Gentlemen, feast your eyes on the "Sharia Swimsuit"
What do you do if you are an observant Muslim woman but you also like swimming?
This year, shops in Egypt have the answer: You buy what has become known as the "Sharia swimsuit".
It is part of a growing industry catering for religiously-observant women.
It is no longer mainly the westernised elite that can afford such leisure activities as swimming.
More and more Egyptians, including the more religious, can now do so as well.
In such a conservative society, many women have until now either had to sit on one side or go into the water in their clothes.
All covering
The "Sharia swimsuit" offers one solution. It is a high-necked, swimming costume with sleeves and a small skirt, to be worn over long trousers.
It first appeared a few years ago, but was expensive and hard to find.
This year, it is widely available - and comes in new cuts and colours.
A salesman at the Sports Mall in Nasr City shows me rails of the new Egyptian-produced swimsuits.
10 models are available but are they selling well?
"Of course they're selling well, very well," says the salesman.
"You know we're living here in an Islamic country, it must be popular."
However, the highest religious authority for Sunni Muslims, Al-Azhar, does not recognise the new swimming costume.
One of its clerics, Sheikh Mahmoud al-Hanafi, says there is no such thing as an Islamically-acceptable swimsuit - the only thing Sharia law recognises is Islamic dress that is meant to protect women from what he calls "gossiping eyes."
Conditions
"Islamic dress must have conditions," he says.
"It mustn't be (so) tight that exposes part of the body, mustn't be translucent that the person can see through,"
Size and colour, please?"Also it mustn't be attractive for strange men to look at a lady, how she is dressed. No."
The sheikh, though, had not seen one of the costumes.
But 15-year Nasr has - and she's a convert.
"The Islamic swimming suits they are better for us because of our religion and everything which says that we must be properly covered," she says.
"It is easier for us than to wear normal swimming suits because some of the parents do not like their girls going around in the normal cuts of swimming suits.
"It allows women or girls to do what they were not able to do before in an Islamic way."
The new swimsuit is, by shopkeepers' accounts, a big hit this summer among women who wear the veil.
Important market
As Egypt becomes more of a consumer society, they are an increasingly important market.
The Geneina shopping mall in the adjacent neighbourhood of Nasr City, boasts a smart fashion boutique for veiled women alongside shops selling skimpy t-shirts.
It is not that more women are now covering their heads.
That happened in the late 1970s and 1980s as a religious revival swept the region.
What is new is that more and more products are now being targeted specifically at religiously-observant women.
The new swimsuit is just the latest splash.
7 comments:
All I can think of is when they get wet, they become sexy!
I've written on this before:
Men and women sit separately when they go to the beach, men with men, women with eacho ther and children. When a child wanders off into the water, where men sometimes are, the woman will rush in to the waves to grab the child. The men do nothing. The water does: the woman, covered like a burn-victim is dragged down by the wight of her clothes, and she and often the child drown in front of whoever is there to see it.
Do I run into the water to save a drowning woman and her child? Or, put it this way: do I grab a Muslim's wife and haul her body out of the water? What if, not only touching her, I see her leg?
Do you want to know how many dead Muslim women I've seen because of Islamic fucked-up savagery? I don't.
But I can see them all right now. I don't even have to close my eyes.
Whimmitude isn't just nasty or crippling or evil. It's murder.
Oh Dag,
This is such an horrible reality. Sorry for being so ligh about it all.
Of course we don't think of these things, but what you describe is not all surprising. Remember in SA, when they let school girls burn alive.
See at Religious Policeman, SA blogger, now ex-pat. of course.
" In Memory of the lives of 15 Makkah Schoolgirls, lost when their school burnt down on Monday, 11th March, 2002. The Religious Police would not allow them to leave the building, nor allow the Firemen to enter."
I've seen this nonsense at my own former gym's pool. The men prancing about shirtless in Western swimsuits with their young children while the women sit sweltering (it was the American Midwest. Everyone's sweltering from the heat in July and August) in their heavy clothes nearby. Luckily with lifeguards they needn't go in the water after their children, but I too have heard the stories from abroad. Women, the most immediate victims of Islam, as always. Even the activists who claim its beauty cannot deny the death toll.
As for me, I'm sticking with my MoKini. P.S. will someone please put Mohammad on my ass? Please? Sorry, had to say it. Even with such a sad subject. I'm just so inundated with these dreadful tales that sometimes you don't know what to do with your emotions anymore, honestly.
Dear Pim's Ghost,
Yes, it is very sad, but we are not weeping without doing anything.
But! That is it! We can do it. A swimsuit design contest, a pro-freedom one! I can help you with photoshop. Let's make a plan (perhaps).
The oppression of women in political Islam is also a nightmare for men who look at their mothers, sisters, daughters and wives in cages from their own cages. The relationships are tough. Women have to resort to manipulative strategies to obtain what they need.
However, I know some Muslims who are beyond this, so there is hope.
Right now, it is sweet avoidance in the studio, the blank canvasses syndrome. Need to be done by October. I'm just staring a production on the subject: Islamofascism, women and men also, death, sadness, the litany of tragedies. Send your pics, if you have any.
check out the swim suit ihave on my forum. http://2faces.myfreebb.com/viewtopic.php?t=755 fantastic,
Reminds me of Strictly Ballroom ..THERE ARE NO NEW STEPS
there is no such thing as an Islamically-acceptable swimsuit
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