them, and easily unburden themselves and hand over the credit of patriarchy to the men in my community. I felt it was when Muslim women reclaimed their space within the movement that I had to speak my truth to power(s) and place myself visibly in the movement. And so I did. 

There were many reactions to the article: obvious trolls from the right-wing, discomfort from the left-liberal, love from the ones in the middle, and most of all, hostility from Muslim men. I was asked by a distressed Muslim male friend of mine in what way was I “contributing to the movement”. What amused me was the positionality he had claimed for himself in that question. Whereas feminists continued to tirelessly educate Muslim women on the “right” way to liberate themselves from misogyny and sexism, a revolutionary Muslim male was educating me on how to contribute to the movement—a movement about the headscarf, about the politicisation of our bodies, about the piece of cloth out of whose 100,000 interpretations and meanings he didn’t have to struggle with even one. I realised that my innocent friend had mistakenly thought that he had actually a place in this movement, when he never did. I realised that most Muslim men had not understood that Muslim women’s movement did not start yesterday with the “hijab ban”, and that Muslim women are by default born into multiple movements, not into any one of them. Eltahawy writes, “Indeed, the State oppresses us all, men and women. However, together the State, the Street, and the Home oppress women.” Patriarchy is universal and seeps into anything on which it can sustain. Similarly, men have dominated Muslim societies, especially in fields of jurisprudence, theology, and exegesis [interpretation of the holy text] which dominates one’s personal and public life. Muslim feminist thinkers like Amina Wadud, Fatima Mernissi, Asma Barlas, and Leila Ahmed have challenged this dominance through their works, thereby shaping the Muslim intellectual tradition of the 21st century.

However, many consider Muslim women’s ability to profess feminism and gender equality while being faithful Muslims an “oxymoron.” They think that in order to be feminist, one needed to be atheist. This reluctance to consider faith, especially Islamic faith, as a liberatory notion is widespread in a “liberal-secular and progressive” society. Upper-caste/upper-class/white/savarna feminisms not just fail to understand different feminisms that occur out of a variety of womanhoods (black womanhoods, Muslim womanhoods), but actively reflect their xenophobic, racist, and Islamophobic selves within their arguments against these feminisms.

Apart from a few Muslim men who believe that echoing a Muslim woman’s voice is ethical and the only way to become her ally, most understand Muslim women’s issues as “internal problems” that needed to be dealt with later, once the “bigger” battle had been fought. Muslim men terribly fail at recognising a Muslim woman as a person capable of attaining her higher spiritual self, of attaining worldly and unworldly wisdom, of attaining vast knowledge, of being able to reach God [without the help of a masculine interlocutor]. Without somehow discarding the patriarchy-induced blindness that they’ve religiously and socially sanctioned for themselves, Muslim men can never look at Muslim women and recognise them as equal social, political, religious and spiritual beings.

“Wavering between that [and this], [belonging] neither to these nor to those” [4:143].

And May God grant us the enormous strength to be able to resist both. Ameen.

About the Author:

Izza Ahsan is a student of Masters in Media & Cultural Studies, at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. Her areas of interest are caste-race relations, culture, religion, cinema, music & society. If not writing, she can be seen doing music gigs and hanging out with her guitar.

*Feature image by Sergey Vinogradov on Unsplash