The hijab had come to stay
Tarek Fatah wonders what on earth the city of Ottawa thinks it’s doing “celebrating” the hijab.
This Thursday, the City of Ottawa will be holding a public event celebrating the Islamist hijab; an article of cloth that many Muslim women consider akin to the medieval chastity belt.
He says we need to understand the history of the Islamist revolution in Iran to get what this is all about.
On March 7, 1979 the Islamic Republic declared that henceforth all Iranian women would not be allowed to step outside their homes if they did not have their heads covered by a chador (a black, blanket-like shawl) or a hijab.
Many Iranians first thought of this decree as a joke, but when it became clear the ayatollahs meant business and would imprison any woman found “naked” with her head not wrapped in cloth, there were spontaneous protests across the country.
But the mullahs had the power, and the protests failed.
The hijab had come to stay, and over the years spread its tentacles across the globe as a political statement, hated by many Iranian women, but loved by Islamist followers of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan’s Jamat-e-Islami in North America.
This Friday, Iranians will go to the polls to elect a new parliament.
Not up for discussion or a vote in this election is the oppressive hijab that many Iranian Muslim women have been fighting against, risking arrest — and even lashings.
If it were, few doubt the law of the hijab would die an instant death. But no opponent of the hijab is permitted to stand for election.
But there is Facebook now.
With the advent of social media, however, the fight against the hijab has taken a new form.
Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad created a Facebook page “My Stealthy Freedom” where thousands of Iranian women are posting videos and pictures of themselves, without the mandatory head covering.
The page has garnered more than 750,000 likes and has drawn the ire of the Iranian government.
So why is Ottawa “celebrating” the fiendish thing?
Let’s have a few photos from My Stealthy Freedom:
Celebrate that, Ottawa.
How are they celebrating it? How do you celebrate a “hat”?
Give it a good tip, that’s how?
Or, considering those pix, a good dip?
This is of a piece with the media giving voice to fundamentalist Muslims rather than ordinary ones. It says more about what “Muslim” means to white, safe, culturally insulated Westerners than it does about Islam.
Hannah Allam, a senior correspondent for Reuters, wrote about how impractical and physically unpleasant it was to wear niqabs when she reported from Saudi Arabia. She’d yank the thing off the minute she was on the plane. And her male colleagues would smugly smirk (to themselves, assuming she didn’t notice) at the little woman having to put up with stuff they didn’t have to.
Sometimes I wonder if the rather too-quick embrace of misogynist clothing by Western “progressives” is indicative of more than just social signalling about how superiorly tolerant they are. Sometimes I think they’d kind of like a “picturesque” world with packaged women.
Also, why is Western Imperialism so bad and Islamic imperialism not bad? Iran’s Persian cultural roots are squelched by this fundamentalism. Everything I know about disgruntled Iranians says they feel like this is being imposed on them and not part of who they are as a people.
But, but Islamophobia!
Of course the hijab is a symbol of gender oppression and discrimination. On the other hand, I do think that women in Ottawa who wear hijab/niqab, whether by choice or not, should not be subjected to shoving, swearing, attempts to remove the garments etc.
But somehow a group comprising “City for All Women Initiative (CAWI) and Coalition of Community Health and Resource Centres, and Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women” has convinced the City of Ottawa that giving special attention to hijabs is the way to address the situation (http://www.cawi-ivtf.org/sites/default/files/news/backgrounder-why_ottawa_hijab_solidarity_day_feb_20.pdf). And I’m thinking of the teenage girls trying to be free of their facecoverings now seeing them sanctioned by their municipal government as well as organizations that are supposed to be for women’s rights.
Update: CFI Canada has sent a letter to Mayor Jim Watson and the Ottawa City Council stating our opposition to hijab day http://centreforinquiry.ca/city-of-ottawas-hijab-day/