১১ comments

1. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ২৮ ফেব্রুয়ারি ২০১১ (১২:২৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

   চট্টগ্রামে দামপাড়ার চট্টেশ্বরী রোডে এ.আই.জি মাদ্রাসার উল্টোদিকে এক বিল্ডিংয়ের ছাদে একটা বিলবোর্ড আছে ‘কনডেন্সড মিল্ক’এর বিজ্ঞাপনে এক নারী মডেল শোভা পাচ্ছিল, কয়েকদিন আগেই হঠাৎ লক্ষ্য করলাম মডেলের মুখটা কালো রঙ দিয়ে পুরোপুরি লেপ্টে দেয়া হয়েছে — প্রথমে কিছুই বুঝতে পারিনি এই উদ্ভট খেয়ালের, কিন্তু একটু পরেই বুঝতে পারলাম — ওই মডেলের মুখ মাদ্রাসা থেকে দেখা যায়, তাই এই ব্যবস্থা। মজার ব্যাপার হচ্ছে রঙীন সালোয়ার কামিজ পরা পুরো দেহকাণ্ড অক্ষত আছে, সেখানে কালি লেপ্টানো হয়নি। মনে পড়ল একবার লিখেছিলাম হিজাব চায় মুখ ঢেকে দিতে, সারাদিনই কত ছাইভস্ম লিখি, কিন্তু এই কথাটি বলা যায় খুব সত্য লিখেছি।

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   • 

     রায়হান রশিদ - ৪ মার্চ ২০১১ (২:৫৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

     ব্যাপারটা খুবই ইন্টারেস্টিং!

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   • 

     সরব দর্শক - ৫ মার্চ ২০১১ (১:৪২ অপরাহ্ণ)

     চট্টেশ্বরী রোড! এই না-পসন্দ্ নামের বদলে একে এ.আই.জি. মাদ্রসা রোড নামে পরিচিত করতে চান অনেকে। কোনো কোনো দোকানের সাইনবোর্ডেও সেরকম লেখা দেখেছি বলে মনে পড়ছে। কিন্তু ওই মাদ্রাসাটার অবস্থান যে ঠিক কোথায়, বলতে পারব না — অন্তত এই মুহূর্তে মনে করতে পারছি না। তবে এই লেখা আর লেখকের মন্তব্য পড়তে গিয়ে মনে পড়ছে আমেরিকা-প্রবাসী ইরানি শিল্পী শিরিন নিশাত-এর বিখ্যাত সিরিজ-ছবি ‘Women of Allah’-এর কথা, ওই সিরিজের অন্যতম ছবি ‘I Am Its Secret’-এর কথা।

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2. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ৬ এপ্রিল ২০১১ (১২:২৫ অপরাহ্ণ)

   টুইটারে আমার নারী বিষয়ক তিনটি টুইট।

   প্রশ্ন : ‘নারীপ্রীতি’র বিপরীত শব্দ কী? উত্তর : ‘নারীনীতি’।
   10 minutes ago via web

   নারীপুরুষ নির্বিশেষে অনেকেই ‘নারীপ্রীতি’তে বিশ্বাস করেন, কিন্তু নারীর উন্নয়নে নারীপুরুষ নির্বিশেষে ‘নারীনীতি’তে বিশ্বাসী হতে হবে।…
   5 minutes ago via web

   দান-খয়রাতের জন্য মানুষের জন্ম হয়নি, হয়েছে অধিকার প্রতিষ্ঠার জন্য।
   7 minutes ago via web

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3. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১৪ ডিসেম্বর ২০১১ (১১:৪৮ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

   রাস্তাঘাটে চোখ কান খোলা রাখলে অনেক সংলাপ শোনা যায়, কিন্তু কখনো কখনো কিছু সংলাপ নাট্যসাহিত্যকেও হার মানায় — হয়ে ওঠে অনন্যসাধারণ। তেমনি একটা শুনলাম গতকাল গোলপাহাড়ের মোড়ে এক স্কুল ইউনিফর্ম পরা মেয়ের কাছ থেকে। মেয়েটি যার হাত ধরে হাঁটছে তিনি বোরখা পরা, উল্টোদিক থেকে আসা এক মহিলার সাথে দুজনের আলাপ পরিচয় হচ্ছে, যার হাত ধরে আছে মেয়েটি তিনি অন্য মহিলাকে বলছেন, আমি ওর খালা। মেয়েটি বলছে, ও আমার খালা না — আলখাল্লা!

