The burqa cannot become a fashion statement in beauty pageants. AP

A video of a college fashion show in Uttar Pradesh featuring Muslim women in burqas has gone viral, with organisers promoting it as a platform for creative expression, challenging the perception of burqas as purely functional attire.

While some students aimed to showcase the fashionable aspect of burqas, the Jamiat-e-Ulema expressed disapproval, deeming it inappropriate for a fashion display and potentially offensive to religious sentiments. Maulana Mukarram Qasmi warned of legal action if such events recur, emphasising the need for respect in fashion displays. The controversy highlights differing views on whether showcasing the burqa in a fashion context is respectful or offensive to religious beliefs, sparking discussions on the intersection of fashion expression and cultural sensitivity.

I have written and spoken countless times about how the burqa/niqab/hijab was made mandatory in Kashmir in the 1990s, by terror groups and given social sanction by separatist organisations, eroding the liberal, tolerant, and multicultural aspects of Kashmir society prevalent since the start of the 20th century. This coercion or manufactured consent was influenced by the radical Dukhtaran-e-Milat’s chief Asiya Andrabi, herself covered from head to toe like an ISIS bride, complete with glasses, gloves, and not even a fingernail showing.

The burqa cannot become a fashion statement in beauty pageants, given the oppressive mandates still imposed on many women to wear religious attire. How can the burqa be an empowering fashion? That perverse idea spectacularly misses the oppression still tormenting millions of Muslim women worldwide stripped of clothing choices. While we debate burqinis at beauty contests, Iranian women face bullets for hijab “violations.” Their Afghan sisters cower under Taliban tyranny consigning them to the shadows.

Dare we speak of liberated burqa fashion when the garment remains mandatory attire for women denied identity and autonomy? Absurd notions of reclaiming religious coverings as a woke costume are only to belittle the suffocating misery still imposed upon its unwilling wearers. Fashion suggests frivolity, a flaunting of style freedoms. But the burqa for multitudes of women signifies a daily nightmare; the looming threat of morality police scrutinizing their strict adherence to veiling edicts. “Choice” is a luxury they cannot access without risking public flogging or imprisonment. While we in India and the West experiment with exotic oriental coverups, countless women across the Middle East and Central Asia tremble at the creeping hemline of their headscarves hoping to evade the cane.

The imposition of the burqa evokes anything but beauty. Rather, it becomes a menacing symbol of suppressed and erased womanhood. If the victims of hijab mandates had designed such attire themselves, Iran’s proclaimed fashionistas might not endure vicious beatings in the streets of Tehran today. Their desperate protests are directed at tyrannical sumptuary laws that nullify female bodies and identities, not at the cloth itself.

Not all objections to the burqa are based on the same grounds or motives. One of the objections to the burqa comes from Maulana Mukarram Qasmi, the district convener of Jamiat-e-Ulema, a Muslim organisation in India, who argues that the burqa cannot be made a fashion statement, as some designers and models have attempted to do in recent years. His objection is based on terming the burqa as a religious sanction for Muslim women, termed mandatory. Anyone seen or heard resisting that Islamic ruling is slut shamed or takfiri-ied (declared not Muslim enough).

But objections to the burqa coming from Muslim reformers or dissenters like me are for different reasons. The argument is that the burqa is not a religious requirement, but a cultural and political imposition by orthodox and extremist groups, who use it to control and subjugate women. Many women and men have died for resisting the mandatory wearing of the burqa, especially in countries like Afghanistan, where the Taliban have enforced it with brutal force and in Iran where the notorious Evin prison houses brave women whose symbolic gestures of holding white scarves on sticks in the faces of the IRGC and the morality police (the mutaween) landed them in jail. The burqa depersonalises women by erasing their personalities and reducing them to objects of male lust, which also damages the psyche of men.

These two objections to the burqa show that the issue is not as simple or as clear-cut as it may seem. The burqa embodies more than mere fabric; it is a debated symbol with various connotations. Beyond individual preference, it holds social and political significance. It extends beyond fashion considerations to become a matter of human rights. We cannot in clear conscience celebrate burqa chic while its coerced wearers yearn for the right to bare heads, so essential to dignity and liberty. Each compulsory veil signals another woman lost behind cloth barriers. Her existence became a formless, subordinate entity in an attempt to reconcile the temporal world.

Women’s equality will remain elusive so long as religious coverings get imposed through violence rather than adopted freely as fashion. Until the tortured faces behind the burqa determine their own veiling, its brash objectification as a modern style symbolizes not empowerment but insult. One cannot overthrow oppression while appropriating and glamorizing the instruments of subjugation still subdue other people. Freedom of choice precedes the freedom to choose such emblems by will alone, without coercion. Those desperate individuals who are examining us behind mandatory veils plead for relief from their bondage. They demand that sisters worldwide recognise their denied liberties, not romanticize the tools of their anguish.

The burqa does not embody a liberating streak until it solely adorns women’s shoulders, unfastened by coerced hands or virtues. Its dark currents persist profoundly, hindering the emergence of sluggish freedoms that would render it a mere plaything of aesthetic fancy. The first imperative is to lift its pall of gloom from unwilling millions, designating it as an icon of totalitarian terror rather than celebrating it as a shining emblem of fashion’s progressive potential. The garb charts no empowering course as long as numerous individuals remain trapped inside its folds, unable to voice their plea for free air. Consequently, the objectionable glamorisation of the burqa must cease for the time being.

The author is a writer and an educationist from Srinagar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

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