The Fabric of Oppression

For some women, a scarf is a pretty piece of fabric, a fashion accessory. For others it's a symbol of religious devotion. However, for many women a scarf is a tool of oppression used against them in name of religious piety.

My colleague, Gretchen, and I spent a week in Aceh, Indonesia, with five Kashmiri representatives of Bedari, a volunteer organization working to further women's rights in Pakistan. Though the rights of Pakistani women are more severely curtailed in most cases than those of the Acehnese women, one notable difference is that the Acehnese Muslim women must cover their hair thoroughly or risk detention (and possibly caning) by sharia police, whereas women in Pakistani cities, at least, can often get away with minimal or no head covering.

I chose to dress modestly in Aceh, but, as a non-Muslim, I was not required to cover my hair (though as a redhead, I might have received significantly less attention if I had!). Two of our Pakistani women friends continued to wear their scarves, but one did not; as an obvious foreigner, she could also get away without covering her hair, and she preferred not to do so when given a choice. I didn't really think much about it until she and I were shopping for souvenirs at a shop in Banda Aceh, when I saw her examining a length of hot pink fabric embellished with metallic threads while searching for a gift for her mother. Thinking she was interested in scarves, I pointed out some pretty ones in a nearby display case.

"I don't give scarves as gifts," she said, explaining that she doesn't support the enforced wearing of headscarves and so refuses to give them to other women. And then I thought back to the evening of two days prior, when we had thrown Gretchen a surprise birthday party in the hotel and invited two of our friends from Solidaritas Perempuan. One of them had allowed me to try on her jilbab, hers a sort of tube of stretchy fabric rather than a folded square of fabric tied or pinned about the head. Laughing, we agreed that I resembled nothing so much as an eastern European peasant woman with it on. I wore it for five or ten minutes before deciding that it was way too hot and needed to come off.

Ah, but there's my Western, non-Muslim privilege: I can don or doff the scarf at will. I can laugh and joke about how silly I look with it on. Increasingly, the women of Aceh and Pakistan cannot. In fact, during our stay, sharia police rounded up 10 to 20 young women in Banda Aceh for insufficiently Islamic dress (judging from the Jakarta Post photo, they wore no jilbab, or wore short sleeves or tight jeans) and threatened them with caning. Even worse, it is becoming increasingly common for self-styled sharia enforcers in the more rural areas of Aceh to take it upon themselves to punish women for what they deem immodest dress, such as in one incident this July when, "In the name of sharia, and after saying a greeting, several youths claiming to be students of an Islamic boarding school in North Aceh tried to spray paint on the tight pants of several women," then returned the next day to attack the cafe owner who had resisted their raid. North Aceh has also seen incidents of sharia enforcers bursting into homes or hotel rooms to check whether women are covering their heads even in their own private spaces.

Personally, I think that the wearing of scarves or other modest dress is so much more spiritually significant when women have the right to choose it freely, without fear of coercion or punishment for refusing. Regardless, public space for Muslim women is shrinking in both Aceh and Pakistan, and the forced wearing of the headscarf is only one of the more visible manifestations of this restriction.

Our friends from Bedari warned the Acehnese groups we met that if they are not vigilant, Indonesia could go from being one of the most liberal of the Muslim nations to being one of the most restrictive, like Pakistan has become since the 1970s. I hope they take heed and are able to increase the voices and participation of women in both the public and private spheres.

May we all work to unravel the fabric of women's oppression instead of continuing to weave it.