Is It Bigoted to Post Images of a Man in a Hijab?

Defending Rights Is Not the Same as Defending Values

by Omid Djalili

(Audio version here)

There is currently a heated argument between politically prominent British and American Muslim and/or Iranian-heritage progressives. It concerns the ethics of celebrating the hijab while the Iranian Islamic Republic is killing thousands of its citizens for protesting against its authoritarian regime — protests in which women publicly rejecting the hijab have been central.

It began when the Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, put out an X post celebrating World Hijab Day. Iranian-American women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad, who has long opposed the Islamic regime and defended women’s right not to wear the hijab, objected.

Mehdi Hasan responded by calling Alinejad a ‘raging Islamophobe.”

Omid Djalili responded:

A back and forth between Djalili and Hasan then ensued.

During this, Khadija Khan, who has long been a consistent voice opposing hijab, suggested that Muslim men who believe the hijab is such a positive thing should put their money where their mouth is and don one themselves. Djalili gladly complied.

This produced outrage from many Muslim men including Mr. Hasan who described it as bigoted. So too did the chair of Labour Muslims, Ali Milani.

Milani also condemned any expectation that Muslims should object to the Iranian regime as Islamophobia, to which Mr. Djalili responded in a way worthy, I would suggest, of standing ovation.

The conflict reflects an ongoing tension between Muslim (and ex-Muslim) progressives and Muslim conservatives, but all involved here are widely regarded as on the left. It also exposes a persistent moral confusion among non-Muslim identitarian leftists who, in opposing anti-Muslim bigotry, end up supporting Muslim social conservatives whose values clash with women’s and LGBT rights. (I have been criticising this for some time)

This becomes complicated and there are a number of issues to untangle here. Much of the confusion rests on a basic category error: defending a person’s right to choose something is not the same as endorsing the values behind that choice.

Many have defended Mamdani’s post as a defence of women’s right to wear the hijab. Even if that were the point, one might question the timing, given that women in New York are not being banned from wearing it while women in Iran are being killed for refusing it and this is World Hijab Day. (Is that not a bit “All Lives Matter?”). But that is not the central issue.

The issue is that feminists and liberals object, on principle, to the values the hijab symbolises: a sex-specific modesty code that holds women responsible for managing male sexual desire. In any other context, such reasoning would be recognised as victim-blaming and condemned as anti-feminist.

Imagine a gay Christian who believes gay sex is sinful and chooses celibacy. Liberals should defend his right to make that choice. They should not celebrate the belief that same-sex relationships are morally wrong. If Mamdani had announced a day celebrating the moral wrongness of homosexuality, no one would confuse that with defending individual freedom.

This is how celebration of World Hijab Day appears to Muslim and ex-Muslim women who oppose sex-specific modesty codes. It looks like the celebration of a socially conservative, anti-feminist value and, in the current context, like indifference to women resisting compulsory veiling at great personal risk. That this decision was made by a man in a position of political power elected on an explicitly progressive platform does mean that he should expect to receive pushback from progressives and especially from feminists and women’s rights campaigners. They think they had the right to expect better from him.

Calling the AI image Islamophobic or bigoted makes little sense. If the hijab is simply an expression of faith, why should men not wear it? Muslim and ex-Muslim feminists and women’s rights activists have consistently made an argument that, if the hijab is just an expression of honouring the Muslim faith, Muslim men should have absolutely no problem wearing it themselves. The challenge exposes the inequality at its core. The reality is that the hijab is not just a manifestation of religious faith but a sex-specific modesty code which burdens women with a responsibility for modesty that is not applied to men. Several people pointed out that genuinely progressive men in Iran who support the equality of women have been protesting by putting the hijab on as women protested by taking it off.

The question remains then, why are Western Muslim men widely understood to be progressive like Mamdani, Hasan and Milani not supporting progressive Muslim women? For the last two to regard this common form of Muslim women’s rights activism as Islamophobic and bigoted seems to indicate that Islam is authentically represented by conservative Muslims who believe the hijab is something women and only women should wear and all the Muslims who believe otherwise are not authentic. One might well be forgiven for doubting their progressive credentials.

Milani is right that Muslims should not bear collective responsibility for Iran. I have consistently argued that we all need to be addressing illiberalism that arises within our own groups, mostly commonly addressing leftists and conservatives and urging them to criticise and marginalise the illiberal factions on their own sides, but I have also addressed this appeal to Muslims. However, nobody is obliged to be an advocate or defender of their ideological beliefs. They do have the right to just practice them privately and expect to be left alone. But these individuals do publicly position themselves as political advocates for Muslims and as progressive voices so they cannot reasonably expect to avoid scrutiny when they appear to endorse conservative interpretations or berate those resisting them.

It is not reasonable to wish to be seen as a spokesperson for an ideology when it comes to demanding protections for it but not when it comes to taking any responsibility for protecting others from illiberal manifestations of it. This is not to place that burden on Muslims exclusively. In answer to Mr. Milani, yes, if a Jew takes a position of political leadership or punditry from which he advocates for the state of Israel, it is perfectly reasonable for him to expect to have to address criticisms of Israel. Yes, if a Christian takes a position of political leadership or punditry from which she supports Donald Trump, it is perfectly reasonable for her to expect to have to answer questions about whether his behaviour is compatible with the Christian faith. Why wouldn’t it be? If a Muslim takes a position of political leadership and/or punditry from which he claims to stand for progressive values, it is reasonable for him to expect to be challenged if he appears not to be supporting progressive values.

