Aligarh Muslim University student protests harassment for wearing 'Western' clothes

An unspoken dress code is 'enforced' in Aligarh Muslim University. A young girl complains of harassment for wearing a t-shirt.

11 February 2006
MUMBAI, INDIA

Farah Aziz Khanum, a student of journalism at the Aligarh Muslim Universtiy (AMU) has protested the harassment she received for wearing jeans and a t-shirt, commonly seen as 'western' clothes by two men on a motorcycle who threw her shawl on the road and abused her verbally. Khanum took up the issue in the form of a press release in at JNU this Thursday. While professors in AMU have come out in support of her protest, according to www.ibnlive.com, written complaints to the university, FIRs and protest marches have produced no results.

It is interesting to see how this event is being read by the media. One of the favorite rants of conservative Hindus has been the triple-talaaq system and how Islam is biased in favour of men. Conservatism and sexism are of course universally found, and painting Islam as fundamentalist, sexist, etc., is only the latest form of discrimination against minority groups.

And then there are Hindus who will respond, in the face of brutal crimes against women, Hindu or otherwise, that 'Hinduism' as such is not a violent religion, and only some 'extreme' people interpret it militantly. Of course, the same argument can be made for Islam, that there is nothing inherently violent about it, rather, that extremists and chauvinists exist in every society/culture.

So when an AMU student is harassed for wearing 'Western' clothes, one wonders why it gets painted as a specifically 'Muslim' problem. Flavia Agnes, lawyer and founder of Majlis, a group that offers legal support to women in Mumbai, and a well-known name in Indian feminism, has written extensively on how Muslim women have been protected by the law two decades before Hindu and Christian women. Muslim women have had access to civil divorce before their Hindu and Christian counterparts, a right that Catholic women have gained only recently. According to Flavia Agnes, a Muslim woman has the right to stipulate conditions at the time of her marriage, which includes adequate mehr, restrictions on polygamy, and demand residence in the matrimonial or other home. She also has the right to challenge arbitrary divorce

Yet the stereotype that Muslim women live under great duress, that Hindu women have more freedom, are more 'modern.' The most 'modern' icons of Indian society have been figures such as Zeenat Aman and Waheeda Rehman. How many Hindu heroes play the campy and gender-bending roles that generate so much entertainment in Bollywood? Where does the insistence on seeing 'Islam' as 'traditional' come from? And is this reading not made to stop seeing the traditional in the so called 'modern' Hindu woman?

Is it merely the burqa and a 'conservative' demeaneour that mark oppression? What will it take to read oppression in the so-called 'freedom' of the Hindu woman? The protest against the AMU for its conservatism by Farah Aziz Khanum marks an important step for Muslim women in fighting for their freedom to not only dress as they please, as a form of self-expression that they have chosen, but also their right to not be harassed. These are hardly rights that other Indian women have already won.

The fight for justice on the part of the female students of AMU against the establishment has to be read in the context of bitter disappointment, of dreams shattered, of an ongoing struggle between entrenched members of a community trying to change the status quo. Not as a fight to destroy a 'conservative' religion, forever only that.