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4. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ ফেব্রুয়ারি ২০১২ (২:৫৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

   হিজাব ও উন্মুক্ততা পাশাপাশি দেখে

   Women are often fighting a battle they don’t even know they are fighting. As they internalize these images subconsciously and try to look like them, sexual power and titillation gets confused with real, personal power. How we are supposed to look replaces the question of how we want people to see us.

   I’m not knocking being sexy. It can be fun to be sexy. But when the perception of a woman is limited to her sexuality, she paradoxically becomes invisible, in spite of all she is exposing. By emphasizing and spotlighting her sexual power, people see her but never know her. I remember walking down the cobbled streets of Lamu, a resort island off the coast of Kenya. The culture is Swahili Muslim and women dress in black burqas with everything covered except their eyes. Mingling with them were American women tourists wearing halter tops, short shorts, and big sunglasses revealing almost everything except their eyes.

   In a strange way, these two modes of dress are two sides of the same coin, the positive/negative image of each other that shared a commonality. Neither was seen for who they were. The burqa blinded the observer to the woman. The emphasis on body parts also blinded the observer to the woman.

   পড়ুন Birute Regineএর সাম্প্রতিক ব্লগপোস্ট : Sex Appeal and Strutting our Stuff: Sexual Power or Real Power?

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5. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ মার্চ ২০১২ (১২:১০ অপরাহ্ণ)

   হ্যাঁ, চোখ কান খোলা রাখলে রিকশালিখন, ট্যাক্সিলিখন, টেম্পোলিখন, রাইডারলিখন, চাঁদেরগাড়িলিখন, বাসলিখন, ট্রাকলিখনেও নারীর বিরুদ্ধে অনেক জঘন্যকথন পাওয়া যায়। আর বাংলাদেশে এই পরিবহনলিখনের ব্যাপ্তি অনেক বড়। তেমনি একটি ট্রাকলিখন আজ চোখে পড়ল।

   নিজের স্ত্রীকে পর্দার আড়ালে রাখুন ও অন্যকে উৎসাহ দিন।

   কী বিভৎস মানসিকতার বেলেল্লা প্রচারণা!

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6. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ৩ সেপ্টেম্বর ২০১৩ (৭:২১ অপরাহ্ণ)

   পাকিস্তান জামাত আগামীকাল 'বিশ্ব' হিজাব দিবস পালন করবে, বাংলাদেশ জামাত ও তেঁতুলবাহিনির খবর কী? pic.twitter.com/6MuprPfI7y

   — masud karim (@urumurum) September 3, 2013

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7. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১৬ ডিসেম্বর ২০১৪ (১:২৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

   faceless ‘Sharia-compliant’ doll launched in UK http://t.co/5XKJOYuJOD pic.twitter.com/vPfiNWpWXH

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) December 16, 2014

   Post by Masud Karim.

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8. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ জুন ২০১৫ (১০:৫৫ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

   Posted by Masud Karim on Friday, June 26, 2015

   But, Hanna, I don’t need a hijab to dress like a feminist. And your choice between veil or bikini is a false dichotomy. In fact, it’s one of the oldest anti-feminist tropes in the book, a mild reframing of the old Madonna-whore complex, for which my own Christianity has been rightly pilloried. Feminists are building a future in which the female body is no more a fetish object than the male: where I can eschew the bikini, but feel the wind through my Chelsea blow-dry, and still be valued more for my understanding of 16th century history than for how I look in either. Granted, we’re not there yet. But the more we treat parts of our bodies as sexual triggers and hide them away, the more we sexualise them in the male imagination. Both Islamic dress codes and Hollywood magazines sustain themselves by policing women’s bodies.

   Hanna, I don’t think the hijab is about ‘oppression’ – not, as you say, in modern Britain. After all, you’re getting a Guardian vox-pop out of it. And obviously, as a liberal, I’d oppose any attempt to ban it. But while you rightly point out that most Western women are psychologically enslaved to diet culture, is it unreasonable to suggest to a student of Marx that false consciousness – remember that? – applies as much to women in hijabis as women in bikinis? I’m not sure I’ve ever met a woman, in a hijab, bikini or knee-length skirt, who makes culturally free choices about her wardrobe.

   And why am I, a white woman, commenting in turn on what a Muslim woman wears? Because I’m also writing about my own cultural history. The attitudes to female modesty proposed in videos like this run through every poem I read for my academic work on women in the sixteenth century: Christian men justifying rape, because a woman accidentally flashed an ankle in their direction. My great-grandmothers, and great-great-grandmothers, fought to escape the limits of modesty policing. To quietly accept such premises all over again is to make a mockery of their entire struggle.

