Muslim Girls Want to Go Topless
We have often come across comments left by Muslim women at blogs similar to mine that they just loooooove wearing the hijab and that it is not oppressive. OK, let's look at each assertion:
Muslim women really love wearing the hijab.
Actually, they cannot wait to take it off. Back in 2002 in Iran, for just a short time, young girls could finally feel free of the prison of the veil:
Wall Street Journal Online, 6 Dec 2002, The Freedom to Go Topless
"The girls are ecstatic and the teachers feel liberated," says Zohreh Samloo, headmistress in a south Tehran school. "It is as if the sun is shining again." Ms. Shamloo's school is one of 12 in the Iranian capital where girls, aged between six and 17, and the all-female staff, have been allowed to remove the officially imposed headgear (hijab) while inside the building.
The permission to cast off the hijab inside the schools is part of an experiment launched by the education ministry in September. To make sure that the girls and their teachers are not exposed to "stolen gazes" from men, six-foot high plastic extensions have been added to the walls of the buildings of the schools concerned.
Inside, the girls are also allowed to cast off the long black overcoats that all females aged six or above must wear in the Islamic Republic. "With the new walls the school looks like a prison," comments Ms. Shamloo. "But inside it we feel free!" [emphasis mine]
The experiment, to be reviewed in three months, was approved after a nationwide study showed that the imposition of hijab on young girls caused "serious depression and, in some cases, suicide."
The hijab is not oppressive.
In 1860 South Carolina, there were 402,406 slaves to 291,300 whites. If they so greatly outnumbered the whites why didn't they revolt? The truth is, although slavery is indeed oppression, many didn't feel oppressed. On many plantations slaves could keep part of the harvest or to work their own small plots and many other incentives to work.
By the 1860s, most slave owners were no longer buying slaves from Africa, they had enough from previous decades of home-grown reproduction. In fact, Southern slaveowners were the greatest supporters for closing of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Blacks who were born slaves were the most likely not to feel oppressed.
I believe Muslim women do not even realize they are oppressed. They have no idea they are slaves.
Source for slavery material: Economic History Services.
Eventually all Muslim women will be forced to dress extremely modestly as Islamic clerics continue to issue more and more outrageous opinions as to why women must cover up. For example,
- In my article Boobs Caused Taiwan Tremors I reported on Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi, an Iranian cleric, who hilariously declared that women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.
- In my article Muslim Cleric: Unveiled Women are like Juicy Steak, Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, the UK's most senior Muslim cleric, said immodestly-dressed women who do not wear a hijab are to blame if they are raped.
- In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that "scientific research had shown that women's hair emitted rays that drove men insane." In fact, the flight routes of Iranian planes had to be diverted from a stadium where women played soccer for fear that their hair rays might affect passengers in the planes above (1).
If dressing normally can cause natural disasters, invite rape, or make men go insane, what Muslim woman will have the nerve to go about without a hijab?
The veil is women's liberation? Is there a more deluded group of people?
ENDNOTES
(1):
Instapundit.com, GENDER APARTHEID
In an interview in 1975 in Beirut, Sadr told this writer that the hijab he had invented was inspired by the headgear of Lebanese Catholic nuns, itself inspired by that of Christian women in classical Western paintings. (A casual visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or the Louvre in Paris, would reveal the original of the neo-Islamist hijab in numerous paintings depicting Virgin Mary and other female figures from the Old and New Testament.)
Sadr's idea was that, by wearing the headgear, Shiite women would be clearly marked out, and thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian gunmen who at the time controlled southern Lebanon.
Sadr's neo-hijab made its first appearance in Iran in 1977 as a symbol of Islamist-Marxist opposition to the Shah's regime. When the mullahs seized power in Tehran in 1979, the number of women wearing the hijab exploded into tens of thousands.
In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that "scientific research had shown that women's hair emitted rays that drove men insane." To protect the public, the new Islamist regime passed a law in 1982 making the hijab mandatory for females aged above six, regardless of religious faith. Violating the hijab code was made punishable by 100 lashes of the cane and six months imprisonment.
