The general thumb-rule is whatever makes conservative rule makers unhappy is good for the society. Now under normal conditions I find the burqua offensive (especially when school kids in Std I are forced to wear it). However it seems the waves of modernity cant be stopped, and change when it comes from within (in small increments) is going to be much more durable and resistant to backlash. All this is ..a nice silver lining.
Muslim women in
Aligarh are increasingly using the traditional burqa as a fashion statement,
embellishing it with designer touches. Burqas inspired by English gowns or
those with Chinese collars, are doing brisk business. So are the modern abayas
from Dubai beautified by laces, pipings and pintex design.
These changes may be redefining the garment – observers say some two-piece
burqas have the chutzpah of cholis and the flirty feel of frocks – but the
makeover, expectedly, hasn’t gone down well with the city’s maulanas.
“Women are precious in Islam and the purdah was introduced to protect
them. The new style of wearing fitting burqas, and adding studs and stones to
them attracts attention and emboldens rapists,” says Mufti Shamun Qasmi,
vice president, All India Imaam Council.
Shopkeepers in the city say that demand of the garments is high, despite what
the orthodox voices may say. “Around 60% of my customers come looking for designer
burqas,” says Rehaan, a burqa-seller at the city’s Amir Nisha market.
“They are also viewed as a status symbol since many of the pieces feature
intricate zarkan embroidery. Today, many women are working and they want to
assert their empowerment through these designer abayas.”
regards
Published by
Brown Pundits Archive
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary.
Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.
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