The changing landscape of women wearing burqas

The proliferation of wearing a burqa in recent years did not surprise the villagers. Despite having no reliable statistics, Sayed Ullah, a local schoolteacher and community leader, claims that at present, ninety-nine percent of village women, including unmarried girls, voluntarily wear a burqa. For him, it did not surprise villagers because a form of purdah (segregating women from the public sphere) for women has always existed in the village, and a burqa is simply a new form of maintaining purdah. This implies that the burqa makes a departure from previous practices of women maintaining purdah, what is often called “portable seclusion” (Papanek Reference Papanek1973). It undermines traditional purdah’s limits of isolating women within four walls while still conforming to social norms. The burqa, identified today as “mobile homes,” emerged as a liberating intervention for Muslim women (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu- Lughod2013, 36).

Historically, purdah has been an integral part of South Asian social structure. Though it has different meanings, interpretations, and practice patterns, the custom indicates the numerous means of keeping women secluded from the public sphere (Papanek Reference Papanek1973; Jeffery Reference Jeffery2000; Feldman and McCarthy Reference Feldman and McCarthy1983). It is a technique of segregating men’s and women’s worlds, where women’s public mobility is rarely tolerated. Nur Jahan, a 75-year-old respondent, wonderfully narrated her experience with various ways of women’s mobility and preserving purdah in the village. She said that women moved from one place to another during the late night and the early morning when people barely existed in the public sphere. They usually carried an umbrella to hide themselves from the sight of strangers. Jahan further stated that women of economically well-off families would travel by bullock cart or Palki (a wooden vehicle usually carried by four men), covering that with a cloth to remain hidden from the public sight. Later, she adds, when rickshaws became available, they started traveling by rickshaw, again covering that with a long shari or a piece of cloth.

Jahan claims that women of wealthy families gradually started wearing a burqa, particularly when they completed Hajj in Mecca. Jahan and other respondents agreed that the burqa started to be a popular dress for women in villages in the late 1970s when village men started traveling to the Middle Eastern countries as migrant workers. During their return, Jahan claims, men brought burqas for their wives, mothers, and sisters. Raisul Hossain, who traveled to Saudi Arabia as a migrant worker in the early 1990s, confirmed Jahan’s claim, adding that they (workers in general) became fascinated by Arab women wearing burqas and desired to see their wives in a similar fashion. Suraiya Begum, a local college principal, describes that the burqa was initially a symbol of elitism and later a sign of middle-class status in villages. However, she maintains that once women of all classes started donning it, that mark of class stratification declined, and the practice gradually became normalized. Begum’s claim contests the prevailing scholarship, albeit in different times and contexts, which argues that the burqa still signals a middle-class status, distinguishing the middle class from the lower class, or that the community does not care if women of higher class, status, or power do not wear burqas (Chowdhury Reference Chowdhury1992, 62–64; Sabur Reference Sabur2022, 398). Neither was the case in the villages where I worked. I rather found two instances where respondents claimed that their upper-class relatives living in New York wear burqas and brought burqas and hijabs as gifts for them.

Nevertheless, historically, the burqa had been a mark of respectability and modernity for Muslim women in Bengal. This was interestingly portrayed in Najibar Rahman’s Bengali novel Gariber Meye (A Daughter of the Poor, 1988, first pub. 1923). When the heroine Nuri, the newlywed, clad in a colored burqa, appeared in her class in a village school, everyone was surprised, finding the dress rather unusual. Rahman narrates, “The garment is not so prevalent in rural areas, and so none had seen one. There was a wild rush to catch a glimpse of the girl clad in a strange dress” (Rahman Reference Rahman1988, 28). Upon Nuri’s discomfort at her fellow schoolgirls’ reaction, her husband replies, “Don’t let that bother you…The ignorant and selfish always criticize innovations…Muslim bhadramahila [gentlewomen] have been using the burqa from ancient times. It is a beautiful means for the preservation of purdah” (Rahman Reference Rahman1988, 31). For Rahman, the burqa was an innovation, a modern adaptation in Bengal from the Arab-Persian customs, and a sign of upper-class Muslims. This view of purdah has transformed over the years, as we find in Jahan’s experience. Jahan and other respondents’ narration of the traditional way of women’s mobility maintaining purdah and the gradual increase of wearing a burqa is apparently supported by academic research conducted on the subject in rural Bangladesh (Amin Reference Amin1997; Feldman and McCarthy Reference Feldman and McCarthy1983).

