Last week, part of our ASTU groupwork involved reading an article by Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian-born French artist, in which Satrapi condemns the proposed French ban of conspicuous religious symbols, including the hijab, in schools. Much of my understanding of Islam comes from the Muslims I interact with back home in Malaysia and Singapore, so this topic made me reflect about attitudes towards Muslim standards of clothing in a modern society.
Many modern Muslim women have stated that they “freely chose to wear the hijab”, but what does it truly mean to have freedom of choice anyway? As we learnt in Sociology class, our actions are not entirely made autonomously, but influenced by society and its institutions – our family, religion, class and nation. How apt is the word “freely” when women say they “freely chose” to wear the veil?
In an article published by Huffington Post, writer Kayla Greaves allows 7 Muslim women living modern lifestyles to voice their personal beliefs on the topic of “Faith, fashion and modesty”. Amongst them is Asma Karimi, a fashion business student, who states:
By wearing the hijab I am not conforming to the societal beauty standards that are set for me to follow as a young woman. Rather, it is my way of resisting the negative social and political backlash as well as the societal expectations of how I should look or dress as a woman. In fact, wearing the hijab makes me feel beautiful, confident and resilient.
Fahmida Kahmali, who works at the Ontario government, says that:
Both within and outside my community, there are those who think a Muslim woman should dress a certain way — that is, not be interested in looking good. But that’s unfair to both the religion of Islam and Muslim women. There is a saying, hadith, from the Prophet Muhammad, ‘God is beautiful and He loves beauty.’ When the Prophet was asked, ‘What if someone likes that his clothing and his shoes are beautiful?’ the Prophet replied, ‘Allah loves to see the effects of His grace upon His servant.’
Also quoted in the article is Fatma Othman, who says:
There are so many pressures to being a hijabi — as if how you dress is directly indicative of how religious you might be. That’s not really the case, my relationship with God is exactly that, my relationship with God. I know my hijab makes me visibly Muslim — and I’m proud of that. It makes me even stronger in my faith. But just because I wear the hijab doesn’t mean I make more trips to the mosque than the girl who doesn’t wear one.
The women mentioned above (and many other Muslim women I know personally) wear the hijab for various reasons. An underlying feature under the surface of these various reasons is the desire to show that their religion can co-exist with their personal desires, whether it is showing their identity as a Muslim while signifying a certain level of defiance in her individuality, or allowing their personal desire for style to supersede the traditional, possibly misinterpreted standards of Muslim wear. They seem to have, interestingly, found freedom of expression in a garment that many believe is representative of oppression and restriction.
The aforementioned Muslim women are lucky enough to have a degree of freedom in being able to create a personal interpretation of their religion by themselves, instead of having someone else try to forcefully impose a certain perspective onto them. And although their decisions may be subconsciously influenced by social institutions, perhaps the freedom from societal influences here is slightly oversubscribed. I personally think it is hard for people to separate themselves from the way they were brought up – to distance themselves from a social institution that has influenced their actions and beliefs all their life, and I personally do not expect everyone to be able to.
For now, I can only hope that the day will come when Muslim women in more conservative societies will be able to express themselves through fashion without fear of persecution or death.