Islamic leaders demanded the ruling coalition withdraw its candidate from India’s presidential race on Tuesday after she said Muslim women should stop wearing their headscarves.
LUCKNOW, India – Islamic leaders demanded the ruling coalition withdraw its candidate from India’s presidential race on Tuesday after she said Muslim women should stop wearing their headscarves.
Several Muslim leaders called on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to find a new candidate for the largely ceremonial post, accusing Pratibha Patil, a Hindu, of insulting Islam by suggesting the headscarf is primitive.
Addressing a conference in the northwestern city of Udaipur over the weekend, Patil said women started wearing the headscarves in India to save themselves from 16th century Muslim invaders, and that it was time to drop what the practice, Indian newspapers reported.
“Now that women are progressing in every field, we should morally support and encourage them by leaving such practices behind,” she said.
Patil, 72, belongs to the moderate Congress party. Parliament and state legislatures choose the president, and the ruling coalition has enough votes to get her elected.
Maulana Khalid Rashid, a member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, said it was God who had asked women to wear a headscarf and that this was enshrined in the Quran, the Muslim holy book. The board is India’s highest Muslim authority on personal matters.
“Any statement against the veil means an opinion against Allah and the Quran which no Muslim will tolerate,” Rashid told The Associated Press.
Historians disagree with Patil. They say the practice of women using scarves in the presence of outsiders was already widespread in the 13th century.
Muslims account for nearly 14 percent of India’s nearly 1.1. billion people. Conservative Muslim women wear headscarves and face-covering veils.
Relations between Hindus and Muslims have been hostile since the bloody partition of the subcontinent into predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan at independence from Britain in 1947.
Hindu religious leaders have not reacted to Patil’s call.
Orthodox Hindu women also cover their faces in the presence of elderly male members of the family, even though their religions doesn’t mandate the practice like for Muslims.
Maulana Hasanul Badr, a Muslim cleric, said it was the duty of Muslim women to cover their bodies.
“Why do politicians interfere in our religious matters? It has become a fashion to pass judgment on Islam,” he said.
“The statement is a clear reflection of Patil’s mind-set about Islam and Muslims. It is better that the United Progressive Alliance change its presidential candidate and opt for a more secular person for this post,” he said, referring to the governing alliance.
Source: Star Tribune
http://www.startribune.com/722/story/1254665.html
2 Comments
hmmmm…very interesting!
Thanks google
It is true that Indian Hindu women used to cover their faces (veils) in the past but that was nothing to do for religion. It was more due to social and political compulsions. Now, because those factors are being eliminated, they are giving up the veils. A custom is one thing, and the fanaticism is another.
If you go into the history of Britain itself, one can find astonishing examples of gender segregation even till after the WWI and around the mid-twentieth century. The Ilfracoombe caves and the Ballochmyle Palace
trenches are a good example. The later was still available to see till the 1980s. The ladies were not allowed to read and write. The name “George Elliot is a good such example.
But the western society and the rest of the Indian society including the modern progressive section of the Muslims (majority) also have come out of these mediaeval practices. Nontheless the radical part of islamic Clerics do not want the Greater Muslim Society to reform and progress.
Unfortunately, as the bad habits and sensual pleasures are easy to catch, so are these Islamic practices of olden days difficult to eradicate due to enforcement in the name of socio-religious code. The reason is that the Islam is being propagated as a strong political force in the name of a pseudo-religion. That is what has made it a regressive cult, dangerous to itself and dangerous to the rest of the world due to the spreading fundamentalist and radical jihadi views leading to a constant societal upsurge of wars all over. This has made it a danger to the world peace.
Therefore it is for the world leaders to seriously think and combat the growing menace of the hydra of a pseudo-religion, ready to devour the entire civilisation. The Islamic Clerics feel threatened of their business if the Muslims imbibe the Modern Education and the Civilisation. That is why they do not want the Muslim Society to come out of these taboos. Hence the onus lies with greater progressive Muslims themselves. So it is the Muslims themselves who are posing a threat to themselves.
Dr. O. P. Sudrania
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