In a Muslim society like Bangladesh, maintaining purdah and wearing a burqa have been highly debated, at least from the early twentieth century. The debate is reflected in the Bengali Muslim literature. However, the issue of the veil came up in modernist and Islamic literatureFootnote ³ in Bengali radically differently. The modernist writers depicted purdah and burqa as the oppressive impositions on women against their wills in the name of religion and social customs. In Abu Ishaq’s classic Surjo Dighol Bari (The Ominous House, 1955), the protagonist Joygun, a rural, working-class woman without any formal education, is a victim of the ulema’s fatwa (informal legal rule issued by an Islamic scholar). Ishaq shows the “hypocrisy” of religious and social leaders; while they did not take the responsibilities of Joygun and her two children after the death of her husband, they issued a fatwa and socially boycotted her when she went outside for work, breaking the purdah norm of the society. The Imam of the local mosque derogatorily declares, “Allah does not grant the ebadah (prayer) of women without purdah (bepurdah), and they (bepurdah women) are worse than the street dogs (raster kutti)” (Ishaq Reference Ishaq1955, 87). Nevertheless, Ishaq portrays a complex psychological dilemma in Joygun’s character: on the one hand, she had to work for the survival of her family, and on the other, she neither wanted to be identified as a sinner to Allah nor sought to be socially boycotted. Modernist Ishaq, understandably, shows that Joygun takes the path of survival at the cost of religious and social isolation. Through Joygun, Ishaq poses a challenge to the prevailing custom of purdah over religious and social norms on pragmatic grounds. Similar to other modernists, Ishaq has an urge to emancipate women like Joygun from the social and religious victimization, but at the same time, determines that rural women are not passive without agency. He rather shows that when life is threatened, women, regardless of their education and social position, can revolt and choose their own path, prioritizing survival over purdah in Joygun’s case.

However, within modernist literature, radical feminists view the burqa uncritically, reinforcing the civilizing mission of Western feminists. The controversial, exiled Bangladeshi feminist Taslima Nasrin, in her Nirbachito Kalam (Selected Columns 2012, first pub. 1992), laments the burqa as an unnecessary, “Islamic” cloth imposed on Muslim women by ulema and patriarchal social structure in Bangladesh.Footnote ⁴ Referring to the Quran and Hadith, Nasrin argues that Islamic texts discriminated against women—hiding them with cloths and restricting their mobility—while providing men absolute freedom in their apparel and movement (Nasrin Reference Nasrin2012). Nasrin designates the burqa as a moving prison where women spend their entire lives without being identified and remain deprived of their rights and freedom. Thus, reiterating Western feminists, she urges for the worldwide ban of the burqa to rescue Muslim women from the “prison.”

In contrast to modernists’ take, Islamic literature portrays purdah and burqa in a profoundly different fashion, showing an opposite picture where burqa is a tool to rescue women from the victimization of so-called modernization. The highly debated novel Abdus Salam Mitul’s Burqa Pora Sei Meyeti (That Veiled-Clad Woman)—the Bengali fiction that is arguably the first to produce a genre of what is known as the Islamic romance novel in Bengali and to defend the burqa and its associated Islamic norms against its modernist onslaught—portrays how the burqa emerged as a liberating technology for women in Bangladesh (Mitul Reference Mitul1994). Mitul implies that women wearing burqas and growing religious practice are a direct impact of the betrayal of modernity that brought various moral crises related to abortion and other issues in contemporary Bangladesh (Mitul Reference Mitul1994). Mitul’s portrayal could be determined as a disruption—psychological and physical—that modernization brought to Muslim societies (Asad Reference Asad and Gailey1992). He seeks to address this disruption by reinforcing Islamic social norms and traditions in everyday life. Burqa and Islamic lifestyle against modern modes of living similarly appeared in the works of other popular Islamic novelists, including Kashem bin Abu Bakar, Musharraf Hussain Sagar, Abul Asad, and Nasir Helal (Huq Reference Huq, Dale and Jon2003). However, the most popular Islamic literature on the burqa comes from the theological interpretations of what is known as masa’la texts that authoritatively demonstrate the “correct” nature and ways of wearing a burqa, invoking the Quranic and Hadith references. Their main claim is that the burqa is an integral part of Islam—both faith and Islamic culture—thus, its wearing cannot be compromised.Footnote ⁵

