A collective movement of we’ve had it up to here!
Students at Paris’s Sciences-Po decided to throw a party for the hijab, but hardly anyone showed up.
The international campaign to get college students and non-Muslim women to wear Islamic veils as a demonstration of solidarity hit trouble at elite Paris university Sciences-Po when fewer than a dozen donned head and neck coverings on a “Hijab Day” that attracted more polemics than participants.
Liberal feminists and secularism defenders, alarmed at what they saw as another attempt to impose a highly conservative interpretation of Islam on secular educational institutions, condemned the protest as an “insult” to women who are forced to wear hijabs in Iran and parts of the Arab-Muslim world. The extreme right National Front, meanwhile, tried to exploit the divisions to inflame racism.
Fewer than a dozen – so, eleven? Eight? Four?
Organizer Lily, who would only give her first name to French journalists said “Hijab Day” was a “collective movement of we’ve had it up to here! We support women who wear the veil and we are in solidarity with them.”
Had what up to here? Those terrible rebellious women who don’t wear hijab? Do you support women who don’t wear it? Are you in solidarity with them?
Hijab Day was promoted by Sciences-Po campus society Salaam, an Islam “reflection” group that has been questioned for inviting conservative and radical Muslim identities to speak. Salaam guests have included Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who is frequently decried in France for his refusal to condemn stoning of women, and his celebrations of Sharia law. Another guest has been the publisher of a Salafist, or extremist Saudi Wahaabist Islam news site called Al-Kanz.
In short, the group is what you’d expect – a fan of theocratic reactionaries.
Sonia Mabrouk, a French-Tunisian broadcast journalist tweeted a widely-shared remark: “When I think of all the women’s daily fight for freedom and choice in countries like Tunisia, this Hijab Day is an insult”.
Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher asked whether there would next be a “Sharia day, or stoning or slavery day?”
Investigative journalist and author Caroline Fourest shared a video of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser from 1956, when he mocked the Muslim Brotherhood’s pressuring him to oblige women to wear hijabs “just to refresh the memory of those who think that Muslims have always been veiled, or that it is a traditional or even “natural” emblem, rather than … being to do with the rise of (Muslim) Brothers in Egypt, or fascination with the Iranian revolution of 1979.”
It’s to do with the rise and rise of reactionary theocracy.
“Yes we can willingly give in to a trend that assigns women the duty of ‘decency.’ We can willingly show solidarity with a conservative revolution. But don’t come and say to us that it is a trend that is anodine or modernist,” Fourest, a specialist on far right Catholic fundamentalists and Islamist extremists wrote.
I suppose it’s Catholicismophobic to say that.
Hijab Days and “solidarity shows” are becoming common in U.S. universities too. Muslim reformers and journalists Asra Nomani, who has contributed to Women in the World, and Hala Arafa have implored women to stop sporting the hijab as a sign of religious solidarity. They say conservative Islamists and regimes like Saudi Arabia, Taliban Afghanistan, Iran and Islamic State are trying to impose the veil as a “sixth pillar of Islam” when there is no Koranic requirement it be worn, and when the word “hijab” doesn’t even mean headscarf in Arabic but curtain, hiding, obstructing or isolating.
Let’s not celebrate the hiding, obstructing and isolating of women, shall we?
Jesus such twisted backwards thinking. I spit on your solidarity, silly silly students.
‘Lily’ wants every women in the world to lead an existence as miserable as her own.
Oh it’s also about spreading the faith, but it’s also about bringing other women *down* to her level. In doing so ‘Lily’ obtains a fleeting sense of satisfaction allowing her to momentarily escape her predicament.
Investigative journalist and author Caroline Fourest shared a video of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser from 1956, when he mocked the Muslim Brotherhood’s pressuring him to oblige women to wear hijabs “just to refresh the memory of those who think that Muslims have always been veiled,
I’m not so sure that’s wise tactic. It reinforces the impression that Islam really is on the march and that attempts at rebuilding the Kaliphat are actually succeeding.
Women in 50s Egypt and 70s Iran looked western because they were living off the dwindling “breathing space” provided thanks to western colonialism, something we’re supposed to be ashamed of, something considered as morally wrong. That’s how Islamists spin this. Don the veil and decolonise
Here’s the straight dope on the hijab. If someone could kindly forward it to ‘Lily’
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-36086992
Had it up to where?
(… It’s just: you’ve, umm, got this thing over your face…)
‘Solidarity’ with oppression, misogyny and theocracy.
Why oh why are some elements of the ‘Left’ so so enamoured with totalitarian ideologies?
Actually, until the arrival of Christianity and later, Islam, Egyptian women lived under far fewer restrictions on their social and economic lives than their contemporaries in Greece or Rome. So much for progress.
Who gives a rat’s as to what interpretation of Islam is ‘imposed on secular educational institutions’. No ‘interpretation’ of Islam should be tolerated, they’re secular institutions.
> Why oh why are some elements of the ‘Left’ so so enamoured with totalitarian ideologies?
They aren’t enamoured of the ideology of Islam.
They are enamoured of any group who has been identified as a victim of Western colonial imperialism. That set firmly includes anyone Muslim, and definitely includes anyone whose dress looks stereotypically Muslim.
Considerations of the actual *content* of Islam are of no concern to the regressive Left. All that matters about Islam is that it’s non-Western and so it must not be criticised by Westerners.
@6 Ben Finney,
Yes, that seems a plausible explanation. If so, it’s a rather patronising attitude to assume, almost a modern version of the “Noble Savage”, quaint if sometimes brutal customs, but we musn’t criticise, that’s orientalism.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that a past generation of the Left praised Stalin’s ‘progressive’ Soviet Union and the next became besotted with Mao and his appalling regime.