Beyond the Veil: Women’s Agency, Freedom, and Moral Autonomy in Islamic and Contemporary Thought
حجاب کے پار آزادی عورت، اختیار اور اخلاقی خودمختاری کا اسلامی و جدید مکالمہ
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66212/brjisr.v7i1.287Keywords:
Hijab; Women; Agency; Moral Autonomy; Relational Autonomy; Islamic Ethics; Modesty; Religious Freedom; Gender Justice; Muslim Women.Abstract
This article examines hijab through the interconnected questions of women’s agency, freedom, moral autonomy, religious commitment, gender justice, and cultural power. It rejects two reductive assumptions: that veiling necessarily signifies female subordination, and that unveiling necessarily signifies liberation. The study argues that Islamic moral discourse addresses women as responsible moral agents and situates modest dress within a wider ethical framework that also regulates male and female gaze, sexual conduct, speech, dignity, and social interaction. In dialogue with contemporary feminist discussions of relational autonomy and scholarship on Muslim women’s religious agency, it distinguishes voluntary religious commitment from coercion and emphasizes that agency cannot be identified simply with resistance to inherited norms. The article also considers the opposite form of coercion in which women are pressured or legally compelled to remove religious dress. It concludes that a defensible account of freedom must take women’s reasoning, conscience, education, security, and capacity for meaningful choice seriously. Hijab, therefore, should neither be romanticized as automatic liberation nor dismissed as automatic oppression; its ethical significance depends on the agent, the normative framework she accepts, and the social conditions in which her choice is formed and exercised.
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The article offers ethical, exegetical, and social analysis. It is not a fatwa on every detailed rule of hijab, legal advice under a particular jurisdiction, or a judgment on an individual case.