In the issue of purdah among Muslim women in Bengal, the most authoritative, nuanced, and balanced comments are found in the writings of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), a feminist author, educator, and activist. Rokeya harshly criticized the Muslim women’s extreme practices of purdah that imperiled their being and living (Rokeya Reference Rokeya and Rahman2012, first pub.1932). She advocated for women wearing the burqa against the purdah custom and was critical of the liberal argument that the burqa imprisoned women, arguing that it offered women an opportunity for public mobility that otherwise traditional Muslim societies seldom allow. The preceding historical accounts I included tell us how the meanings and, practically, forms of the burqa changed over the years and how modernists, Islamists, and radical feminists debated it. Building on those debates, in the following section, I show how ordinary women themselves view the burqa, engage with social and religious norms, and exercise their agency in choosing burqa patterns, and in the final section, I outline how rural women manage their public mobility in the transformed socio-political landscape of contemporary rural Bangladesh.

Rural women’s complicated “choice” of burqa

One of the central debates concerning the Muslim veil is could it be considered a genuine expression of women’s rational choice? Joan Scott summarizes the dilemma in the French context that when a woman claims that the “headscarf is part of myself,” liberals would interpret it as a delusional act, dishonesty (acting as an Islamist agent), or something imposed by a family that women would otherwise refuse (Scott Reference Scott2007, 125). Scott tells us that liberals maintain that veiling cannot be a rational choice but an imposed practice of an oppressive community. Such generalized and essentialized assumptions are not only empirically flawed but also conceptually problematic, especially in the context of Muslim-majority countries. How is it determined if veiling is a genuine choice? How do veiled women view veiling themselves?

The question of choice bears little significance in the context of a rural Muslim community in Bangladesh—where the incident of not wearing a burqa barely exists—a very different context than that of Scott’s urban France. Still, when I asked if wearing a burqa was their choice, my interlocutors invariably claimed it was their voluntary choice. One of my interlocutors, Rozina, asserted that they were not compelled to wear it. For her, the choice of not accepting veiling as a community norm prevails, although they barely exercise that choice. In her words:

What Rozina started voluntarily in compliance with community norms, wearing a burqa, gradually becomes part of her own habits that she safeguards, even contesting her husband’s expectation. The norms are not simply social impositions on the subject but constitute individuals’ very substance of interiority (Butler Reference Butler1997, 19-20). Community norms perhaps do change Rozina’s interiority. However, while internalizing social norms, Rozina and the interlocutors I worked with do not deliberately distinguish between what is their well-thought-out individual choice and what is the social norm they comply with. Instead, the social implicitly dominates their choices, actions, and practices. Yet, village women are not without exercising their choices. Whereas the question of the choice for not wearing a burqa is rarely raised, the matter of choosing the styles and colors of a burqa depends entirely on their preferences. Women favor various fashionable patterns of burqas, both ready-made and designed by themselves. Traditionally, burqas were black and loose so that people could not recognize the shapes of women’s bodies. But those burqas are nearly obsolete; only older women in the village wear them. Badhon, the proprietor of a local women’s garment store, claims that previously they used to sell only plain, one-colored burqas. However, they sell hundreds of colors and patterns of it, as the burqa has become a part of fashion now. My conversations with Shamim, owner of another popular women’s garment store in the area, on several occasions reveal that the choices of women’s burqas and hijabs have become so diverse that he is unable to easily meet their expectations. Women, particularly young ones, see designs online and ask owners of the garment stores to bring them from the city. Badhon and Shamim agreed that the burqa has lately become a dress similar to other women’s dresses. I found similar responses from young boys and girls during my focus group discussions. Only one college-going girl out of thirteen in a focus group told me that she wears a burqa, not merely as a dress but rather as a part of religion. Upon further conversation with this respondent, it came out that she is from a very pious family and grew up wearing a sort of plain burqa. Her father is a devout Tablighi Jamaat (Islamic preaching movement) adherent, and both of her brothers are pursuing their education at Islamic seminaries.

