-Ottawa: A Day Honoring the Hijab?

                                                                                (Source of Images: Wikipedia)

This week in Ottawa, Canada they had an official day honoring the wearing of the hijab. Here’s an editorial about this event from the Toronto Sun:

While liberal Muslim women around the world are fighting against Islamists, both on the battlefield like the Kurds, and on the ideological front, like Sun Media columnist Farzana Hassan, many feminists in Canada and the West are backing their enemies by saluting the symbols of the Islamist cult.

This Thursday, the City of Ottawa will be holding a public event celebrating the Islamist hijab; an article of cloth that many Muslim women consider akin to the medieval chastity belt.

To understand the phenomenon of the hijab, which has nothing to do with Islam, other than men’s desires to shackle women, one has to go back to Iran in 1979.

Read the whole article>

Response: It is fascinating to watch Western liberal cultures bending the knee to Islam in order to avoid a charge of bigotry and Islamophobia. Why would a liberal Western city want to celebrate a symbol of feminine restriction under Islam? If they really wanted to support the rights of Muslim women in the Middle East and elsewhere in Muslim dominated countries they would call for ending of the forced wearing of this radical medieval throw back instead. Shouldn’t women have the choice of what they wear all around the world.

Women in western countries like Canada and the USA can choose to wear the hijab to honor their culture and tradition but are not forced one way or another and that is the way it should be in the 21st century.  Western feminists usually are calling for women to have the same choices that are available to men but in this case many are honoring a symbol that stands for the exact opposite? Strange!

In the middle of the last century the wearing of the hijab had substantially disappeared in the major capitols in the Middle East as they were far more ‘western’ than they are now. If you look at the graduating classes of major universities in the Middle East from the 1950’s through the early 1980s most women graduates were wearing western clothes. But since the rise of radical Islam, starting with the 1979 revolution in Iran, that is no longer the case. Now there are hijabs everywhere and in many cases it is required by law.

Same goes for pictures from the capitol cities in middle of the last century as compared to the present.  Several Muslim countries like Tunisia had discouraged or even outlawed the traditional Muslim headwear until the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ brought it all back when radical Islamists took control. There is also current resurgence of the wearing of the hijab in Istanbul, Turkey which tried to be far more secular and ‘European’ in the past. The change reflects the political rise of radical Islam in that country in the last decade.

It really does seem incredible to me that any western city or government would choose to honor a symbol that reflects a continuing subjugation of women in the 21st century. Also a symbol that has under gone a resurgence with the rise of radical Islam and with it the continuing wars, terrorism, and persecution of Christians and other minority religions in Muslim dominated nations and cultures.             *Top