History will not be kind to ‘liberals’ cheerleading for hijab and burqa

Youth activist Malala Yousafzai is a great example of how liberal privilege cannot just hollow out your moral convictions, it also empties you of your most intense and defining life experiences. Her story is well-known: the girl who was shot by the Taliban in the head for pursuing education. Invisible powers in the West fund her treatment, stay, and sustenance. Book contracts, lecture circuit money and other grants make a millionaire in just three or four years. The iconic victim of Islamists is not a liberal elite and a puppet, wheeled out to defend the same Islamists. So, she sanctimoniously tweeted, calling the Karnataka school’s objection to hijab “horrifying".

“College is forcing us to choose between studies and the hijab”.

Refusing to let girls go to school in their hijabs is horrifying. Objectification of women persists — for wearing less or more. Indian leaders must stop the marginalisation of Muslim women. https://t.co/UGfuLWAR8I

— Malala Yousafzai (@Malala) February 8, 2022

It is the same young woman who, in her book I Am Malala, wrote, “Wearing a burqa is like walking inside a big fabric shuttlecock with only a grille to see through and on hot days it’s like an oven.” It is the same Malala who gratefully accepted, without a word of condemnation, the Nobel Prize from Norway, which bans burqa and hijab in educational institutions.

Malala has little choice.

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The moment you become part of the global elite today, you have very few people agreeing with you, because you have long mocked patriotism and tradition, formed a tiny club of money and privilege, and become a first-class hypocrite by undermining the same values riding which you call yourself a liberal. You lose credibility with the silent population who believe in reason and logic. Among your very few friends are Islamists. Because Islamists need your academic and intellectual validity to cover up for its brutal excesses. But such self-proclaimed liberals do tremendous disservice to the genuinely oppressed women across the Islamic world. The actions of the Karnataka girls, who it now transpires are reportedly acting at the behest of student wing of the extremist organisation People’s Front of India, are silencing the voices of all other Muslim girls who don’t want to wear the hijab. They will come under even more community pressure to move around imprisoned by a tent of cloth. Many institutions will be unwilling to admit Muslim girls, as will their employers. The stubborn insistence on an oppressive piece of cloth will ultimately hurt the girls and the wider community, reinforcing the worst stereotypes. It will also be a breeding ground for radicalisation. Hijab has never been a choice, as so-called liberals including Congress dynast Priyanka Gandhi Vadra argue. It is a centuries-old brainwash and bullying at various levels — community, family, and man-woman relationships are governed by the need for the woman to be a sexual object ‘her man’ possesses, to be kept away from the gaze of others. Parents reinforce it through violent reprimand, society turns up the threat further with shaming, boycott, thrashing, and even murder. The pressure is so much, as Canadian human rights activist Yasmine Mohammed puts it, “good Muslims stop struggling and just submit to the cement drying them in place”. In her book Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam, she writes: “Women who get arrested and disappear because they dare to take a scarf off their head in Iran. Women who are arrested and disappear because they drive a car in Saudi Arabia. Women who are arrested or killed for showing their face and hair on social media in Pakistan or Iraq. Those brave women exist all around us, and they want nothing more than to be supported by feminists in the West. “The free West, where these brave girls used to look to as beacons of light and hope, is supporting their oppressors and ultimately fighting against their progress. In Saudi Arabia, women are burning their niqabs. In Iran, women tie their hijabs on sticks and sway them silently, defiantly in the streets as they are arrested in droves. In the West, we put a Nike swoosh on hijabs.” Across the Islamic world, voices are emerging against the specious liberal alliance with Islamists. IPS officer Najmul Hoda writes in The Print: “The dictum that minority communalism was a lesser evil was myopic inasmuch as it ignored its ability to inflame majoritarianism. The paternalistic minorityism of liberals made them equivocate on burning issues. So, in one kind of bomb blast, terror had no religion; but in another, it did. The discourse of ‘hurt sentiment’ became normalised as demands to ban a book and now a movie became the norm. The Right-wing learnt fast, and how.” He says that despite this, no genuine bond was sealed between liberals and Muslims except merely a tactical one. Instead, it cornered and crushed the liberal Muslim voice. “Muslims love Hindu liberals conditionally, and together they hate the microscopic Muslim liberals unconditionally. Muslims love liberals because the latter don’t question their narratives, and liberals value Muslims because they are their only support left,” he writes. The hijab, under so much weight of fear and conditioning, can never be a choice. And history will remember the role that ‘liberals’ are playing in making it look like one.