Forced into hijab: a response to Katharine Quarmby

In Britain, freedom of consciousness and liberalism thrive. Women can choose to wear the hijab (headscarf) or not, and so Katharine Quarmby can ponder at will its aesthetic and fashion implications. In Iran, however, such a luxury is unimaginable. A woman’s worth and modesty is dictated by misogynist Islamist clerics who force women to wear the hijab and throw feminists in jail for daring to protest for equal human rights.

Unfortunately, some do not appreciate the freedoms held in Britain. In a recent talk I attended, Alastair Crooke, a former MI6 agent, labels what we see in Iran as ‘Muslim values’, praising Iran’s leaders for using their ‘creative imaginative faculties’ to construct a society based on collective ‘Islamic’ norms. Most Iranian women recognise this as Khomeini’s politicisation of religion. Crooke rejected the idea that the Iranian regime abuses a woman’s human rights, as these are a ‘Western’ construct – Christian, capitalist and rooted in individualism.



Worryingly, a female member of the audience drew an analogy between the state imposing the hijab on women and society allowing breast enlargement adverts in London’s tube. Such an analogy is false: the British state is not forcing her to get bigger breasts. She will not be lashed 80 times and thrown into jail for refusing. Iran’s former prosecutor general, Abolfazl Musavi-Tabrizi, said “anyone who rejects the principle of hijab in Iran is an apostate, and the punishment for an apostate under Islamic law is death.” No government official in Britain says this about not adopting, in principle, ‘Western values’. State-enforced moral prescriptions can only remind us of the last century’s totalitarian experiments.

Of course, in some social circles, there are pressures to wear the hijab. In Qatar, where I grew up, the law does not require the hijab for women. Instead, society expects it: for local women to not wear it in public is social suicide. My Qatari friends wore it, and though I am not Qatari, I felt pressurised to wear it too, thinking this was required for Muslim women to be more pious. I moved to London for university and took it off; I felt guilty doing so, thinking I would be punished. I even pretended to some friends that I still wore it; they would have thought that I was immodest and my faith in Islam was weak!

Meeting diverse Muslims in this country—some of whom like me removed their hijab—made me realise that there are other Islamic interpretations that say the hijab is not required. This interpretation is not less valid, even though it may not be mainstream opinion. Modesty and virtue, a justification often cited, comes from within – if I can achieve this aim without the hijab then I am no worse for believing that it is not required by God. In fact, I get annoyed when Muslims – and non-Muslim – define or measure my ‘Muslimness’ on a metre of cloth.

However, when women are not afforded this choice, and are forced to abide by only one religious interpretation of female modesty, of course they will express their individuality by wearing Bengali or Indian fabrics as hijab. Women expressing themselves thus in Iran is a microcosm of political protest against the very clerics who demand a uniformed appearance on their version of morals. To say one does not like wearing it out of vanity is belittling the hijab to those who choose or are forced to wear it.

Religion is a personal matter; there is a difference in choosing how to express religiosity as opposed to being forced to by a state that defines morality through narrow and rigid religious interpretations. Accepting that human behaviours differ even within one society or religion is a basic tenet of human rights. Britain’s liberal society protects my right to practice my faith however I see fit. Such rights are not, as Crooke thinks, solely Western; but are the rights of all.