“O Prophet, tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to bring down over themselves [part] of their outer garments. That is more suitable that they will be known and not be abused. And ever is Allah Forgiving and Merciful.”
— The Quran, 33:59
(WASHINGTON, DC – 3/17/2022) – The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the nation’s umbrella group for major national, regional, and local American Muslim organizations, today condemned the Indian court of the state of Karnataka for its deeply bigoted, discriminatory, and dangerous ruling banning Muslim schoolgirls from wearing hijab in college classes in the state.
The court justices – appointed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – fully displayed their astounding arrogance and open misogyny in the wording of their ruling, in which the court’s non-Muslim justices audaciously presumed to interpret Islamic Law for Muslim women.
“We are of the considered opinion that wearing of hijab by Muslim women does not form a part of essential religious practice,” Chief Justice Ritu Raj Awasthi of the Karnataka High Court reading from the judgment.
Not only does India’s constitution bar the government from prescribing dress codes, in general, it also explicitly guards fundamentally guaranteed rights regarding essential religious practices.
“It is a wrong interpretation of the law,” said Anas Tanwir, the lawyer representing the students who brought the case to court. “As far as essential religious practice is concerned, [that] should not have been the question. The question should have been whether the [authorities] had the power to pass such orders.”
India is experiencing an internationally acknowledged climate of dangerous anti-Muslim hostility. Genocide Watch has recently issued two genocide alerts for India, higher than anywhere in the world. In this climate, the court’s ruling has every possibility, and intention, of spurring an India-wide prohibition over India’s more than 213 million increasingly besieged Muslims.
“It judicially sanctions apartheid,” said student leader Afreen Fatima of the Fraternity Movement. “It is going to set a worrying precedent and further push Muslim women out of educational spaces. Its implications are going to be felt across all states. It will embolden the Hindu extremists to demean Muslim women in public spaces.”
The virulently anti-Muslim ruling BJP and its handpicked justices show no such sensitivity to students wearing of saffron turbans – a symbol of Hindutva, which directly and self-confessedly modeled on Nazism and calls for violent Hindu supremacy within India.
The US Council of Muslim Organizations calls upon President Biden to intervene with sanctions on India’s BJP and its key members to stop India’s relentless march toward an anti-Muslim genocide.
We call on the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and all its member nations to sanction India, the BJP, and its individual members and to vigorously follow through on its request to the United Nations to “look into alleged human rights violations in India linked to Muslims.”
We ask God to protect the persecuted Muslims of India and safeguard them from further state-inspired massacres.
