The hijab in India and Iran

The hijab in India and Iran

The Hijab – can the state tell women what to do? Nilanjana Bhowmick writes about what women choose to wear in India and Iran.

A Bangladeshi family worshiping at the Cave Hira in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Credit: Mohammed Tawsif Salam

In February 2022, a hijab controversy started suddenly in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. A group of young Muslim women wanted to wear the hijab, the head covering, inside their college classrooms. They stopped the women from entering the college because it was against the institute’s uniform policy. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party leads the Karnataka government. After protests and counter-protests, the Karnataka government made a rule against wearing the hijab in schools and colleges. Angry students took the protest to the state high court but the court ruled against them.

Then the matter went to the Indian Supreme Court. But in October 2022 the Indian Supreme Court was divided in the case. This means that the angry debate continues in the country.

A month earlier, almost 3,000 kilometres away in Iran, a very different hijab controversy started suddenly after the death of a 22-year-old woman. The country’s morality police arrested her because she did not wear a hijab.

Eyewitnesses said that the police beat Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman, after they put her in a police van. The police said this was not true and that Amini died because of a ‘sudden heart problem’. Her family said she was in very good health. There was anger across Iran as women – and supportive men – took to the streets. Amini’s death came to be a symbol of the state oppression of women across the world.

What a woman chooses to wear or not wear is her choice. For some women the hijab is a religious-patriarchal imposition and they have the right not to wear it. For other women, the choice to wear the hijab is also a right. This is a woman’s personal space – and when the state tells women what to wear or what not to wear and where, the state is interfering in the privacy and freedoms of its people.

I support the women in Iran because the hijab is an imposition on their lives. When they burn the hijab and show their hair in public, I applaud them for saying no to the suppression of their choice and freedoms. They risk penalties and worse.

In India, we are right to see the rule against the hijab as another attack on the minority Muslim community and their freedom to practise their religion. India’s secular constitution gives them that right.

What do women around the world want? To be free – it doesn’t matter what country they come from, their society, or culture. They want the world to let them be free, not to tell them what to do because of their wombs or the honour of the group they think that they carry in their vaginas. They do not want the state to tell them what to think and what to do, or what they choose to wear or not to wear.

Women in India and Iran are showing us that the hijab can be a symbol of freedom and also of oppression.

NOW TRY THE ORIGINAL:

https://newint.org/features/2022/12/05/view-india-hijab

(This article is in easier English so it is possible that we changed the words, the text structure, and the quotes.)