April 25, 2024

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Hijab Hypocrisy: "Not Just a Piece of Cloth"

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2019/04/hijab-hypocrisy-not-just-piece-of-cloth.html

By Daphne Anson

 

https://mobile.twitter.com/hashtag/NoHijabDay?src=hashtag_click

In the wake of the Christchurch atrocity, New Zealand’s female (and feminist!) prime minister, along with the female mayor of Christchurch, covered their heads with hijabs out of “respect” for their Muslim fellow-citizens, and numerous of their non-Muslim countrywomen followed their example, including a policewoman and several news anchors.

Aussie columnist and Sky News host Rita Panahi, American-born of Iranian parentage, knows a thing or two about the oppression of women that the hijab represents, as pointed out here and here and here,

Sky News host Rita Panahi says World Hijab Day, celebrated on February 1, is a betrayal of the most oppressed women in the world. Ms Panahi says a woman celebrating modesty culture like the hijab, ‘is like a slave celebrating their chains’ and it shows how regressive modern feminism has become. She says celebrating the hijab and burqa ‘is utterly perverse and has no place in a civilised society that values equality’…..

 Women in New Zealand are being encouraged to wear hijabs to show solidarity to the Muslim community after the Christchurch massacre…. [T]he hijab is being forced on millions of oppressed women across the world and was invented by men to be imposed on women to ‘control, separate and subjugate’ and that the NZ campaign is ‘misguided and counterproductive’…. [T]he garment is ‘imbued with deep symbolism’ and represents a pernicious ‘modesty culture.’….

 New Zealand women who donned the hijab following the Christchurch massacre were “well-intended, but ill-considered and ignorant”…. {W]omen in some Muslim nations are being beaten and locked up for fighting against the hijab and “we have a responsibility as free women in the West to stand by our subjugated sisters rather than give comfort to their oppressors”.  [T]he hijab is “not just a piece of cloth”, but rather “imbued with deep meaning” and “at the centre of a fight for equality and human rights”.

Ruchika Sharma, a doctoral student at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, is also aghast at the New Zealanders’ actions, and in this article she explains the misogynistic reasoning behind the hijab (lit. “curtain”) and its imposition on Muslim women.  Her article concludes:

“The oppressive origins of hijab, have made it an active a tool to subjugate Muslim women. In countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia forced veiling is practiced that has led to scores of protests by women in these countries. The lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh has only recently been sentenced to 38 years in prison, and 148 lashes, for representing women who defied Iran’s hijab laws.


As if the upholding of an oppressive symbol was not damaging enough, New Zealand’s Scarves in Solidarity movement also stereotypes Muslim women, many of whom do not wear the headscarf. It presupposes, in the most orientalist manner, that hijab-clad women are the norm in the Muslim community.


Considering the hijab as a synonym for the Muslims not only disadvantages women actively fighting against its enforcement but also has a deleterious effect on womanhood in general. It marginalizes women as merely a property of the community.


Proponents of New Zealand’s Scarves in Solidarity regards hijab as a neutral symbol of Muslim identity. Yet, if symbols of oppression could be purged of their exploitative histories in a day, feminism would have already triumphed. Associated with the hijab is centuries of suppression and body policing. Using it to show solidarity is to marginalize the women actively fighting against its enforcement and yearning to break free.”

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