Why Do We Police Muslim Women's Beachwear?
The piece below is an op-ed from Melanie Elturk, the CEO of Haute Hijab, an online retailer for modest fashion.
In March, Marks & Spencer announced they will begin selling the burkini, or Islamic swimsuit for women, in UK stores. The suit, already on sale online and in places like Dubai and Libya, will serve a growing market of Muslim consumers who want to enjoy a day at the beach without compromising their beliefs. Awesome, right?
Not if you're French Minister for Women's Rights Laurence Rossignol, who compared Muslim women who wear the garment to the "American negroes" who supported slavery. "What's at stake," she stated, "is social control over women's bodies. When brands invest in this Islamic garment market, they are…promoting women's bodies being locked up." Pierre Bergé, partner of the late Yves Saint Laurent, also condemned the project, describing it as promoting the "enslavement of women." "Designers are there to make women more beautiful," he stated, "not to collaborate with this dictatorship which imposes this abominable thing by which we hide women and make them live a hidden life." Further he added, "We must teach [Muslim] women to revolt, to take their clothes off, to learn to live like most of the women in the rest of the world."
As a Muslim woman who chooses to wear the hijab and owns a burkini, it seems to me that this kind of rhetoric is also a form of social control. Enslavement of women also includes telling women they must take their clothes off. Just as women have the right to wear next to nothing, so, too, do women of all backgrounds have the right to wear more clothing― whether that means they cover up at at the beach or wear a hijab over their hair. As Hanna Yusuf pointed out in The Guardian, "If pressure to wear the hijab is seen as oppression, and rightly so, why is social pressure or legal pressure to not wear it excused as female emancipation?" She adds, "This pseudo-feminist argument… goes against the feminist values it claims to defend."
It is true that many Muslim-majority countries are terrible examples for female empowerment. In Saudi Arabia, women obtained the right to vote just last year and in some remote parts of Afghanistan, women do not attend school. But this poor treatment of women has more to do with cultural and tribal practices rather than religious edicts.
If we're speaking about conditions in the West, Muslim women are an active and empowered segment of society. According to the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, which released an in-depth analysis of Muslim Americans, Muslim American women are one of the most highly educated female religious groups in the United States and are more likely to work in professional fields than their female counterparts. As a result, Muslim women have the highest degree of economic gender parity of any religious group. In the UK, a record of 13 Muslim members of Parliament were elected in Britain's general elections―8 of them were women.
If Rossignol and Bergé understood the Western Muslim woman that they claim to be advocating for, they would not be so quick to say that she's "enslaved" or living a "hidden life." Instead, they would understand she's using the liberties afforded her to choose what part of her body is private or public. By covering up, Muslim women privatize their sexuality and reclaim control over their bodies from a society that seeks to objectify it. This simple fact is threatening to many, including the power structures that seek to gain from this very objectification.
Kudos to Marks & Spencer for allowing women the ability to decide for themselves how they want to dress at the beach and for responding to a rapidly growing market that has demonstrated buying power in the hundreds of billions. Dolce & Gabbana knows this; they introduced an abaya line back in January. Tommy Hilfiger and DKNY know this; they offer Ramadan collections. And now Marks & Spencer's has shown that they know this, too.
Muslim women, particularly those living in the West, know what they want. They are intelligent enough to choose for themselves how they want to dress. To assume they are forced into covering their body and hair is patronizing and downright ignorant. Instead, let's allow every woman the freedom to choose for herself what to think and how to dress.
Melanie Elturk is the CEO of Haute Hijab, an online retailer for modest fashion.
