The hijab, law and our economic doldrums (1)

Ms Kadaria Ahmed is a big-name media personality. And just the other day Ms Ahmed, following the run of calendars turned 50. Anyway, to hint something of her place under the African sun, she pulled the strings and the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo himself, had to abandon duty post and Abuja. He stylishly and at great public expense jetted into Lagos. And it was all to consort Ms Ahmed, as she celebrates a private, very private moment, her birthday.
Or perhaps it is that, at 50, Ahmed is so important an aspect of our poor and tragic lives that these things have to happen this way. Or perhaps, again, there is nothing really more important in the current VP’s schedule than to mingle with socialites and celebs, cashing out on the photo-ups? OK, lately, like all dictatorial government pikins, Osinbajo was loud complaining his and his principal’s pay are artisanal. Meanwhile they are cruising over cities and continents, in sheik-like luxury, to do birthday shindigs and be attended to by high-prized medics. It must thus be a miracle of modern economics. Otherwise, how does one explain being poorly paid and living like fairytale potentates? Meanwhile, we are being persuaded that his government be given $1 billion jara, to defeat the technically undefeated? Boy, this is Nigeria, big girls and things happen.
If we let go the asides, we can come to the meat of the matter. And the facts in issue are as follows: Ms Ahmed is a northerner, middle-class and now upper-class VP’s connection and all. And she is a Muslim lady. Apparently, she is married to a Yoruba guy. She hinted that much herself. And where did she do that?
It was at a Classic Radio talk show. “The Discourse,” with Jimi Disu, an aging humorist(?), and Ahmed answered many questions. In the course of her answers, she exhibited, in our estimation, why she is really a golden gem in communications. It was an interview worth listening to. But of interest to us here are the following apercus. She was asked how growing up as a northerner and a girl were for her. And this was in the background of the hijab/call to the bar brouhaha. See: FB Hijab https://youtu.be/zQyXyNY0uDQ
She conceded that this wave of hijabing as orthodoxy, is all a recent hit and phenomenon. To explain, she first mourned that some of her growing-up pictures are now lost. The much she could retrieve from relatives showed how they grew up in the North of her days. It was all in modesty, but sans hijab. And she was a female among many. So it was nothing peculiar to her.
And I smiled. A smile? Yes. Earlier, I had read a Foreign Policy report that in the 1950s to 1960s, photographic evidence shows that, in Egypt, especially Cairo, life was lived without hijab orthodoxy. Incidentally, too, I lost my file of the piece, photos and all, when my computer crashed. And I smiled. The point in issue is thus as follows. Hijab as a phenomenon in practice, as an orthodoxy to and for being a Muslim lady is a recent re/invention. Egypt then, at least, was the undeniable Muslim bellwether. That is Egypt, led and the rest of the Arab world followed, intellectually and culturally.
Thus the following is implied. If in those “Ms Ahmed growing up and Cairo years,” hijab was dutifully observed in the breach or negligence, the implication is clear. It implies a specific interpretation of the religious injunctions and instructions, that is, a cultural choice. This state of legitimate choice of observance in breach can only be annulled if a fatwa is issued. And that fatwa, after the fact, will be that those non-hijab-wearing females of yore were no Muslims at all. That is, those lovely people, many of whom are now dead, are dedicated to going to hell, having missed their way to paradise, sans hijab.
The point of this re/interpretation of hijabism is important. This is because the dominant/all views in all non-mathematical or scientific discourses and writings, including the scriptures, are choices. They are and cannot be what is stated in the books, however canonical. This is because, being non-mathematical, being non-scientific, they cannot be precisely stated and thus cannot be eternally correct or eternally valid. The inherent variation in interpretations ensures this. A Martin Luther, or an Shiia-Shiite disputations will always erupt. And this eruption ensures several and varied, even conflicting “certainties” and thus partisanship.