The diverse choice of women’s burqa contests the religious and community expectations. It’s a fascinating development of resistance in rural Bangladesh. We find similar observations of veiled women’s resistance to community norms and practices in other Muslim contexts, such as Egypt and Indonesia (MacLeod Reference MacLeod1992; Brenner Reference Brenner1996). In contrast to my interlocutors in rural Bangladesh, those observations are based on the experiences of urban middle-class educated women. However, I did not come across any evidence of my interlocutors’ refusing to wear a burqa, but their resistance is actually against wearing a particular pattern of plain, loose, and black burqas prescribed by the social and religious community. A group of elderly male members I interacted with in a local tea stall expressed their disapproval of the burqas young women wear, as those are not the ones women traditionally used to wear. They claimed that the new colors and styles of burqas undermine the religious purpose of wearing them. The local religious leaders have been found to be the most vocal against wearing multi-colored and designed burqas. Among the local Islamic preaching programs, Waz Mahfil, and Friday Mosque sermons I participated in during my fieldwork, in two of the Waz Mahfils and a mosque sermon, ulema vehemently attacked the modern patterns of burqas and declared that they are by no means Islamic ways of maintaining purdah. I observed similar reactions during my interviews with local mosque Imams and teachers of Islamic seminaries. Mohammad Muhiuddin, a local Imam and a teacher at a local Islamic seminary, claims that the contemporary pattern of the burqa is just a dress like any other kind. It is not the way of maintaining purdah as the Quran and Hadith prescribe.Footnote ⁶ For him, women’s wearing attractive burqas, which attract men’s attention, is haram [forbidden] and Jahiliya [ignorance]. However, the village women did not observe purdah as prescribed by the ulema, nor did they entirely reject it. Women’s such defiance of the ulema’s desire to wear a specific pattern of burqa and shun public mobility is somewhat akin to Shehabuddin’s observation of women who engaged with NGO works in rural Bangladesh. They neither abandoned purdah in compliance with secular aspirations nor adhered to Islamists’ expectations not to join NGOs and work outside (Shehabuddin Reference Shehabuddin2008, 151).

Therefore, a woman’s choice of a burqa is complicated. It is a distinct choice produced within compliance with the community’s expectation of wearing a burqa while resisting their prescription of wearing a plain, loose, and black burqa. In this respect, the liberal concern for women’s genuine choice for veiling is seemingly irrelevant and, to some extent, disruptive in this context where women live in embedded relationships within the community. The quest for some authenticity of choice rather appears to judge these Muslim women on the scale of liberal individuality, which prioritizes discovering an individual’s “true interiority” and expressing it in external actions (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005). Rather than searching for “true choice,” what is more intriguing is to examine how these women act at the intersection of various community, religious, and market discourses within an ambivalent space of “conformity and resistance” in their shared, community-based living. The village women deviate from the prevailing community standards with respect to the design and color of the burqa yet adhere to the community norm of wearing a burqa. While ostensibly resisting religious discourse pertaining to the strict ways of donning the burqa and public mobility, these women nonetheless embrace other religious teachings advanced by religious leaders, ulema. Furthermore, they comply with market demand by preferring modern burqa patterns to some extent, while resisting the market allure of forsaking burqas in favor of fashionable modern dresses. It is somewhat like Maimuna Huq’s observation that veiled Islamist women in urban Bangladesh do not adhere to a single, hegemonic discourse of Islamic or other ways of life as they navigate their quotidian affairs. They belong to and embody various prevailing discourses within the community (Huq Reference Huq2006, 258–62; also, Huq Reference Huq2008). The village women’s creative intersectional engagements with contending discourses offer a distinct agency to them; I will elaborate on it further in the next section. What I emphasize here is that women’s various modes of conformity and resistance mostly involve their external interactions. They do not make an effort to cultivate inner pious feelings, or their veiling cannot be reduced to merely a pious expression (Mannan Reference Mannan2022).

