By Abdul Hameed, TwoCircles.net,
Mumbai: As a part of the ongoing agitation against the French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s statement calling hijab a sign of ‘subservience’, the women wing of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind’s Maharashtra unit handed over a memorandum to the Consulate General of France in Mumbai and urged them to take it to President Sarkozy.
A group comprising Salma Beg (organizer woman wing, Mumbai division), Mumtaz Shaikh, Asma Deshmukh, Aslam Ghazi, Mirza Fazl Beg and Shaikh Nazir met Francois Pujolas at Consulate General of France in Mumbai located at Nariman Point and gave him the memorandum along with two books – Purdah and Towards Understanding Islam (English translation of Risala-e-Diniyat), both authored by Sayyad Abul Ala Maududi. They requested the consulate general to inform the French President office about their protest.
‘We protest the ban as well as condemn your remarks about hijab as they are uncalled for and in bad taste,’ the memorandum to Sarkozy reads.
‘Just as adding the letter ‘s’ is a national recognition for you, in the same way wearing burqa is the recognition of Muslim women. Any wrong sentence or statement in this regard is unbearable for us and it hurts our sentiments,’ the delegation reportedly told Pujolas.
Pujolas, however, defended that Sarkozy was misquoted by media and asked whether the delegation had gone through the original statement.
The memorandum expresses its regret over French president ‘publicly displaying his dislike of customary burqa worn by Muslim women around the globe’ and calls the ban on wearing a burqa in public places ‘against the basic tenets of democracy and rights of the individual in a plural society fashioned upon secular values’.
‘It is none of the business of a head of state to judge the status of a woman by the type of dress worn by her. Your description of a ‘veiled’ woman ‘unveils’ your own prejudice against cultural identities based upon religious beliefs of minority groups belonging to other faiths in your country,’ it adds.
The memorandum further reads, ‘Highly qualified women particularly professionals in medicine, engineering and other such faculties are always decently clad and not found in scanty clothes as in the case of those belonging to the world of glamour. No matter whichever religious faiths they might belong to.’