   The hijab, by definition, highlights sexual difference and effaces intersexuality. As the Harvard academic Leila Ahmed details in her book, A Quiet Revolution, the rapid resurgence of the veil in the modern Muslim world has not been matched by a renewed dedication to men’s Islamic dress codes: women are required to display their belonging to the clan group, while men are not. As one ex-Muslim also told the Guardian, it allows women to be policed by Muslim strangers:

   You’re much more visible as a woman. You’re conditioned to behave in a certain way with a headscarf. I mean, you’re not going to go to a pub with a headscarf, are you? You’re not going to stay out late with a headscarf. It’s a form of control.

   There’s a simple question I ask of religious prohibitions, whether it’s Christian men telling me I couldn’t be a bishop, or the Haredi Jewish women hiding themselves away from the world during their menstrual cycles. Does God ban men from doing it, too? If not, there’s nothing feminist about it.

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9. 

   মাসুদ করিম - ১৩ সেপ্টেম্বর ২০১৬ (১২:০২ অপরাহ্ণ)

   The Politics of Dress
   Double Standards in the Headscarf Debate

   When cultures clash, women’s clothing is often at the center of the debate. While for Western women, the issue is how much skin they should be allowed to show, for Muslims the focus is on how much they must show.

   In Iranian archives, there is a collection of photos from the late 1930s. They show women and men dressed in European clothing, and the women are not wearing a chador or headscarf. The images are oddly troublesome: Some women look at the camera in horror, while others have their gazes affixed to the ground. The photos are of Iranian aristocratic families, taken at the instruction of Shah Reza Khan at the height of his campaign to unveil his country’s women. He wanted Iran to become a modern country, Western-oriented, and he saw the chador as a symbol of its backwardness. The ban was far more violently enforced on the streets of Tehran than the burkini ban on French beaches. Women’s chadors were ripped off in broad daylight.

   Back then, the women were undressed in the name of modernization. In recent weeks, similar incidents occurred on French beaches, because women in burkinis allegedly posed a threat to the modern, Western lifestyle. Yet it is only a little more than half a century ago that women on European beaches could be issued a fine, not for wearing too much but too little. When the bikini came onto the market 70 years ago, it was no less controversial than the burkini. In fact, it was initially banned almost worldwide.

   Then as now, the female body is a focal point of the battle between tradition and modernity. The liberation from the corset to the fight over trousers, the debates over miniskirts, hot pants, bikinis and headscarves: Women’s clothing has repeatedly been regulated, stipulated and proscribe, with men issuing decrees and bans relating to what women wear. In Europe, the dispute has tended to focus on how much skin women are allowed to show. Now, though, it is about how much skin they are required to show.

   Specific Social Morals

   Clothing, our second skin, is deeply personal. And it is political. It is an expression of identity, making a statement about character and personality, social status and worldview, profession, age and gender. Whether someone wears a frilly blouse or a tank top, jogging pants or a tuxedo, pumps, vegan sandals or riding boots, clothing is always a message we use to belong or distance ourselves, seduce or deter. Clothing conforms or rebels. Those who prescribe or ban certain types of clothing for women want to change society or preserve specific social morals. To this day, women are not supposed to decide for themselves what they wear, because their clothing is a symbolic battlefield. A man drives a truck into a crowd on the Nice waterfront esplanade and kills 86 people — whereupon women in Cannes, 33 kilometers (21 miles) away are banned from wearing the burkini.

   Today, we are trying to determine our relationship to Islam by way of our attitudes to the headscarf, burqa and burkini. We define the burqa and the headscarf as symbols. But of what, exactly? Of the oppression of women in Islam, or of their protest against the dominance of the West? The veil can be many things. It can be a sign of a man’s claim to ownership of his wife, ensuring that other men are unable to look at her. It can be a woman’s message to men that she is not available. But it can also be seductive, like the colorful headscarves worn by some, who combine it with loud makeup, skin-tight coats and high heels, so that they end up being chaste on top and sexy down below.

   “The burqa debate,” says literary scholar Barbara Vinken, “affords us a new look at our own gender order in public.” Men and women in Western cultures are likewise in no way on an equal footing, she adds. Men wear suits, with only their faces visible, and an erotic message is rarely associated with male clothing. For a long time, men did not want women to dress the way they did. They weren’t in favor of women wearing the pants, which stood for power, success and credibility. German Chancellor Angela Merkel wears pantsuits, as do most of the female cabinet ministers. To this day, a woman is more likely to be taken seriously in Germany if she wearing a pantsuit than a skirt.