My interlocutors are generally pious—that is, in the sense of observable religious practices. That means they say regular prayers, fast during Ramadan (the month for fasting), and recite the Quran as a part of the daily “ritual.” Their piety develops within the quotidian rituals of family and community; girls adopt these rituals from older women as they grow up. That is to say, their piety is not about reading the Quran and Hadith literature to self-reflectively follow the Islamic principles in the everyday rituals and preaching God’s message to others, as do the women of the piety movement (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005, 4-5). A sense of divine teleology drives the village women’s lives—they summon Allah in any danger and remain gracious to Him for every accomplishment. Still, they are not concerned about discovering and expressing some true internal religious feelings through everyday rituals or, symbolically, by wearing a burqa. They do not construct themselves as disciplined and devout Islamic subjects by separating themselves from traditional norms or everyday habits. The village women I worked with, rather, internalize religious practices within a process of existing socialization. Although various preaching movements, i.e., women’s da’wa groups, Tablighi Jamaat, and madrassa/mosque-based preaching programs, exist in the village, their impact on the construction of women’s particular Islamic subjectivities in the village remained nominal compared to the piety movement of Bangladesh and elsewhere (Huq Reference Huq2006; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005; Deeb Reference Deeb2006). My interlocutors invariably recognize that the burqa is an integral part of Islam and their life, yet they maintain that wearing it does not make one particularly pious.

Veiling, thus, is not a practice of expressing inner personal conviction that helps cultivate a relationship with God, as for the women of the piety movement in Bangladesh and elsewhere. For my interlocutors, wearing a burqa is primarily a social concern associated with showcasing their modesty in the public sphere.Footnote ⁷ Their concern is what people would perceive (loke ki bolbe) if they did not wear a burqa. For them, not wearing a burqa has a profound social consequence, including the potential for hurting their family reputation. The question of what people would think and the possible harm to the family’s social image are also significant considerations for the rural women wearing the burqa in other regions of Bangladesh (Feldman and McCarthy Reference Feldman and McCarthy1983). How can women in rural Bangladesh, while adhering to the social and religious norms of wearing a burqa, defy these norms by choosing diverse styles of burqa and enhancing their public mobility? This is a complex process produced within the interplay of global norms, the modern state’s legal regimes, and transformed local conditions, which I will illustrate in the section that follows.

Rights consciousness, wearing a burqa, and women’s public mobility

The pathway survey conducted in 2009 reveals that women councilors in rural Bangladesh do not look upon purdah as an impending factor to their mobility; rather, it facilitates their movements and offers them greater “acceptability and respectability” within society (Mohsin Reference Mohsin and Ahmed2020, 45). Burqa facilitates mobility of not only the councilors but also women of various socio-economic positions in rural Bangladesh (Feldman and McCarthy Reference Feldman and McCarthy1983; Hossain and Kabir Reference Hossain and Kabir2001). However, the question of “acceptability and respectability” varies. The village people where I did my fieldwork, while appreciating women’s wearing burqas, are highly critical of their public mobility. Yet, they cannot revoke women’s mobility due to their having a strong sense of women’s rights consciousness, as I defined in the introduction. The distinct rights consciousness strongly resonated with the responses of my interlocutors and my other encounters in the village. How did this distinct rights consciousness grow among my interlocutors and villagers in general?

Among the other factors that predominantly contributed to women’s rights consciousness was how the modern state’s legal regime reached out to village women. The Bangladesh government has adopted a number of legislative protections to safeguard women from violence in the last decades. It was intriguing to observe how these legal protections have made their way into the village and effectively permeated the awareness of rural women and the villagers in general. Two ways stand out: women’s experiential learning through actual events in the village and local NGO’s translation of legal rights into vernacular language and context. The protective legal apparatus is known to the villagers as Nari Nirjaton Ain (NNA), which is Nari-o-Shishu Nirjatan Daman Ain (Women and Children Repression Prevention Act), 2000.Footnote ⁸ Villagers realized its efficacy by means of a number of instances that ensued in the village. Kamrun Nahar narrated the story of how she realized the strength of the law. To her, their neighbor, Main Uddin, a middle-aged man, severely tortured and verbally divorced his wife, Naima, because she allegedly had an extramarital affair with another person in the village. Naima’s family appeared before the village authority, an informal village court named Shalish, for justice. The Shalish authority favored Uddin while victimizing Naima, even though her guilt had not been proven. Nahar, like other villagers, thought the issue had been resolved. However, a few days later, they learned that Uddin had been arrested and imprisoned because Naima’s family had filed an NNA case against him with the assistance of an NGO.Footnote ⁹ Although the issue was settled in court and Uddin was released, it left an everlasting imprint on the collective psyche of the villages. Several such incidents occurred subsequently in the village where the Shalish authority’s verdicts were overruled by official judicial judgments. These established a powerful consciousness that NNA is the savior against women’s victimization. It became such a formidable and effective instrument that villagers started misusing it. Even in conflicts other than women’s persecution, they file an NNA lawsuit or threaten to do so against their opponents. Joshna Begum recounted one of the numerous such conflicts I learned about during my fieldwork. She asserted that despite the fact that their family was involved in a violent conflict with their neighbor Abu Bakar’s family over a land dispute, and three male members of the latter family were injured—none of them was women—Bakar filed a case against their family through NNA to make the case stronger, deceptively claiming that women were persecuted during the conflict. The power of the NNA and its deterrence, thus, profoundly shaped the women’s rights consciousness in the village.

