THIS IS NOT ISLAM [Hijab]

Abu Afak, Samstag, 18. Oktober 2003, 01:15 (vor 7881 Tagen)

THIS IS NOT ISLAM [Hijab]

By AMIR TAHERI


August 15, 2003 -- FRANCE´S Prime Minister
Jean-Pierre Raffarin has just appointed a commit-
tee to draft a law to ban the Islamist hijab
(headgear) in state-owned establishments,
including schools and hospitals. The decision
has drawn fire from the French "church" of Islam,
an organization created by Raffarin´s government
last spring. Germany is facing its hijab problem,
with a number of Islamist organizations suing
federal and state authorities for "religious
discrimination" because of bans imposed on the
controversial headgear.

In the United States, several Muslim women are
suing airport-security firms for having violated
their First Amendment rights by asking them to
take off their hijab during routine searches of
passengers.

All these and other cases are based on the
claim that the controversial headgear is an
essential part of the Muslim faith and that
attempts at banning it constitute an attack on
Islam.

That claim is totally false. The headgear in
question has nothing to do with Islam as a
religion. It is not sanctioned anywhere in the
Koran, the fundamental text of Islam, or the
hadith (traditions) attributed to the Prophet.

This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by
Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the
leadership of the Lebanese Shi´ite community.

In an interview in 1975 in Beirut, Sadr told this
writer that the hijab he had invented was inspired
by the headgear of Lebanese Catholic nuns, itself
inspired by that of Christian women in classical
Western paintings. (A casual visit to the
Metropolitan Museum in New York, or the Louvres in
Paris, would reveal the original of the
neo-Islamist hijab in numerous paintings depicting
Virgin Mary and other female figures from the Old
and New Testament.)

Sadr´s idea was that, by wearing the headgear,
Shi´ite women would be clearly marked out, and
thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser
Arafat´s Palestinian gunmen who at the time
controlled southern Lebanon.

Sadr´s neo-hijab made its first appearance in Iran
in 1977 as a symbol of Islamist-Marxist opposition
to the Shah´s regime. When the mullahs seized
power in Tehran in 1979, the number of women
wearing the hijab exploded into tens of thousands.


In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first
president of the Islamic Republic, announced that
"scientific research had shown that women´s hair
emitted rays that drove men insane." To protect
the public, the new Islamist regime passed a law
in 1982 making the hijab mandatory for females
aged above six, regardless of religious faith.
Violating the hijab code was made punishable by
100 lashes of the cane and six months
imprisonment.

By the mid 1980s, a form of hijab never seen in
Islam before the 1970s had become standard gear
for millions of women all over the world,
including Europe and America.

Some younger Muslim women, especially Western
converts, were duped into believing that the
neo-hijab was an essential part of the faith.
(Katherine Bullock, a Canadian, so loved the idea
of covering her hair that she converted to Islam
while studying the hijab.)

The garb is designed to promote gender
apartheid. It covers the woman´s ears so that
she does not hear things properly. Styled like a
hood, it prevents the woman from having full
vision of her surroundings. It also underlines the
concept of woman as object, all wrapped up and
marked out.

Muslim women, like women in all societies, had
covered their head with a variety of gears over
the centuries. These had such names as lachak,
chador, rusari, rubandeh, chaqchur, maqne´a and
picheh, among others.

All had tribal, ethnic and generally folkloric
origins and were never associated with religion.
(In Senegal, Muslim women wear a colorful headgear
against the sun, while working in the fields, but
go topless.)

Muslim women could easily check the fraudulent
nature of the neo-Islamist hijab by leafing
through their family albums. They will not find
the picture of a single female ancestor of theirs
who wore the cursed headgear now marketed as an
absolute "must" of Islam.

This fake Islamic hijab is nothing but a
political prop, a weapon of visual terrorism. It
is the symbol of a totalitarian ideology inspired
more by Nazism and Communism than by Islam. It is
as symbolic of Islam as the Mao uniform was of
Chinese civilization.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/pr
intTaheri20030819.shtml