In the book Sarajevo - A Biography by Robert J. Donia (2006), on the section dealing with the social transformations in Bosnia after the second World War, the following extract from this work (pages 217 to 220) explains the vigorous efforts made by the Muslim establishment to effect the abandonment of the veil, which, with the assistance of government legislation eventually proved successful: ­­

More than any other group, the Muslim women of Sarajevo suffered from traditional barriers to social advancement. Most spent the majority of their time sequestered in their homes, and while in public most wore a veil or a head-to-foot robe (feredža) that included a veil. Their traditional attire was an impediment to employment in many shops and factories. Muslim women had a low literacy rate and endemic health problems, and until 1945 they had not been allowed to vote. The Antifascist Women’s Front took aim at each of these problems in the late 1940s....

The Antifascist Women’s Front of Bosnia-Herzegovina launched a campaign at its second congress in 1947 to encourage women to abandon the veil. Removing the veil, in the words of the congress’s resolution, began a “life without inequality and without enslavement of one person by another, a life in which there shall be no darkness and backwardness.” As soon as the resolution was adopted, Šemsa Kadić, a delegate from Travnik, demonstratively removed her veil to the applause of the assembled delegates, and on her urging other Muslim women followed suit. The next three years the organization sponsored rallies and held meetings to encourage other Muslim women to shed their veils. The crusading women approached the effort with infectious revolutionary enthusiasm. Prominent male political leaders were enlisted to endorse the effort. Veils were ceremonially removed at rallies held in neighborhoods and enterprises, particularly in the tobacco and textile factories that employed large numbers of women.

The newly-designated Reis-ul-ulema, Ibrahim Fehić, led a group of progressive, progovernment Islamic leaders in endorsing the anti-veiling campaign. In his inaugural address on September 12, 1947, Fehić praised the achievements of the people’s liberation war and denied rumors that the new Yugoslav constitution was at odds with Islamic law. “One valuable legacy of the liberation war of our peoples is the proclamation of women’s equality,” he proclaimed. “But unfortunately women cannot achieve the full expression of that equality, as they are inhibited by wearing the veil and gown.” On November 1, 1947, the Sarajevo-based Supreme Islamic Council of Yugoslavia (Vrhovno islamsko starješinstvo FNRJ) endorsed the Reis’s position and assured Muslims that “the veiling of women is not required by religious code. Muslim women, as regards religion, are free to walk about unveiled and tend to their affairs.” The council urged Islamic leaders to “spread this message to the broadest levels of our peoples, to approach the topic without spite in a favorable manner without the use of force ... since harmony and brotherhood are most necessary to us.” These religious leaders hoped that Muslim women would voluntarily give up wearing their veils and robes, thereby, avoiding government-imposed measures: “If possible, this problem [should] be solved by only Muslims as a purely Islamic matter.”

Despite the best efforts of progovernment Islamic leaders, the campaign encountered staunch resistance, especially among women outside of Sarajevo and among Muslim men. Statistics compiled by the women’s front showed that 95 percent of Sarajevo’s Muslim women had abandoned the veil by late 1950, but fewer than 50 percent had done so in other towns of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Faced with widespread resistance to the unveiling campaign, the Bosnian Assembly resorted to compulsion to end the practice completely. Legislation banning the veil was introduced by Džemal Bijedić, who was later to become Yugoslavia’s prime minister and emissary to nonaligned nations. Passed on September 28, 1950, the law declared a ban on wearing the veil, “with the goal of ending the centuries old symbol of inferiority and cultural backwardness of Muslim women.” Violators were subject to fines and to prison sentences of up to three months. Veils soon disappeared in Sarajevo, and resistance to unveiling elsewhere in the republic was gradually overcome as well.

The second key to improving the status of women, particularly Muslim women, lay in education....

Because the traditional barriers to women’s advancement were stubbornly held, educational parity probably could not have been achieved in the absence of the government’s compulsory measures to end the veiling practice.

Reproduced with the kind permission of publishers Hurst & Company, London