Still, how did local NGOs persuade women to file court cases and translate women’s rights discourse to them? A long conversation with Chompa Rani, a retired NGO worker who shared her experiences working with the village women, was instructive. According to her, their approach was not to educate the village women about their rights; the rights discourse did not appeal to them. During their meetings for other purposes, such as encouraging women to save money, raise livestock, and cultivate vegetables, Rani addressed the issues of women’s everyday life in an easily comprehensible local Bengali dialect. She wanted to know what was occurring in their lives through various indirect means. The village women initially did not state their domestic persecution, but as she gained their confidence, they gradually began to speak up. After they told their tales, Rani equated their mistreatment to that of women in other villages or regions of the country without directly criticizing either patriarchy or other social and religious practices. She persistently endeavored to convince the village women to file lawsuits in severe cases, repeatedly stating that the government privileged women by passing laws to safeguard them, and the courts and police administration were positive and proactive in this regard. She added,

Nahar and Rani’s narratives demonstrate that what primarily contributed to rights consciousness among village women was their encounter with the resistance to women’s victimhood through legal means as they experienced them in their communities. The global rights norms exist there, but they are translated and conveyed through the process of vernacularization that remakes original norms with the support of local stakeholders like NGOs and local institutional supports such as local courts (Merry Reference Merry2006, 181-82, 219). The translation of global norms can only make sense to the local context if the content of the norms is transformed in ways that make sense to the people receiving them in their context (Berger Reference Berger2017, 6-7). However, Merry and Berger’s emphasis remains on the process of the vernacularization of norms in local terms done by the local mediators like NGO workers, as if the recipients of them are passive and accept what they are given. My ethnographic evidence, nonetheless, shows that village women embrace global norms on their own terms only when they find the practical utilities in their lived experiences.

In contrast to the global understanding of women’s rights, which emphasizes women’s freedom and equality and pits women’s rights against oppressive social norms, the rights consciousness among villagers is understood and utilized for women’s public movement without undermining patriarchal social norms. My interlocutors do not assert that they, as individuals, are free to move wherever they choose and that their movement should be legally protected by the state. Rather, they claim to make their way to move and work outside out of their necessity. This implies that they will only move outside once required to do so. However, it is not the case. Women whose households have male members who are responsible for collecting daily necessities also shop at marketplaces. One such woman wondered, “How can my husband, father or brother choose things for me?” “My husband takes care of groceries and other necessities, but I like to do my own shopping. He does not object to it since I wear a burqa with a face-veil; nobody can identify me on the way.” This anonymity is significant for women’s public mobility. It offers them an opportunity to move outside without being recognized by the community. Family members, particularly husbands, support this practice because it alleviates their concerns about potential social repercussions for women’s mobility within the family but simultaneously enables women to exercise their choice, such as shopping independently. I have encountered numerous instances where male individuals speak against women’s mobility in the public sphere, even when women in their families anonymously venture outside while wearing a burqa.

