It is Malala Yousafzai again, a woman who had fooled the entire western world by pretending to be a female voice against radical Islam. But no one could realize the fact that Malala and her entire family are no better than Taliban jihadists, while they were under monthly payroll of Pakistani spy agency Inter Service Intelligence (ISI).
As Malala Yousafzai recently started passing comments supporting mandatory hijab and burqa within educational institutions in India, Utpal Kumar wrote in News18:
Malala Yousafzai is at it again. A true rent-a-cause activist, just like Greta Thunberg and Rihanna, she has jumped into the ongoing hijab controversy in India. It so happened that a private college in Karnataka’s Udupi district barred a few hijab-wearing Muslim girls from attending classes. Malala is aghast at the college “forcing us to choose between studies and the hijab”. For Malala, “refusing to let girls go to school in their hijab is horrifying”. She adds, “Objectification of women persists — for wearing less or more. Indian leaders must stop the marginalization of Muslim women.”
Malala has come a long way from being a young Pakistani girl who dared to look in the eyes of the Taliban when they threatened her from attending school. In 2012, she was shot in the head by the Islamist militia for her campaign in favor of education of girls in Pakistan. She then thought “wearing a burqa is like walking inside a big fabric shuttlecock with only a grille to see through and on hot days it’s like an oven,” as she confessed in her memoir, I Am Malala. In another book that she co-authored with Patricia McCormic, Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Changed the World, she went further: “Living under wraps seemed so unfair — and uncomfortable. From an early age I told my parents that no matter what other girls did, I would never cover my face like that. My face was my identity.”
Today, 10 years later, in the comforts of the ultra-liberal West, Malala’s worldview seems to have turned upside down: Hijab today symbolises freedom for her. It helps Muslim women fight against their sexist commodification. Incidentally, the country that awarded Malala the Nobel Peace Prize has already banned burqa and niqab in schools and colleges. She is yet to criticise Norway for doing that. In 2009, Switzerland banned minarets despite the existence of just four minarets in that country. The ban continues till date, but Malala is yet to condemn the Swiss. Maybe she thinks Asian Muslim women deserve the hijab/burqa barrier to protect their modesty!
Malala, however, isn’t an exception. She, in a way, epitomizes the great liberal tradition of standing up for Islamist fundamentalists. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes in Heretic: Why Islam Needs A Reformation Now, “I never cease to be amazed by the fact that non-Muslims who consider themselves liberals — including feminists and advocates of gay rights — are so readily persuaded by these crass means to take the Islamists’ side against Muslim and non-Muslim critics.”
These liberals would work overtime to look for excuses to accommodate the extremist worldview. They would perversely intellectualize the exorbitant demands made by Islamists to give them legitimacy: They would make us believe that the likes of Ayaan Hirsi are the real problems accusing the latter of upsetting and offending “the faith community of Islam”, as Christopher Hitchens writes in the ‘Foreword’ of Ayaan Hirsi’s memoir, Infidel: My Life. It is this liberal propensity to patronize and pamper the Islamists that explains why in the Udupi hijab case, the college management is being pilloried as a villain of the piece, and not the hijab girl and her family who decided to breach the common dress code agreed upon by all those studying there. There is a reason why the school dress is called “uniform”! But one is hardly surprised with the liberal reaction, especially in a country where anything associated with uniform — either a uniform school dress or the Uniform Civil Code — is deemed communal.
Such is the sanctity of the so-called liberal code that even the high priests of secularism, as was the case with Ramachandra Guha a couple of years back, don’t come out unscathed when they occasionally take a contrarian position. Guha, for instance, in his article, ‘Liberals, Sadly’ (The Indian Express; March 2, 2018), while reminding his “friend of some 40 years” Harsh Mander’s defense of burqa and skullcap, wrote that the two represented the “most reactionary” and “antediluvian” aspect of the faith. “To object to its display in public is a mark not of intolerance but of liberalism and emancipation,” Guha wrote. With this single incident of defiance, Guha who, writes Hasan Saroor in Who Killed Liberal Islam, “had until then been a darling of liberal Muslims, turned from hero to zero. Et tu Guha? they asked in bewilderment, calling his remark patronizing”…
