Javed Anand: What is at stake in the hijab issue
Secularists must support rights of Muslims in an increasingly Islamophobic world, but they should be wary of strengthening the Muslim right in the process. To make sense of the contradictory voices within the community of secular-minded Indians on the raging hijab controversy, we would do well to recall a decades-old remark, in another context, of the US-based “Indian philosopher of language and mind”, Akeel Bilgrami: Sometimes who is saying it is as important as what is being said.
On the one hand are a large majority of secularists - women’s organisations, independent feminists, political parties - along with Muslim religious and political leaders, as also some secular-minded Muslim women and men, who see in the attempt of some pre-university colleges in BJP-ruled Karnataka to bar the wearing of hijab in classrooms as yet another attempt by Hindutva forces to impose their majoritarian agenda on the minorities. In full-throated support of the agitating Muslim girls, they believe they are defending the Muslim women’s constitutional right to freedom of religion, right to education, right to freedom of choice.
On the other hand, are the relatively fewer voices of Muslim
women and men at pains to point out that all the Quran asks of Muslim men and
women is that they dress “modestly” and “decently”. Neither the hijab nor the
full-body burqa has anything to do with the fundamental tenets of Islam.
Included among these voices are those of Zeenat Shaukat Ali (Islamic scholar,
author of The Empowerment of Women in Islam), Ghazala Wahab (author of Born a
Muslim: Some truths about Islam in India), Zakia Soman (co-convener, Bhartiya
Muslim Mahila Andolan), Shabnam Hashmi (Anhad), many members of Indian Muslims
for Secular Democracy (IMSD). It is a view they share with a host of
modern-day, internationally renowned scholars of Islam, both women and men…
Javed Anand: On RSS reassurances to Muslim, deeds matter more than words
The essay by AK Ramanujan censored by DU's
Academic Council
Sambhaji Brigade vandalised the Bhandarkar Institute in Pune in 2004
Javed Anand - Ms Wadud, we are
ashamed
Suspension
of academic in Kerala because he talked about fascism and Sangh Parivar
