By Adamu Adamu, dailytrust.[/b][b]

In the recent past, Muslim students in Lagos and Osun states sued their governments for the right of Muslim girls in public schools to wear hijab, the Islamic body covering required of Muslim females; and a furore was let loose, and the matter ended in court which ruled that they were not entitled to that right.

It is all a pity because it is an issue whose solution needs a dose of tolerance and cultural sensitivity not legalism or litigation and has now been muddled by a secular judicial process ill-prepared to protect religious rights and averse to promoting moral values, and muddied even further by an intolerant Wesoxicated state elite that mistakes subtle Islamophobia for progressiveness.

The argument is that the hijab is oppressive, discriminatory and anti-modern and that the demand for it is ill-timed. Some have asked why the issue of hijab at this time; but previous denial of a right or delay in asking for it will not erase its essence or alter its dueness or put an end to the appropriateness for its demand, and so cannot be used as justification to deny its being granted whenever it is made.

It is indeed difficult to see how a measure that confers no material advantage on the wearer can be discriminatory, especially considering the fact that non-Muslims students are not prevented from wearing it. And if it looks oppressive, it does so only in the eyes of outsiders to it; for, to insiders, it is a sign of liberation from the dictates of a culture defined by nothing nobler than the ogling desires of man.

In the end, the stand and arguments of the Lagos and Osun state governments become untenable when Dr Kayode Fayemi, a Christian governor in the neighbouring Christian-majority Ekiti State, permitted the use of the hijab; and in addition to doing so, expressly prohibits any kind of discrimination against female Muslim students who use it in the state’s public schools, thereby turning the discrimination argument on its head. In other words, it is in fact female Muslim students who are being discriminated against; because while others are free to dress as their religion enjoins, or at least in a way that is not offensive to its dictates, Muslims are not.

And some people are ready to adopt desperate measures to show their opposition to it. The decision by some non-Muslim parents in Osun and Lagos to ridicule the hijab by sending their children to school dressed as choir girls, some in celestial gowns, others with Ifa beads and Tajia caps, yet others with Baptist cassocks, and some even dressed as masquerades, all in order to ridicule the hijab couldn’t in any way have weakened the argument for the hijab. If anything, it actually only reinforced it.

First, merely looking at those dresses which the children wore that day—celestial gowns, cassocks, masquerade regalia and choir dress—only proved that all our religions in fact teach decent dressing.

Second, it didn’t prove anything negative: it only showed the great diversity of our people in their religious beliefs, each of which should be respected by all. But the point is that Islam requires women to cover up; while paganism, for instance, has never made the demand on its adherents to go about their everyday business clad in masquerade vesture; and if it has, Muslims will not have had anything against it.

Third, opposition to a measure like this, one that is of vital importance to the practice of one faith, and does not infringe on the rights of adherents of other faiths is the best example of classical intolerance. It is difficult to see how putting on the hijab by a Muslim lady will deprive any non-Muslim of any legitimate rights.

By sending their children to school dressed in religious garbs, those opposed to the hijab, all sadly miss the point, because hijab is not the prerogative of parents to decide for their children to put on or not. It is a divine injunction on women and not an imposition on them by Muslim men. It is not, as critics have said, a hierarchy of patriarchal male domination from which gender nosy parkers can come to liberate them. As an effective sartorial defence, the hijab seeks to draw moral boundaries that set the limits of public personal space between unrelated sexes. It is the perfect antidote to the culture of sexploitation that has been accepted as the norm for a secular world.

Indeed, the current worldwide opposition to the hijab was sparked off by President Nicholas Sarkozy of France who, in a vain attempt to shore up his dwindling political base, sought to ingratiate the anti-immigration brigade of the extreme right by clamping down on French Muslim women’s reassertion of the hijab; and French media did a one for the road to the hangover of the laïcité to resurrect Diderot’s depiction of French nuns and the veil of the convent in an entirely different context—in order to do battle with Islam, by first asking it to integrate into aspects of a culture that does no honour to its reputation.

