In the 1940s, Abul A'la al-Maududi founded the Islamist organization Jamaat-e-Islami and published his treatise on the purdah system. He argued that a strict system of gender segregation, restricting women’s mobility and access to public spaces, was essential for maintaining the moral integrity of the society. By the 2020s, both the Indian faction of the organization and its conception of the purdah system had undergone radical revisions. Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH) moderated its distaste for Indian democracy and more or less transformed its advocacy of the purdah system into a promotion of the practice of hijab. As a result, while earlier the organization was largely dismissed as apostasy, it had now gained significant traction within the Muslim community in India. At the heart of this transformation was an increasingly visible and vocal female activism literate in religious scholarship as well as modern secular-democratic principles.

This paper examines this phenomenon through a literary analysis of articles on the practice of purdah in Aramam Monthly, a women’s magazine in Kerala, a southern state in India, published by JIH. The analysis covers articles from the magazine’s inception, in 1985, to the present day. The paper looks at how notions of freedom, equality, sexuality, fashion, and religiosity have been deliberated over the years in discussions of socially acceptable and appropriate conduct for Muslim women. Thus, it observes how moderation of the Maududist principles on the ‘woman question’ has been negotiated in practice such that advocacy for segregation and confinement gave way to visibility and activism.

Authors:
Zuha Moideen, English and Foreign Languages University, India

About the Presenter(s)
Zuha Moideen is a PhD Scholar in Cultural Studies at English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her thesis is titled 'Traditions of the Hijab in Malabar, Kerala'. She is interested in Pop-Culture, Religion, Secularism and Gender Studies.

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