By Monjia Abidi:  

Chairperson of Women Against Torture in Tunisia
 

"Sign  here,  take this  piece of rubbish off your head and go home! Never ever think of going back to school with it. Right now, I am going to attach it to this sheet of paper in which you declared your full compliance with circular 108. Don’t you understand! There is no place in our schools for fundamentalists.. We are a modern country!” Fatima, the 18-year-old school girl, stood as if pinned to the ground in a state of bewilderment, listening carefully to a zealot policeman whose sole mission has been to frighten and punish women, university students and schoolgirls who challenge the hijab ban in Tunisia. Fatima's daily journey to school was diverted to the nearest police station where she was subject to harassment, physical and moral torture. I, just like Fatima, cannot find a single contradiction between modernity and hijab, as I am covering my hair not my brain. But Fatima just like thousands of Tunisian women, and unlike us living abroad, has been denied as a human being and a citizen in a one-party police state her extremely basic right to dress in a way she herself has chosen.

The ban on hijab in Tunisia dates back to the early 80s of the last century. The issue of women was employed as a tool of modernity. Taking the scarf off the head of a Tunisian woman by the then president Bourguiba in an ‘’historical’’ TV show at the time was viewed as an emblem for women emancipation. The superficiality of this motto -women emancipation- was unveiled when confronted with the hijab challenge. We are dealing, here, with a large group of women who are, in a way, the outcome of the Bourguibean school, who have willingly and reasonably opted for a kind of dress they believe it to be in harmony with their Islamic identity. The headscarf has been described by the state as being ‘’sectarian’’. Let us presume that the Islamic dress is sectarian, is there any article in the Tunisian institution, in international law and human rights conventions which prohibits women of any sect to dress the way they like? Is that not a kind of religious discrimination, even cleansing?

The oppressive nature of the state and the alliance between a few opportunistic ex- Marxists on the one hand and the current regime on the other have hindered any objective or neutral perspective in dealing with this phenomenon. The state should have simply taken it as a normal reflection of the Arab-Islamic identity of the country, as in all other Arab and Muslim societies. Yet, the state's propaganda rests – in a strange blending­- upon the assumption that the Islamic dress is a political symbol of women belonging to the Islamist Nahdha movement and must, therefore, be quashed within the framework of that movement's extermination. This has only resulted in the increase of the movement's popularity and its portrayal as the real guardian of Islamic values by the people.

For more than 10 years of suffering, women wearing the headscarf have been subjected to various unlawful, unconstitutional and inhumane practices by the police who have gone further than the literal law, to remove women's scarves in the streets, schools, universities, and public as well as private sectors. Even women who were in labour were denied the right to admission into hospitals for wearing the so-called "sectarian dress".

Political police accompanied by head-teachers have been deployed in all educational institutions in order to force girls as well as teachers to remove their scarves in the presence of students as well as parents. Many of them fainted in great shock as a result of the assault. Thousands of students have since been compelled to leave school and many women have lost their jobs. Social workers have been sent to different houses in order to check whether there are women who still wear the headscarf indoors.

The new reaction to the new wave of antagonism vis-à-vis Muslim women is that of challenge. A large number of women have been extremely committed to their right to dress the way they themselves have chosen for themselves. They believe that the scarf is none of the state's business, which sounds reasonable and convincing enough to urge us to wonder how a state boasts itself for being in the forefront of the whole Arab and Islamic world in terms of women's rights when a fundamental right is not even respected!! Would any woman on earth obey anyone who forces her to change the colour of her hair, her make-up, the length or colour of her skirt? Today, we have a situation in Tunisia where women are forced by means of police to show parts of their bodies to the public, where women are harassed in the streets, tortured and deprived of their basic right to study or work.

What makes things worse is the lack of interest by women's organizations in Tunisia in the whole issue. The "Association of Tunisian Democratic Women" -a marginal Marxist organization which adopts radical feminism and has acquired huge propaganda both inside and outside the country, not to mention the massive support it lent the government in its crackdown on Islamists in the beginning of the 1990s- still denies women's right to the headscarf and views the latter as a sign of backwardness which has no place in a modern country. Instead of defending women’s rights, in a recent communiqué, they expressed great alarm and denounced the return of "Hijab phenomenon" and ascribed it to the regime's tolerance! Thus an organization purporting to defend freedom and democracy is calling on the government to repress such a basic freedom.

Although we believe that Tunisian women’s choice is in harmony with their faith, we do not defend women's right to choose the way they dress from an ideological but rather a human rights perspective. The headscarf is a personal choice and a basic right. The Islamic dress is worn only by Muslim women, out of personal conviction. Others are totally free to dress the way they prefer even in a Muslim country.

The ban on hijab in Tunisia, however defiant of common-sense, of the people’s identity and of any law, is just another form of repression in a police state, repeatedly denounced for its appalling human rights records by international organizations, with a permanent seat in the Committee for the Protection of Journalists and Reporters Sans Frontieres’ Top Ten Enemies of the Press, and with the same party and president winning the elections by 99% of the votes. The slogans of modernity, freedom and openness are a décor tolerated and praised by western governments, earning Tunisia a visit to Washington during which Colin Powell praised the achievements of their “ally in Washington's war on terrorism ». On the other hand, for a democratic country established on the principles of equality, fraternity and freedom, to deprive its citizens of their basic right to choose how to dress, is a serious cause of concern indeed.