   The Male Gaze

   The burqa debate confronts us with our own insecurities. Just how self-determined is female fashion in the West? To what extent is it shaped by social constraints, group pressure, conventions, shows like “Germany’s Next Top Model” and the dictates of the fashion industry? The feminist movement is still divided over whether the visible female body, bare skin and the miniskirt are actually signs of freedom or if they degrade women into sex objects.

   It comes down to the male gaze, certainly in Islam. Traditionally, the veil (hijab) was a curtain that protected Mohammed’s wives from the gaze of his visitors. Islamic culture differs fundamentally from Western culture in that it covers up things that are precious. There are no images in mosques, and certainly no icons. Visibility and transparency do not have positive connotations; the preference is for the hidden, the invisible and the indirect. The veil signifies esteem. Poorer women had to work, and how can a woman work in the fields wearing the chador? It was the clothing of wealthy, privileged women.

   But the enlightened West is also willing to make allowances for the covetous male glance. The ability to control one’s yearning, oft touted as a civilizational advantage of the Western man, likewise has its limits. A year ago, Germany was embroiled in a brief but heated debate over hot pants in schools. A principal in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg wrote a letter to parents arguing that the ultra-short shorts should be banned in her school. She argued that male students and teachers should not be distracted in class by overt displays of the charms of female students.

   And not long ago, my 15-year-old daughter brought home a letter from her physical education teacher. The letter, which required a parent’s signature, stated that parents should pledge to ensure that their daughters wore sufficiently decent clothing in PE. Bare bellies are verboten, and so are spaghetti straps. According to the letter, girls should have at least three finger widths of material on each shoulder. It sounded as if the school would prefer to see girls wear burkinis in relay races. The school argued that the measure was necessary because it would prevent boys from injuring themselves. “Otherwise, they might run into something!” the physical education teacher explained to the girls. And yet, there are no rules for the boys, who are allowed to show up shirtless on the playing field. The girls were furious: How unfair is that?

   Whatever a Woman Chooses

   Still, men’s clothing too has periodically been regulated by the state throughout history. The most famous example is Kemal Atatürk’s hat revolution. Like the veil and the headscarf, the traditional male head covering also became a symbol of backwardness in 1920s Turkey. In his famous hat speech, Atatürk touted Western-style hats, and it was followed by a legal decree that stated: “The general head covering of the Turkish population is the hat, and the government forbids the continuation of a contradictory habit.” For women, the headscarf and veil were banished from public life, and they were banned in schools, universities and government service. The return the headscarf under current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is thus not just a sign of Islamization, but also of protest against an authoritarian, secular state.

   In the last century, the battle over clothing was a conflict between tradition and modernity, but now it is overlaid with the contrast between Islam and the West. Outside the West, clothing was often associated with the search for a unique, non-Western identity. The goal was to preserve traditions or to develop a separate modern age. This is embodied by the Mao jacket and the Nehru shirt, as well as modern Muslim women’s fashion. Globalization led to the triumphal march of Western fashion brands around the world. From suits and ties to jeans, T-shirts and sneakers, the Western style of clothing seems to have become universal. However, globalization also incorporates the reverse movement, as foreign clothing appears on our streets and in schools. We see it as demarcation and provocation, and as signs of the failure of integration efforts. We fight over the headscarf.

   Nowhere has the headscarf debate been waged as bitterly as in France. As long ago as 1989, in the so-called headscarf affair, three girls were expelled from school for refusing to remove their headscarves. In 2004, the government enacted a general headscarf ban in public primary and secondary schools, and the burqa was banned in 2011. There are also now laws in Germany regulating where women are permitted to wear the headscarf and where not. The battle over the headscarf shows us the limits of our own, enlightened liberalism. Suddenly we no longer know just how liberal we want to be. We disguise our own illiberality with the claim of wanting to liberate the women of other cultures.

   Perhaps capitalism will prevail in the end, and in this instance, it might not be such a bad thing. Western fashion labels are now designing Muslim fashion. DKNY was one of the first, with its 2014 Ramadan Collection. Conversely, oriental fashion is also influencing Western fashion designers. Perhaps we will see the rise of a global non-dress code, in which essentially everything goes – including whatever a woman chooses to wear.

   the politics of dress: double standards in the #headscarf debate,writes #ChristianeHoffmann https://t.co/mubum2vGs2 pic.twitter.com/xemkNdR3OX

   — MasudKarimমাক (@urumurum) September 13, 2016

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