Hijab and a rant (over a cup of Kashmiri chai )

I’m drinking an incredibly sweet cup of kashmiri tea and going through my emails. I’ve deleted a few hundred old ones and have just come across a really nice one about hijab that made me want to write this post.

Here it is.

"...When I was about 7 or 8 I asked my mother this question of why we cover, and to my surprise she responded with, "Let's go shopping". So we headed out to the mall and passed by a few stores, we went into Claire's and saw all the beaded jewellery and the fake crystals all lying around in piles in the store. Some people touched them, some people picked them up then put them back down, some people tried them on, and most of them were not even noticed. Then we went to a diamond store. There, we saw only a few select pieces of jewellery. Rare stones, hidden under glass containers. Sealed with the highest security systems. Kept protected from the hands of those who couldn't pay the price of handling them. My mother looked at me and said, "Which would you rather be?"

This ties in nicely with a video about hijab that my friend showed me a few days ago. It got me thinking about women in Islam again. Over the past year I’ve heard too many talks and read too many articles where Muslim women are a target for criticism, where they are blamed and condemned and scolded. When it comes to women suddenly everything becomes a matter of debate. Should Muslim women be on TV? Should they be allowed to give presentations in mosques? Can they wear t-shirts with logos? Are pink and hijabs appropriate? Should they be going to university?

That’s why this video was a little breath of fresh air.



I don’t claim to know the answers to all of these above questions but the fact that women are always a topic of debate annoys me to say the least. Don’t we get enough of it from the media?! Has anyone seen Nicky Campbell’s show The Big Questions? Hijab and niqab have been the central subject one too many times.  Now why do Muslim men insist on pressing this subject? I feel as though Muslim women are constantly being reprimanded by Muslim men and stereotyped by the non Muslim population, so there’s no way of avoiding  criticism.

It’s as though some muslims believe that to judge the state of Islam in the West today we need to judge the state of the Muslim women.

Really, it feels like that sometimes.

Don’t get me wrong; I know this is not the attitude of all men and that yes, women do need to be corrected for the things that we do wrong, but then so do men! And I also have a lot of appreciation for the many scholars like Hamza Yusuf who stick up for us. But also, I’d like women to take the initiative to speak out for themselves more. Especially regarding women’s rights in Islam. There’s just something comically ironic about a Muslim man trying to persuade a crowd of non-Muslims that Muslim women are liberated. How are they going to believe that when there’s not a single Muslim woman in sight? If a woman tried to tell an audience of men what it felt like to be a man surely there’d be a room full of raised eyebrows? Because how can a woman know what it’s like to be a man?

So in the same way a man cannot really know what it’s like to be a woman wearing hijab in this society. Of course they know the rationale behind hijab but how can a man know how it truly makes us feel?

So women should be the one talking about issues like this, we shouldn't rely on our brothers all the time. In one of the debates about hijab in ‘The Big Questions’ a Muslim woman in the audience did just this, she spoke up about the benefits of hijab really forcefully and the audience looked simply stunned.

More of this please!

I’ve shortened this post considerably, there’s so much more I wanted to write but just haven’t got the time. And now my tea’s gone cold. Oh well, it’s worth it, this is an essential topic I’m always musing over and I thought it was about time I shared my thoughts about it. Please comment and let me know what you think!