Not just a scarf
Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan is facing a firestorm of criticism from conservative figures and political commentators after appearing in a hijab during a visit to a Somali market in Minneapolis.
The incident took place at the Karmel Somali Market, where Flanagan—flanked by Somali leaders and speaking in part in Arabic—opened with the greeting “Salam alaikum” and told viewers: “The Somali community is part of the fabric of the state of Minnesota.”
But the hijab is part of the fabric of the oppression and repression of women. Women in Afghanistan and Iran are beaten and imprisoned (or worse) for not wearing the hijab. It’s not a nice cuddly symbol of nice cuddly religion, it’s a concealment and repression of women imposed and violently enforced by men.
Pretty true. Moreover, these men are not like cops or some bunch of Orwellian thought police; strangers to the women involved. They are their brothers, fathers, uncles, sons, etc, some of whose heads are full of Islamic bullshit. Except that it is not quite as simple.
In 2001, I visited Iran, and one day I had a fascinating car ride with a couple of young Iranian men from Tehran down to Isfahan. In the course of this, one of them told me (he spoke excellent English) that his mother was always at him to take his religion more seriously, attend the mosque more often for prayers, and so on, and he was always telling her: “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will…” And he added with a wink “but somehow I never seem to get around to it.”
She had learned to conform, and was urging her son to do likewise. In my good old Marxist days, I would have said that she was possessed of ‘false consciousness.’ But, none the less, it made her a true conservative pillar of her society: one moreover in which women are commonly executed in public for having had sex outside of marriage, but not the men involved. And for better or worse, it is often the bizarre case that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.