There are many reasons why the modern Western woman dresses the way she does—and every one of them is a man. In the circumstances, it is difficult to understand the protestations of a naked-by-choice woman or the one stripped naked by the commercialism of the harem that is the advertising world, that she is not a sex object. With the glorification of the so-called sex symbols as role models, the obsession with the need to be slim, look beautiful and have sex appeal, and acceptance to expose her body, if Western woman is not a sex object, what on earth is she?

When a woman accepts the measure of physical attractiveness and the need to uncover as her standards of value and sense of self-worth, she has no more right to object that she is not a sex object; because that is exactly what she is. And it is this sexualisation of the female that Islam wishes to stamp out, so that womanhood is appreciated and valued for what it is, and woman accepted for who she is and what she can do, and not for how she looks or what can be done with her. All that hijab does is to make woman potentially in-exploitable.

And the West, with a standard of permissiveness that feels culturally challenged by Islam’s female sartorial in-exploitability, comes up as a society that feels intimidated and frightened by decency and anything that it cannot exploit.

But despite the pressure, the Muslim woman must adhere to that which gives dignity to her person and protection to her weaker sex so that she can have an identity other than as an attractive doll.

Indeed, some of them here even believe that they should flaunt what they have. But natural beauty in a woman is no personal accomplishment: it is a gift and the credit goes to the Great Sculptor who created, fashioned and proportioned the human body; while salon-beauty is cosmetic and only skin-deep: and the credit even for that goes to the beautician and not to the beautiful woman. And, so, what exactly is it that these painted, uncovered women take so much pride in and think they have that they can flaunt?

There is indeed nothing of lasting value to woman but that inner spiritual beauty and capacity for true love; and it is doubtful if scantily-clad temptresses can really be said to have the former, or if they can ever have the latter to give.

And those who think that with the demand for the hijab, Islam has discriminated against women ought to know that the demand for decency has been made on both sexes; and the demand on the male Muslim, who has been asked to lower the gaze, is a lot more difficult.
In a society that has not accepted to cover up, restraining the gaze is a requirement infinitely more difficult than any number of layers of hijab. Second, even if Islam has not required Muslim women to cover up, they reserve the right to decide to dress the way they want, as they do now—decently; and no sane person should have any quarrel with such a choice when it is made. Third, critics should learn to allow Muslim women to speak for themselves; for, by denying them this right, they have consigned them to a status worse the one from which they think they are liberating them. Actually, behind her veil, the Mahjubah laughs at those more-Catholic-than-the Pope Western busy bodies who have appointed themselves her liberators.

The hijab shouldn’t be treated as a stranger in country on whose statutes there is penalty for indecent exposure and some of whose institutions have at one time or the other spoken or nursed the idea of a dress code for flirty females. The hijab is not merely a dress to put on; it is an attitude to adopt, a lifelong behaviour to live by. And the real liberation is not in it per se; it is in the freedom to choose to wear it. And the best indicator that the hijab is not oppression to the wearer is that it is being demanded by those who have been educated in Western ways or who are already out there on the streets working or pursuing their businesses and other careers, who, when they get the chance, can state their case.
And the case for the women of Lagos, or indeed for Muslim women and honourable non-Muslim women anywhere, couldn’t have been put more eloquently than the way Hajia Hafsah Badru, Amirah of the Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria in Lagos, put it. “We are neither seeking a favour nor asking for a privilege; we are simply demanding our rights,” she said. “The hijab is an apparel of honour, a garment of modesty and a shield against immorality. It is our pride. It is our dignity.”[b]



[/bhttp://www.dailytrust.com.ng/daily/columns/friday-columns/42374-in-defence-of-the-hijab

“The hijab is an
apparel of honour, a garment of modesty and a
shield against immorality. It is our pride. It is our
dignity.”

The media is one of the probs.