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World Hijab Day: Unveiling is Strength

http://maryamnamazie.com/13711-2/

Date Written:  01/02/2024
Year Published:  2024  
Resource Type:  Article

This year's World Hijab Day’s theme is Veiling is Strength but it doesn’t take strength to do as you are told. The veiling of women is a religious imposition, often via force and compulsion.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Fighting religious intolerance is important, as is fighting intolerance against those who have no religion and are being killed for apostasy and blasphemy in countries under Islamic rule. But you cannot fight religious intolerance by normalising misogyny.

This year's World Hijab Day’s theme is Veiling is Strength but it doesn’t take strength to do as you are told. The veiling of women is a religious imposition, often via force and compulsion. How can it be a woman’s ‘choice,’ when it is more often than not, the choice of the husband, father, brother, mullahs, religious states and organisations… There can be no choice in compulsion. This is a play on words to make the hijab palatable and conceal its role in controlling women and girls. Of course, some women will ‘choose’ the hijab, in the same way that some women will 'choose' to carry out FGM on their daughters, or 'choose' to throw themselves on the burning pyres of their husbands in the practice of suttee. However, the use of the term choice ignores the religious and cultural demands on women to comply (or else) and also the punishment if they don't. Compliance is not choice.

World Hijab Day activists can promote the hijab all they want, especially when living safely in secular societies, but the reality of the hijab is one of terror, trauma and violence on the one hand, and women’s resistance against it on the other. The Woman, Life, Freedom revolution in Iran has struck a cord with women across the globe for this very reason.

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