The core issue which causes so much of this confusion comes from Islam itself and the fact that mainstream Islamic interpretations often combine economically left-leaning politics with socially conservative values. Many Muslims therefore find a political home on the Western left despite holding conservative views on gender roles and sexuality. They are less likely to feel at home on the right despite having socially conservative values in common with the social conservatives from majority demographics because they are not ultimately seeking to conserve the same traditions and culture. Conservatives do not tend to regard different kinds of conservatives as allies.

If conservatives from majority demographics are not likely to mistake Muslims with socially conservative values as their political kindred, those on the identitarian left are likely to make precisely this mistake. This is due to a combination of genuinely shared economic stances and a commitment to the tenets of postcolonial theory. Identitarian frameworks tend to divide people simplistically into “minorities” regarded as marginalised and “majorities” seen as privileged. They consequently struggle to register internal diversity within minority groups and flatten them into one community which obscures minorities within minorities. Because they are very aware of and feel complicit in a history of colonialism in which white Western cultures asserted their own superiority whilst trampling on other cultures, they overcompensate for this with cultural relativism and acceptance of values that are deeply rigidly socially conservative and hazardous to the rights of women and sexual minorities. This leads them to throw liberal Muslims, progressive Muslims, Muslim feminists and Muslim gay rights activists under the bus and make it much harder for them to advocate for themselves and address illiberal, rigidly socially conservative, anti-feminist and anti-gay beliefs within Islam. (I explained this in depth here).

This then results in extreme confusion, especially when people who want to support queer and trans activism crash up against those who believe in rigid gender roles and the moral unacceptability of homosexuality. This is what caused the chaos among Your Party members when Zarah Sultana declared that there was no room for socially conservative views within a socialist left-wing party and Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed left.

This confusion can also leave even left liberals who reject ‘woke’ identitarianism in a tangle. They want to defend religious freedom and oppose anti-Muslim bigotry when it functions more like racism than legitimate critique of Islam, while also defending the right to criticise rigidly socially conservative ideas and uphold women’s and same-sex attracted people’s rights. It can feel wrong to criticise Islam on these grounds when many of those targeted by the illiberal, ethnonationalist anti-immigrant sentiment they oppose are Muslim. It can feel easier to look away from misogyny and anti-gay values within Muslim communities and focus only on conservatives who are white and of Christian cultural background.

This may be well-intentioned but it is wrong and it contributes to making the left incoherent and vulnerable to justified accusations of hypocrisy.

The solution is for liberals on the left to stop supporting people on the basis of identity and reductionist frameworks of privilege and marginalisation, and instead support individuals according to their principles. The solution is to be consistently liberal, accept that viewpoint diversity exists within every group and the responsibility of the liberal is to support those members of it who are also liberal and who are objecting to illiberalism.

Liberalism requires defending the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab if they choose to do so. It also requires recognising that the choice reflects a socially conservative commitment to rigid gender roles. Defending a right does not require celebrating the value. If you would object to sex-specific modesty codes that burden women with managing male desire in any other context, you should object here too. There are already many Muslim and ex-Muslim women doing exactly that. They are the voices to support, not those attempting to silence them with accusations of Islamophobia.

Recognise progressive and liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims in the terms with which they frequently describe themselves - a minority within a minority. They face hostility from illiberal conservative members of their own communities — sometimes even violence — while also navigating virulent anti-Muslim sentiment or tokenism from majority conservatives. As Ayesha Ibrahim put it:

I am a woman from an intersectional background; an immigrant, a woman of colour from a Muslim family, and the cherry on top, an Ex-Muslim. A minority within a minority, if you will. How can someone like me talk about the issues in our communities, such as the denial of basic rights and freedoms under the guise of religion, without being tokenised by hard-right groups to justify anti-Muslim bigotry?”

Women like Ayesha, like Masih, like Khadija, targeted for abuse by illiberal Muslim conservatives and illiberal mainstream conservatives should be a clear priority for support from the liberal left. What do we exist for if we do not consistently object to illiberal manifestations of conservatism that impact the most vulnerable people? Instead, they often face a third front from the left comprised of non-Muslim leftists who resent their disruption of a simple identitarian narrative that eases their postcolonial guilt, and Muslim political leaders and pundits who present themselves as progressive but fail to live up to that commitment in practice.

Zohran Mamdani did fail to live to up to this when he celebrated World Hijab Day. He had a choice to support conservative Muslims defending the hijab or progressive ones objecting to the values it represents; to indicate solidarity with Iranians protesting the Islamic regime which forces women to wear it or to entirely fail to do so. Masih Alinejad’s objection to his message was exactly what one would expect from a women’s rights campaigner of her calibre and he should respond to it and explain how his stance on hijabs and failure to address the Iranian massacre at all is compatible with his branding as a progressive. Mehdi Hasan’s kneejerk response to her in calling her a “raging Islamophobe” should undermine any credentials he still had as a progressive voice to be respected on human rights and social justice. Ali Milani should consider whether his leadership of Labour Muslims is really very welcoming to any Muslim women who are not, in fact, conservatives.

Omid Djalili distinguished himself.

The other gentlemen did not.

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