Epistemological
Hijab
By Muqtedar Khan
Director of
International Studies
Chair, Political Science Department, Adrian College
Non-Resident Fellow, Brookings Institution
Washington, DC
The issue of “Hijab”,
its various implications and the politics surrounding
it, has become a globally polarizing issue. Whether
in France or in Turkey, the Hijab has become a
symbol for the cultural struggle between Islam
and modernity and between contemporary and traditional
interpretations of Islam.
The Hijab is to some a symbol of Islam’s
ascendance in the world, while for others it is
a reminder of the intransigent Muslim resistance
to things that first emerge in the West –
modernity, secularism, feminism, liberalism and
globalism. For some Muslims in France it is a
symbol of their resistance to French cultural
occupation over Arabs and Muslims in France. For
Islamists in Turkey it is an important means to
preserving the Islamic heritage of Turkey from
secular fundamentalism. For Non-Muslim observers
it is often an introduction to an Islam that has
misogynistic proclivities.
No matter what the perspective one employs, the
fact remains that the Hijab is an instrument of
segregation and containment. The Hijab in its
philosophical sense marks the Muslim woman for
separation and for “different” treatment
in all aspects of life; the most egregious being
the moral differentiation it engenders. Muslims
who claim that Hijab is an instrument that compels
society to treat women in a special, even exalted
way (in terms of security and respect) do not
work to ensure that the society has special affirmative
laws in place that will guarantee equal outcomes
for women, since the Hijab ultimately undermines
equal opportunity.
But the sartorial Hijab and its attendant social
practices of segregation, disenfranchisement and
marginalization of women, is but a symptom of
a more profound and civilizationally debilitating
form of Hijab that is practiced by contemporary
Muslim society. What is significant and must be
confronted with vigor is the Epistemological Hijab
that “good” Muslims insist on imposing
on “good” Muslim women. The Epistemological
Hijab is the traditional barrier that exists between
women and Islamic sources. Women have played a
marginal role in the interpretation of Islam and
articulation of the laws and rules that are forced
upon them. The Epistemological Hijab – the
barrier between women and Islamic sources –
has fundamentally rendered the articulation and
enforcement of Islamic laws undemocratic. This
undemocratic tradition privileges men and exploits
women. Its reconstitution is important and more
so now than before.
In the postcolonial era a strange paradox has
captivated the global Muslim community. The nearly
hundred-year-old Islamic revivalist movement that
is singularly responsible for the global significance
of Islam, has been driven by lay intellectuals.
Consider the following key figures of Islamic
revival; Jamaluddin Afghani, Hassan Al Banna,
Syed Qutb, Ali Shariata, Muhammad Iqbal, Abul
A’la Maududi, Khurshid Ahmed, Malik Bin
Nabi, Rashid Ghannoushi were all lay intellectuals,
many educated in the West. Many of them were of
course exposed to traditional Islamic sciences,
but none of them was an Islamic jurist.
But for some inexplicable reason the ascendant
Islam today is highly legalistic and Shariah-obsessed.
Islam in the mind of many Muslims is nothing but
Shariah – what it really means in operational
terms is that the beauty, the virtues and the
meaning of Islam is confined to the rather mundane
domain of medieval Islamic legalist discourse
-- Fiqh – which lacks the intellectual depth
of Falsafa (Islamic philosophy), the aesthetics
and the mystery of Kalam (Islamic theology) and
the spirituality and charisma of Tasawwuf (Islamic
mysticism).
We live today in an era of Islamic banking –
Shariah compliant transactions -- and Halal Hamburgers;
we ponder over the legality of eating marshmellows,
and deliberate over the propriety of women shaking
hands with men. Mind you all serious legal matters,
such as for example state-military relations,
international transactions, have very little input
from Islam or Muslim jurists, since the Muslim
world merely follows the conventions of Western/international
laws. Islamic legalism is itself confined primarily
to issues of personal matters only.
This peculiar legalism, which has colonized Islam
and the Muslim conscience, is a product of the
vulnerabilities of the Muslim man who has tried
to cope with his own insecurities in a world dominated
by other men. Muslim men today are not sovereign
beings. Other men dominate their world. The only
area where they exercise absolute sovereignty
is over the tiny domain called Islamic law. Here
they realize their manhood. They glorify themselves,
grant themselves exotic privileges and assure
themselves of their power by exercising it on
their women. This exercise of power is realized
by complete exclusion of women from participating
in the process of deriving and interpreting Islamic
rulings from the sources.
There is perhaps no other legal tradition extant
today where one has no say in the articulation
of laws that govern one’s entire life. Muslim
women have very little if no role in the process
of developing Islamic Fiqh. Even historically,
men and men alone have developed all the Madhahib
– legal schools, and legal principles, even
those that deal with the most private aspects
of female existence. Thus Islamic legalism has
descended as a shroud on the Muslim women, covering
her very essence from the world, disconnecting
her from her own reality, depriving her of the
right to understand and interpret her own being
and disabling her from being able to navigate
her own life. Islamic legalism fundamentality
veils the Muslim woman’s consciousness.
Frankly it dehumanizes women.
Muslims scholars and philosophers of every tradition
maintain that the essence of humanity is either
our moral compass or our reason or both. By preventing
Muslim women from exercising their reason to derive
the moral laws by which they live, Islamic legalism
denies them the most human of all exercises using
our reason to become capable of making moral judgments.
In a way Islamic legalism steals women’s
God given humanity from them.
Islamists are fond of repeating that in Islam
God is sovereign since He and He alone has the
right to make laws. Unfortunately this is a very
superficial understanding of Islam and fails to
recognize the distinction between revealed principles
(Wahy), human product (Fiqh). They obfuscate the
distinctions between the two and call it law (Shariah).
By insisting that the opinions and arguments of
long dead medieval jurists are actually divine
law, Islamists make jurists the God of Muslim
women and introduce a new and oppressive partition/veil
between the woman and her real God. In some cultures
this divine status of men over women is recognized
since men are sometimes referred to as the “majazi
khuda” (manifest God) of women.
If Muslim women wish to regain their humanity
and gain an equal moral status with men, which
is not denied to them in principle but only in
practice [within Islamic society], they must tear
the partition that separates them from their right
to understand and interpret Islamic sources and
act upon their own understanding.
They must tear asunder this epistemological Hijab
imposed by Islamic legalism that stands between
them and their God. Until then all discussions
about the cultural and physical will remain superficial
and contained within the context of the masculine
logic that currently exercises such supreme sovereignty
over Islamic principles and its derivative laws.
(Muqtedar Khan teaches at Adrian College and is
a Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
His website is www.ijtihad.org.
)
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