When my driver picked me up from work yesterday, he was accompanied by his young daughter, whom he’d just picked from school. She’s an adorable little thing. She’s 5 years old, and a real charmer. She likes dolls, frocks, and cartoons. She likes to go shopping for DVDs with me sometimes, I buy True Blood and Spartacus, she picks out Tom & Jerry and Dora cartoons for herself. In short, she’s a normal little girl.
Her school, however doesn’t think so. They don’t think she’s a child. They think she’s a proper Islamic woman. I say this because part of her uniform is a vee, or a dupatta. I kid you not. In fact, the vees I wore at school were less in width than the dupatta-ish thing she wears, spread across her tiny little body to cover herself.
Why is this child, and other little girls, being forced to cover herself? Why should she? This is typical of our society. We teach girls, nay, brainwash them as children that their body, their God-given body, is something to be ashamed of, that the way they were created by God is wrong, that somehow, they are so incredibly flawed that they must cover themselves.
We do not, however, teach little boys, or even our teenage boys, that it is wrong to stare at a girl in a lewd fashion. We do not teach them to respect women. We do not teach them to lower their gaze. We do not teach them that there is more to a woman than her breasts. Because, after all, boys will be boys. They have nothing to be ashamed of. They’re only behaving naturally.
In the meantime, girls must hide away behind their chadors and their dupattas and their hijabs. They are sinners, not just for being born female, but also, for allowing men to sin by exposing themselves to their gaze. This is why, after all, girls get raped, isn’t it? Because they don’t cover themselves properly?
We cannot say that this is something that only occurs in government schools. My own school was a private school, its low-quality education notwithstanding. We used to have an annual party every year, and each time, our teachers would instruct us to wear proper decent clothes. Labouring under the assumption that this meant formal dress, some of my classmates showed up in jeans and kurtis, some in capris, some in sleeveless. They were immediately chastised by our teachers for ‘not dressing properly.’
How dare they? You might ask. What gives them the right, you might demand. When their mothers don’t have an issue with it, who are they as teachers to take umbrage?
They dare because of us, because of our society. Because we as a collective whole think the way God has made us, is something we should be ashamed of.
Growing up in a conservative family, I was one of those girls who’d wear her dupatta like a good little Muslim girl. I don’t now, because if some guy wants to stare at my rack, well, that’s his sin, not mine, nor is it my responsibility. I’m lucky to have enough exposure to the world that I understand my body is nothing to be ashamed of.
But what about Maham, and all the little girls out there, who aren’t so lucky?
Far From The Madding Crowd's Ignoble Strife 