The burqa emerged as a site of negotiation between male family members, women’s exercise of choice, and public mobility. The general norm came to be that women could move outside and choose their outfits if they maintained an “appropriate” form of purdah. Maintaining the “correct” form of purdah or wearing a burqa signifies that women are in compliance with social norms. Thus, women utilized the veil to negotiate creatively between their particular choices and community expectations for being modest in order to construct their ways for public mobility. This process of negotiation, however, is strongly supported by the women’s rights consciousness developed in the village as discussed above. The male villagers’ fear of being persecuted by strict NNA for mistreatment of women, on the one hand, and strong legal protection for women, which provided them with courage and motivation to move outside, on the other, contributed to women’s public mobility. My conversations with the elderly persons and ulema in the village provide strong evidence that women’s public mobility would not be easier if they were not legally protected. It is therefore intriguing to notice that the modern state’s legal safeguard and the rights consciousness that developed in the village facilitate women by granting them distinct agency, thereby transforming women’s relationships with the community in a substantial way. As illustrated in the first section of this paper, historically, in order to survive, ordinary women had to accept community norms and were not in the position of negotiating with them. The state’s legal apparatus, however, now essentially unsettled the community’s normative power, empowering women to carve their way out.

The utterance of women’s choice for particular patterns of burqa and how women negotiate with patriarchal social norms for public mobility indicates that village women display a distinctive expression of agency. However, the exercise of their agency cannot be determined without investigating them in the context of the discourses and structures of subordination where they act and analyzing them in the specific networks of concepts that enable their “specific modes of being, responsibility, and effectivity” (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2001, 212). Women exercise their agency within complex power relations, acting at the intersections of contending discourses of power (Huq Reference Huq2008). Their public mobility cannot be readily reduced to the resistance against traditional social norms from a liberal emancipatory viewpoint. My interlocutors rather utilize rights consciousness against the power of their social norms and vice versa to pave the way for their public mobility. Nevertheless, they do not become liberal subjects, liberating themselves by discarding the burqa and repressive social norms altogether. The village women are not passive, docile bodies, merely an object of power that produces their subjectivities either. Instead, the power that produces them dominates over them and is also the object of their resistance (Foucault Reference Foucault and Faubion1994; Butler Reference Butler1997). Although they are variously produced by social and religious norms in the community, women resist them on the question of choosing fashionable patterns and designs of the burqa and on the question of their public mobility. They are subjects of liberal norms and the state’s legal regime but do not transform into “liberated” subjects. Rather, negotiating with competing discourses and power relations, women emerge as a particular subject with distinct agency. In the process of negotiation, women become neither liberal nor Islamic subjects but subjects that are constantly in the process of self-constitution. Their subjectivities are shaped by their everyday encounters with the discourses in which they reside.

The extension of the modern state’s legal power to its rural subjects in the process of shaping their subjectivity transformed the dynamics of village women. How can we interpret this transformation and rights consciousness? Should we read it as part of liberal feminists’ civilizing mission in “rescuing and saving” Muslim women from the “violence and oppression” of repressive religious and social norms and practices? (Massad Reference Massad2015) Or interpret it as part of the modern states’ becoming repressive instruments in Muslim societies with their legal apparatuses in constructing liberal subjects in destroying and rebuilding moral and political options? (Asad Reference Asad and Gailey1992, 336). I do neither disagree with Massad and Asad’s concern with respect to liberalism and the modern state’s violent disruptions brought to Muslim societies, nor do I resist Mahmood’s contention that women can hardly escape from the modern state’s disciplinary mechanisms that “continually targeted” them (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005, 194). However, stressing the disruptive part of it, looking at liberalism and the modern state’s encounter with Muslim women from the prism of oppressive power and its resistance, or as the clash of two “warring forces,” to put it in Asad’s words, undermines their nuanced distinct effect on the lives of Muslim women in different socio-political landscapes (Asad Reference Asad and Gailey1992, 341).

The liberal ethos and the modern state do not appear in or affect Muslim communities similarly. The global women’s rights norms traveled and remade themselves in rural Bangladesh in the form of a rights consciousness informed by the modern state’s legal empowerment, which not only disrupted rural women’s traditional existence but also helped them develop a particular agency. The otherwise marginalized rural women, accordingly, utilized them to resist social and religious norms without becoming the desired liberal subjects of the modern state. They instrumentalized the state’s legal apparatus to resist social and religious norms while utilizing those norms, to some extent, to resist the state’s pervasive subject formation. We will miss rural women’s such creative engagements with liberal norms and the modern state’s legal regime if we merely see them as pervasive and totalizing entities undermining the possibilities of finding “more rooms for creative subversion to occur” when marginal subjects engage in dialogue with the modern state’s legal apparatuses (Stephens Reference Stephens2018, 18).