The liberal in me found the comments grating and very offensive. He made multiculturalism sound like it had an expiry tag. Yet, the feminist in me began to wonder when he argued that the full veil essentially forced women into being “prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity”.
The fact is that the debate around the veil is too complex to be reduced to these kind of sweeping generalisations. What the veil stands for seems to change every time history, context and culture shifts.
I have to confess that I don’t get it when some women say that being behind a veil liberates them from the prying eyes of the male gaze and makes them feel safer. It’s become just about the most clichéd explanation. But then — if you deconstruct any religion and culture — chances are that you will find several attempts at reigning in female sexuality and containing it within bounds of modesty and meekness. The ghoonghat, the covered head — even the dupatta — were all originally such symbols of protocol and morality. It’s just that as societies change, symbols can often get separated from their original contexts and become contemporary in usage. Take the bindi for example. Most of us, who wear one today do so for entirely aesthetic reasons, unmindful that once upon a time it would have made us Hindu and Married. Perhaps the burqa isn’t yet seen as an aesthetic cultural custom to those who watch from the outside. But, the hijab or the headscarf, for example, seems to have been assimilated into the mainstream of several societies across the world.
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