The fact is that only mathematical truths, once founded, are and cannot be revised. The fact of this pulls the carpet from under the feet of those arguing for or against tithing, the giving of one-tenth. The point is that they are getting their fractions and numbers wrong. Nothing can be proved one way or the other on the matter of tithes. Tithing, like all religious injunctions, are in beliefs, not logical systems. That is, they are administrative and, finally, political decisions or even devotions. You pay tithes or even worship gods not because it is logical. You do so because you believe.
This much must thus be said. The bottom-line fact of religions being belief systems while being marketed as rational choices is what makes democratic politics a more honest enterprise than pastoring and/or hijabing. In the end, democratic systems acknowledge a fact, that votes are instruments of belief, a choice, not logic, not inevitability. You don’t vote for the correctness of mathematical functions. You vote for or against say President Buhari, not because he is the logical person to be or not to be there. You vote for or against him because, after all your “rational” calculations, you believe he is or is not the man for the job. So voters are honest. But not so religionists. Religion, Mother A’Endu says, is the artifice of making poetry stand up as mathematics.
Thus the religionists’ claims that their beliefs are logical, are necessary, not contingent things, are false. And this falsity is valid even within their own religious references. This is so, we repeat, because the re/interpretations can alter or be altered. The fact is that the dominant religious interpretations are political, choices, not necessities. At their best, they are irrationally rational. To start with, all religions are self-referencing. And the fact of that proves nothing.
Immediately this is understood then it is clear that hijabing is a political or administrative, not strictly religious, demand. At best, it is a political demand within a religion. Even where it is legislated, it becomes both legal and political. This is because one can oust legislations, amend or introduce newer ones. Or even observe enforcement in breach. And this is a choice we repeat. To conclude on this section, we may state that there is nothing eternal in any legislation, including religious types. And the long history of civilisation confirms this.
So, if hijabing is a recent political or administration choice, what are the push and pull factors? First of all, let us point out the usual culprit. It is said that it is the emergence of Saudi money that propelled the rise and rise of conservative Islamism. The best scholarship on this, by our reckoning, is as follows. We quote:
Why has Sunni-Shia sectarianism become so toxic? There are several reasons. The first is the tolerance of anti-Shia hate speech by the Saudi Arabian government, which, especially after it accrued massive oil revenues from 1973 onwards, has sought to export its brittle Wahhabi ideology. Saudi Arabia might see itself as promoting Muslim solidarity as a rallying point for conservatives against Arab nationalism, socialism and democracy, yet its founding ideology, Wahhabism, demonises the Shia (and Sufis) as idolaters. The second reason is the Iranian revolution of 1979. This was ‘Islamic’, although not primarily in a sectarian sense. Ayatollah Khomeini’s ambition was to persuade all Muslims – Sunnis as well as Shias – to line up behind him…
As the decades passed, Saudi Arabia and Iran would both try to co-opt Sunni and Shia communities to their side in their struggle for regional power.
(Islam’s ‘Toxic’ Schism, by John McHugo, History Today. http://www.historytoday.com/john-mchugo/islams-toxic-schism)
The quoted logics and facts are valid. However, we consider them the pull factor. The push factor is the unimagined or not to be imagined factor. It is politically correct not to so imagine it.
But we shall. It is this: The story of the resurgence of the hijab can be characterised in summary as follows. The Arabs, in trying and failing to be scientific and technological, are retreating into religious superstitious and conservatism. So, rather than mathematicising poetry they are poeticising mathematics. That is, the Arab relapse into religionism is accounted more by their scientific-cultural failures on one hand. On the other hand, it may be accounted by their insistence on holding political and cultural dominion over all others. Apparently, they imagine that there was a time and a time was when and while they ruled the world with poetry and that that state of affairs should remain. In short, the Arabs are calling for frozen time. But even at that we need to be wary. This is because their religionist gestures have nothing to do with making paradise. It is all about power. And to be fair to the data, it is not Arab-specific. All religions, repeat, all religions, are arsenals for power on earth. Making heaven is an opportunistic quasi-religious afterthought for all religions. Or was there ever a Pope who wanted less power than Caesar, or an Imam who didn’t want to lead an empire?