Oliver Guitta has a very important piece up at the Weekly Standard which details the mechanism by which Muslim communities turn to the veil:
... the Tunisian author and feminist Samia Labidi, president of A.I.M.E., an organization fighting the Islamists, recounts that she personally started wearing the veil before puberty, after Islamists told her the hijab would be a passport to a new life, to emancipation. After a few years, she realized she had been fooled and that the veil made her feel like she was "living in a prison." At first, she could not bring herself to stop wearing it because of the constant psychological pressure. But the 1981 ban on the hijab in public places forced her to remove
it, and she did so for good.
Labidi's experience suggests that in both Tunisia and France the recent banning of the hijab has actually helped Muslim women who are subject to Islamist indoctrination.
For Islamists, the imperative to veil women justifies almost any means. Sometimes they try to buy off resistance. Some French Muslim families, for instance, are paid 500 euros (around $600) per quarter by extremist Muslim organizations just to have their daughters wear the hijab.
This has also happened in the United States. Indeed, the famous and brave Syrian-American psychiatrist Wafa Sultan recently told the Jerusalem Post that after she moved to the United States in 1991, Saudis offered her $1,500 a month to cover her head and attend a mosque.
But what Islamists use most is intimidation. A survey conducted in France in May 2003 found that 77 percent of girls wearing the hijab said they did so because of physical threats from Islamist groups. A series in the newspaper Libération in 2003
documented how Muslim women and girls in France who refuse to wear the hijab are insulted, rejected, and often physically threatened by Muslim males. One of the teenage girls interviewed said, "Every day, bearded men come to me and advise me strongly on wearing the veil. It is a war. For now, there are no dead, but there are looks and words that do kill." Muslim women who try to rebel are considered "whores" and treated as outcasts. Some of them want to move to areas "with no Muslims" to escape. However, that might not be a solution, as Islamists are at work all over France. The Communist newspaper L'Humanité in 2003 interviewed two Catholic-born French women who said they had converted to Islam and started wearing the niqab after systematic indoctrination by the Muslim Brotherhood.
In light of this, wearing the hijab may or may not be a manifestation of the free exercise of religion. For any individual, it may reflect the very opposite--religious coercion. In fact, millions of women are forced to wear the veil for fear of physical retribution. And the fear is well founded. According to Cheryl Benard of RAND, every year hundreds of women in Pakistan and Afghanistan alone are killed, have acid thrown in their faces, or are otherwise maimed by male fanatics.
Given the Islamists' ferocious determination on this point, it is worth asking: Why exactly
is covering the female so important to them? The obvious answer is that it is a means of social control. Not coincidentally, it is one of the only issues on which Sunni and Shia extremists agree. It's not by chance that use of the hijab really took off after Iran's Islamic regime came to power in 1979. Some Shiite militias in Iraq have actually started forcing women--Muslim or not--to wear the veil or face the consequences.If this issue were not vital for Islamists, how can one explain their reaction when France banned the hijab in public schools? Al Qaeda's number two, Ayman al Zawahiri, "strongly condemned" President Chirac's decision and threatened actions against France. Likewise, Sheikh Fadlallah, founder and spiritual leader of Hezbollah, wrote to Chirac threatening "likely complications" for France. Mohammad Khatami, former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, called on the French government to "cancel this unjust law."
3 comments:
Thats a great post Pastorius.
During the Taliban's reign of terror a woman and her 12-year-old daughter were beaten to within an inch of their lives when the woman removed her daughter's burqa in order to help her breathe during an asthma attack.
The Fab (socialist) journalist Julie Burchill wrote this a few years ago in the GUardian before her constant stance against islam and for Israel got too much for them.
I’ve also since read and agree with columnist Yasmin Alibhai Brown on this particular issue. She leans somewhat towards a ban in the UK, a hot topic in Europe as some euro countries impose a ban (europe's socialism is much more right wing than ours when it comes to muslims): “thousands of liberal Muslims would dearly like the state to take a stand on their behalf. If it doesn't, it will betray vulnerable British citizens and the nation's most cherished principles and encourage Islam to move back even faster into the dark ages, when we all need to face the future together".
The vulnerable women she referred to included a desperate young woman who had followed her home one evening revealing from under her burqa bruises and cuts received from her deeply pious father and brothers. It left her with a number of serious questions about just what we are helping to cover up by paying not a blind bit of notice in the name of ‘rights’ eg her right to wear whatever she likes in the UK. She condemns what she views as a "pernicious ideology.. propagated by misguided Muslim women who claim the burqa is an equaliser and a liberator". I'd add along with most modern day feminists and homo-lefticus who abandoned supporting fundamental women’s rights (including trying to limit the kind of throwaway soft porn disposable women bullshit that we think is A OK now) in favour of a tacit support for religious fundamentalism.
Yasmin is a socialist and not someone i regularly agree with but i thought her experience and subsequent change of mind were very interesting.
http://www.alibhai-brown.com/archive/article.php?id=68/
Actually she has re written a piece which explains among other things the veils history. She also puts this very well:
.......So when does this country decide that it does not want citizens using their freedoms to build a satellite Saudi Arabia here?
We can’t answer that question because Islamicists say we are not allowed such national conversations. Straw isn’t because he is a white man; Deborah Orr isn’t because she is a white woman; Parliament can’t because there is no Muslim woman MP in it; I am not because I am a bad Muslim. Well stuff that I say. This garment offends me and here are my reasons why.
........
The sexual signals of the hijab and niqab are even more suspect. They are physical manifestation of the pernicious idea of women as carriers of Original Sin whose cheek or a lock of hair turns Muslim men into predators. In Denmark a mufti said unveiled women asked for rape. As if to order, rape by Muslim men of white women is rising alarmingly. In truth half naked women and veiled women are both beings solely defined by sexuality. One group proffers it, the other withholds it. A six year old girl in a boob tube and in hijab are both symbols of unhealthy sexual objectification. Western culture is wildly sexualised and lacking in restraint. There are ways to avoid falling into that pit and the veil is not one of them ......
http://www.alibhai-brown.com/archive/article.php?id=103
Alison,
Thanks for leaving that link here. That is a great question she poses.
I'll put a post up on that later.
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