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| The Burka and the Bikini Aziz H. Poonawalla, October 20, 2002 Islam has respect for women hard-wired into
its fabric. While Islam makes much of the equal status of women to men, it
also specifically acknowledges that women are different. This is different
from the rhetoric of Feminism in the West, which asserts that women are
"equal" to men. The difference is subtle but profound. Along these lines, comparisons of women's
status, especially with regard to oppression, can be made between Islam
and western culture. The degradation of women in Saudi Arabia, for
example, is reprehensible, and only defended by those few Muslims who have
succumbed to tribal impulses and the inexplicable allure of ignorance,
lacking basic human decency as well as coherent understanding of their own
faith. Westerners and Muslims (and Western Muslims) alike can agree on the
obvious fact that the burka, as practiced by Wahabis and the Saudi
theocracy, is oppression in its purest form. But if we Muslims are to cast a critical
eye at ourselves, surely the West can do the same? For example, in the
matter of the bikini. Far from being an expression of freedom, the bikini
is as much a tool of oppression as the burka. Here follows a justification of this
statement, from an Islamic perspective (rather, of many possible Islamic
perspectives. Your mileage may vary). But to understand the nature of the
bikini, we must revisit the burka. What is the burka? As routinely imposed on
women, it is a full-length one-piece garment that covers the woman from
head to toe, almost invariably black. Usually the face is uncovered,
except in extreme cases where there is a veil or even worse, a metal
faceplate. This is almost exclusively a Sunni-Wahabi innovation of recent
times, whereas if you look at the modes of modest dress in other Islamic
societies you see much more healthy interpretations, ranging from the
two-piece colorful ridah garments worn by women in my own community, the
Dawoodi Bohras, to fully-Westernized business attire (jacket, pants)
topped with headdress or scarf. Many muslims living in America use a
particular form of headscarf known as hijab, which is a shawl that drapes
around the women's head and shoulders. It's a matter or ethnic and
cultural variance as to how much hair is visible, or whether the shoulders
are covered, or whether it's black or white or some other color. There is
an incredible variety of which non-Muslim commentators are almost
universally ignorant of - it's no exaggeration to say that the variety of
Islamic female fashion easily matches if not exceeds the variety of
fashion found in Western societies. In fact, since many Muslim communities
are Western, there is a healthy mixing between these two fashion
universes, with many innovative and (dare I say it?) attractive
innovations. However, none of these fashionable garments
are worth anything if they are imposed against the woman's will. However,
apart from a few cases (worst offender being Saudi Arabia, homeland of
Wahabism), modest dress is part of the culture and not a cruel imposition. It's important to emphasize that the Qur'an
places restrictions on womens' and men's dress (both). These restrictions
are solely for modesty, whose importance as a virtue is common to Judaism
and Christianity. Attractiveness is NOT the same as sexiness. It is
possible to be attractive and yet retain modesty, but sexiness is
inherently immodest, because it promotes women as sex objects. Modesty is
retaining your dignity - and maintaining your identity as a person, to be
respected on the basis of your character. Webster's dictionary defines it
as "humility respecting one's own merit." The concept of merit
is intrinsic to the Islamic concept of modesty as well. Many women choose burka freely, as well as lesser variations such as hijab or ridah. Even the most oppressive-seeming burka with metal faceplate and voluminous robes is actually a weapon in the hands of a woman when chosen willingly. My own wife wears ridah full-time, even to medical school, though I was initially against the idea. But I supported her in her desire to achieve her modesty, and the result has been astonishing. But the benefits she derives from wearing ridah are a topic for some other time. Contrast the Qur'anic prescription of
modest dress with the tribal custom of imposing oppressive dress on women.
It's not exaggeration to say that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity brought
the first concepts of equality between genders to tribal peoples who at
the time had decidedly primitive notions of gender roles. To take one
self-aimed example, pre-Islamic customs of burying first-born daughters
alive was stridently condemned by Muhammad SAW. Yet these practices still
persist in modern times - for example in Nigeria, where a woman was
sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. Also recently a woman was
sentenced to be buried up to her neck in sand and again stoned, for having
a child out of wedlock. And there is the case of the gang-rape of an
innocent girl in Pakistan, and riots in India. These kind of barbaric decisions are always
made in remote villages by a band of grizzled elder men, who invariably
call themselves an "Islamic court". The truth is that these are
immoral primitive tribal customs, which are used by the tribal elders as a
power play of enforcing their authority. They are wrapped in poorly-argued
Islamic reasoning, often bundled with some selective out-of-context
Qur'anic verse, so that no one dares argue. But this is not Islamic, it's
purely a primitive cultural practice, with its sole aim as a power play of
I-have-control-over-you. These tribal impulses of control are the
root cause of the Saudi burka, and the absurd punishments in Nigeria and
Pakistan, and the concept of honor killings. They also, to a lesser
degree, are the underlying philosophy behind the bikini, which is the real
subject of this essay. The bikini was invented in 1946 by an
engineer in Paris, Louis Reard (here's a history link via Google). The
historical record doesn't mention whether Reard was grizzled or an elder,
but he was definitely male, and the bikini was a invention specifically
designed to "stir the masses". What the bikini does is reduce
the woman to a caricature of sexual desire - by revealing almost every
part of her anatomy, it completes obliterates any trace of modesty (and
hence, undermines her respect in her own merit). It's true that some women wear bikinis
because they have pride in their bodies and don't care (or need) what men
think. But a larger fraction of women wearing them are doing so because
they want to influence the response of men in some way. Jim Henley called
this the "sexual power of women" but it is analogous to
appeasement. Whatever power the woman has, is being bent to serve the
desires of the other party (in this case, titillation of the male). One of
the major flaws in Jim's argument is unstated but implicit assumption that
the bikini is an expression of female power - but in fact, it's an abject
surrender. Is it really true that women have to strip down to two
strategic strips of cloth just to exercise their power? The bikini and the burka are so far to the
extremes that they meet again. They both serve to reduce women, from a
person, to an object. In the case of the burka, that object is
"slave". In the case of the bikini, that object is
"sex". The burka is forced upon women, for fear of consequences,
whereas women are induced to wear the bikini, out of desire for
consequences. But in both cases those consequences are to please males. The bikini and the burka can both be used
by women as expressions of power and independence. The burka, or ridah, or
hijab, can be a powerful weapon of modesty, if chosen freely (and in fact,
it is in Western countries like America that Qur'anic modes of modesty in
women's dress do finally take on the meaning they were intended to have,
because of the freedom of choice. America is the greatest Islamic country
on earth). Likewise, the woman wearing a bikini solely out of her personal
pride in her appearance has turned the bikini into a weapon of
self-expression. That said, the bikini is not Islamic,
because it is immodest. Whether you care about modesty or not of course is
irrelevant to the issue of whether you are being oppressed or not. But in the West, many women wear bikinis to try and attract the attention of men. And in the East, many women are forced to wear burka, especially cruelly oppressive versions. In that case, both are wrong and immoral[1], and this is why I claim that they are equally oppressive. Notes: Aziz H. Poonawalla runs the popular weblogs Shi'aPundit and UnMedia. Source: http://www.altmuslim.com/ |