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The Hijab as a Billboard for Islamist Propaganda

Quraishi, Ibrahim
http://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/28/the-hijab-as-a-billboard-for-islamist-propaganda/

Publisher:  CounterPunch
Date Written:  05/11/2022
Year Published:  2022  
Resource Type:  Article

Let's not fool ourselves about what is actually happening in Iran now and for the last five weeks. These women are not just merely "celebrating" or marching for their freedom of expression in general political terms, no! They are fighting a piece of cloth that has come to symbolise an all-encompassing religious intolerance and zealotry as the core of a disintegrating Islamist ideology.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

The issue of the Hijab has been debated over and over across the West, but let's be perfectly honest: the Hijab is not about modesty. Hijab is not a cultural symbol of liberation but quite the opposite. It is a very specific cultural, political and religious marker that targets and more precisely aims to separate, discriminate and assume a very specific position between the demarcated role for women verses men. Imposed by men, it is discrimination, packaged as cultural difference. No man in Iran, or for that matter in any other Muslim country, has to cover up. No man in Iran has to prove his virginity. No man in Iran has to legally don a beard. No man in Iran has to justify who they are with in public. And virtually no 'Moral Police' in Iran chases men for wearing shirts, pants, shoes and socks.

A significant point here is that perhaps while one is inside the system, one is more keenly aware of the symbolic value of the Hijab, much more than when one is outside of it. Of course, we in our so-called free West worry about human rights, the freedom of the individual and the rights of people to wear whatever they want to wear. And of course, we are afraid of trampling over the rights of specific minorities, and especially when it comes to Islam, many of us are even willing to negate those very hard-fought freedoms of absolute equality of the sexes (which even in the West has hardly been achieved). Some of us even speak of the virtues of a modesty in the Hijab in our own midst. But let's not compare donning the Hijab with wearing a Channel scarf for example, or with wearing protective facial gear while being at work in dusty environments. Rather, the hijab is a constant visible reminder of the supposed sin of being a woman: the supposed evil, potential séductrice, in need of being held down, because she is deemed untrustworthy, physically and mentally feeble and seen as being impure, thus deserving of all kinds of untold punishment that is due to them by God: i.e. Allah, the State and men.

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