A Hijab? On My Starship???
Thoughts on yet another STAR TREK controversy.
There’s a new controversy happening in the world of Star Trek fandom, which is one of the least surprising statements you can make. In the modern era Trek finds itself consistently fueling feuds between fans of different eras - The Original Series people versus The Next Generation people! Next Generation people versus Discovery people! - but also occasionally Trek gets itself caught up in the endless bullshit culture wars. This latest controversy is a bit of both.
The issue: on the animated canonical Star Trek show Lower Decks (jockeying with Strange New Worlds for best of the new Trek) we have seen a member of the USS Cerritos crew wearing a hijab. She was featured fairly prominently in the latest episode, which is where the controversy comes from. The image above is not from the latest episode, but from like two years ago, which means this isn't even a new development. But people will still kvetch!
What’s interesting is that this controversy is a little bit country, a little bit rock n’ roll. Or rather a little bit Islamophobic/anti-diversity and a little bit purist dorkiness. I’m not even going to address the Islamophobic/anti-diversity arguments because those people can go fuck themselves into a warp nacelle for all I care, but I am intrigued by the dork aspect.
The argument goes that Gene Roddenberry was quite specific in his vision of the future - it was a future without religion. Roddenberry himself was a Humanist, and really more of an atheist, at least according to his son. For him an idealized future would be one where man had transcended the superstitions of religion and would live fully rational, materialistic lives.
This is what people point to when they say they’re outraged about the hijab. It’s a symbol of religious belief on a human - this is verboten in Roddenberry’s future! But… is it?
First off, some words about the hijab, not to be confused with the burqa. The hijab is a head covering worn by some Muslim women, and its purpose is modesty and humility. The hijab covers the woman’s hair but leaves the face visible; similar prescriptions to cover hair are common in Middle-Eastern religions, and women probably wore head coverings before Mohammed. Head coverings are still common in Orthodox Judaism, but the women there usually wear a wig to cover their own real hair. The burqa, on the other hand, covers the whole body and the face, and there’s a strong argument that the verses people point to as demanding the burqa are misunderstood. Mohammed’s own wives certainly didn’t wear burqas.
The hijab has been getting popular in recent years, and it has been seen by some as a form of oppression. It’s become controversial in Europe for this reason - France schools banned them and French Olympic athletes are not allowed to wear them in the games. Maybe the French should have considered their own internalized Islamophobia before they occupied Algiers. But many women argue that it empowers them, and that they feel more connected to their community and culture when wearing a hijab. Frankly they also often look good, and it’s not uncommon to see women in incredibly stylish hijabs showing off their own identity and uniqueness. It’s a good look.
But does it belong in Star Trek? Roddenberry’s thoughts on the matter seem pretty clear. And in fact Star Trek has addressed Starfleet officers wearing religious adornments; in the Next Generation episode Ensign Ro a Bajoran by the name of Ro Laren joins the crew and is wearing the traditional earring of the Bajoran religion. Commander Riker meets her in the transporter room and demands that she take the earring off, because it violates the uniform dress code. It’s a real bad scene, and Riker comes off like a huge dick (there’s some other stuff going on with Ro and her history, but even so Riker comes off poorly). Eventually Picard allows her to wear the earring.
This seems to settle it - you could argue that the hijab is outside of the uniform dress code but that the captain of a ship can give dispensation to a crewmember to wear one. But I’m going to go a step further: the whole argument that there’s no religion in the future of Star Trek is a bad one, and one that is easily proven false.
How false and how easily? In the fourteenth episode of the first season of the original show, Balance of Terror, the Enterprise is revealed to have a chapel where a wedding is to be held. That chapel has a pulpit and a backdrop, and on the backdrop are various religious symbols, including some kind of cross.
There are some arguments that the chapel is just an all-purpose room that has been dressed to be a chapel for the function, but that’s not the point. They make a room into a chapel! That’s all that matters.
Then there’s the matter of Lt. Radha. She takes over the helm in the season three episode That Which Survives, and she’s wearing a bindi. She’s also a white lady slathered in bronzer, but let’s not go there. The bindi is a Hindu decoration that supposedly centers energy on the ajna chakra, known to us Westerners as the third eye. It can also represent a woman’s marriage status.
Okay, so that’s two background things. Surely these don’t mean anything, especially the bindi. They put a white lady in brown makeup, it’s unlikely anyone in the production knew what a bindi was, they just knew they had seen pictures of Indian ladies wearing them. And the chapel… hey that cross is weird, maybe it’s not for the human crewmembers, even though two humans (one of whom is a virulent racist, something the woke libtard James T Kirk does not like) are getting married in it.
But there’s more. There’s actually a bunch more, but I’m going to focus on the number one biggest example in TOS. In the season two episode Who Mourns for Adonais? the crew runs into a guy who is claiming to be the Greek god Apollo - an ancient astronaut kind of thing. Kirk gives him a speech that concludes with a rebuke of the Greek pantheon… but that falls quite short of a statement of atheism.
“Mankind has no need for gods. We find the one quite adequate.”
Well that’s a statement of monotheism if I ever heard one. Wonder what Lt. Radha would have to say about that, seeing as she belongs to a polytheistic religion. At any rate this isn’t some production design stuff, something that slipped by. This is a line of dialogue in the original series that Gene Roddenberry created.
Did Gene want a future without religion? Yeah, most likely. But read his novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture to get his weird thoughts about the future, including the Enterprise having fuck nooks and the fact that James Kirk got his name as a tribute to his mother’s, and I shit you not, “love instructor.” Not every one of this guy’s ideas was a homerun.
It seems to me that a future without religion wouldn’t be utopian at all. Not that religion needs to be a dominating force in human history as it has been for the past few thousand years, but that the possibility of having it should be open to Federation citizens and Starfleet officers if they want it. The idea that the rational future is suppressing religion and all the comforts and connections it can bring feels oppressive. In fact, in a post-scarcity Earth like the one we see in Star Trek it makes sense that people, no longer needing to work for survival, would turn their thoughts and attentions to larger and more cosmological questions. In a world where your material needs are met it makes sense that you would begin investigating the spiritual. And it’s a human trait to want connection to your heritage - if you are a person with an Arabic background it might make sense that you would be drawn to Islam as a way of being a part of the continuity of your people.
What seems utopian to me is a future where people get to believe whatever they want to believe, as long as those beliefs do not infringe on the rights of others. This is one of the things that always bugged me in the episode Ensign Ro - the suppression of Ro’s religious beliefs feels despotical to me. That earring isn’t harming anyone, and neither is Lt. Radha’s bindi or the hijab seen on Lower Decks. These are expressions of deeply held beliefs that represent exactly the idea that Roddenberry was trying to capture when he invented the Vulcan IDIC*: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations
*I can’t leave that without saying the other reason he invented the Vulcan IDIC and had Spock wear it was so that he could sell jewelry to the fans. Roddenberry really represents the full breadth of 20th century men.