The craze for fitness has also infected those who cannot afford to go to a gym, and so have carved out their own exercise routines. Shahida Khatoon stopped using the rickshaw that used to drop her six-year-old son to his school about two kilometres away from her home in the Model Town area, and now walks every day to drop and pick up her son. "I thought this walk would help me shape up and keep my body fit," says Shahida, who has never stepped out of her house without a burqa.
"Burqa or purdah was never an obstruction in the way these women want to look," says Shahnaz Sidrat, the president of Bazm-e-Khawateen—a Lucknow women's organisation that has recently spread its wings in Pune. In fact, Sidrat has started a yoga camp at the city's only Zanana (women's only) Park. "The last camp held in July was attended by about 200 women, and many of them indeed came in purdah," Sidrat says.
A simple explanation for the rising number of veiled women queuing up at fitness centres comes from the only woman member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, Begum Naseem Iqtedar, who is known as a woman with progressive ideas: "Yeh aurat ki fitrat mein hai ki woh achcha dikhna chaahti hai.... Chaahe kisi umar ya kisi bhi class ya background ki ho. Mujhe hi dekhiye (It is in a woman's nature to want to look good, whatever her class or background. Look at me). At this age I also do as much as my health permits to keep myself fit and presentable," says the octogenarian Begum who comes from a traditional family.
The Begum's 56-year-old daughter, Habiba Hasan, a housewife, and her 26-year-old granddaughter, Humaira Hasan, a teacher, both living in Aligarh, are regulars at yoga classes for the last two years. The Begum's sister, Rehana, who is a teacher at the Study Hall School in Lucknow, has a yoga instructor coming regularly to her home to train her.
The explanation the Begum gives for this growing fitness craze is that earlier, Muslim families were large, and looking after the children and the household work kept women on their toes, and kept them trim. Now families are much smaller, there are many more household aids that take the physical labour out of housework, more and more Muslim women are studying, or in desk-bound jobs, and the calories are just not getting burned.
Sana, a representative of Gen Next, who works with a Saudi airline, has another explanation, and a novel justification for going gymming. She holds that any Muslim woman who follows the rules of Islam, keeps roza and does namaaz five times a day becomes physically fit, and doesn't need to go to aerobics class or a gym. "But I have a time crunch—I don't have the time to observe roza and the five-times-a-day namaaz—who does nowadays?" she says. "And yet my profession demands that I have a good figure—so I have to come and work out in a gym." It's as simple as that.
