The scarf is just the tip of the debate

More people must stand in solidarity with Muslim women against bigotry, writes Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

An American teenager participates in the American Muslim Day Parade in New York (Spencer Platt/Getty Images/AFP)

Growing numbers of Muslim women around the world are increasingly frightened to step outside for fear of being attacked. For some, the fear is from violent extremists or bombs dropped from the sky to “liberate” them.

For other Muslim women who wear a headscarf or veil, and live as minorities, the attacks are closer to home. Vicious verbal and physical assault are part of a growing mainstream phenomenon of turning Muslim women into outsiders in their own countries.

In the US, for example, where there has been a spike in attacks after Paris and Donald Trump’s outrageous comments, non-Muslim women have been donning the headscarf as a symbol of solidarity with Muslim women.

The debate was ratcheted up this week by the Washington Post, which carried a piece entitled “As Muslim women, we actually ask you not to wear the hijab in the name of interfaith solidarity”. The authors, Asra Nomani and Hala Arafa, stated that wearing the headscarf is not a religious requirement, and that to wear one has a specific political meaning being pushed by political ideology.

This is willfully dismissive of the fact that Muslim women in minority countries (and many majority ones too) make an active choice to wear the head covering. They wear it because it is a spiritual endeavour and has nothing to do with politics for them. It is a choice carried out after long deliberation, sometimes over many years.

This call to refuse solidary breaks vital connections in building strength across the women’s movement. And it does so by delegitimising Muslim women’s choices in society as being less worthy of solidarity.

This narrative instead places Muslim women outside of “our” struggle, and “our” experience in western societies. Whether wilful or not, its consequence is to deliberately exclude Muslim women from “us”. Just as colonial powers continue to justify imperialism through the notion they were going to “save” Muslim women, ideas that Muslim women must have their links to other women forcibly broken and the choices they make disrespected smacks of considering Muslim women as different, in spirit if not in body. It is imperialist, missionary and illiberal.

Muslim women’s bodies and choices are not some far away land to be colonised, they are part of the nation. Solidarity is not simply in clothing, but in the spirit of showing their inclusion and acceptance in society’s fold.

To attack solidarity with Muslim women on the basis of wearing a headscarf is to undermine the place of Muslim women in our societies and to deny them liberal space to live life as they choose it on their terms. And to further deny it “here” in the West on the premise that Muslim women “over there” do not have choice simply underscores the fact that Muslim women are seen as outsiders in their own land. Instead, we must build solidarity to show they and their struggles belong here.

This is not about the religious merits of wearing a covering on your head. We should be asserting, in no uncertain terms, that Muslim women are our people, our citizens, our nation and their choices must be defended by all of us in solidarity against bigotry.

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed lives in London and is the author of Love in a Hea dscarf and blogs at www. spirit21.co.uk