Kanadensiska Macleans har ett varningens ord
till Västerlandets kvinnor:
"You may have noticed that the poster girl for the
"You may have noticed that the poster girl for the
latest “social justice” campaign is a Muslim woman.
“Drop Fees for a Poverty-Free Ontario” is the
ringing cry, and next to it is a hijab-clad lady
speaking up and speaking out. It’s something to
do with the cost of post-secondary education,
which, like everything else in Canada, is supposed
to be “free.” The image is a curious choice as an
emblem for educational access: after all, one of
the most easily discernible features of societies
that adopt Islamic dress is how ignorant they
are. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, girls
were forbidden by law to attend school—i.e.,
not just fritter-away-half-a-decade-on-
Ontario-taxpayers “post-secondary” education,
but kindergarten and Grade 1.
In Pakistan, 60 per cent of women are illiterate.
**
According to the UN’s 2002 Arab Development
According to the UN’s 2002 Arab Development
Report, half of all women in the Arab world cannot
read. And even in Canada, the ability of the woman
on the subway poster to access that post-secondary
education depends not on the “fees” but on her father
or, if she’s already been married off to her 16-year-
old cousin back in Mirpur, her husband.
The Saskatchewan Internet maestro Kate McMillan
summed up the poster thus: “Subjugation of women
—it’s the new normal.”
**
“Traditional Islamic dress” is not so
“Traditional Islamic dress” is not so
“traditional.”
Talk to any educated Muslim woman who
attended university in the fifties, sixties or seventies
—back when they assumed history was moving their
way and a covered woman was merely a local variant
of the Russian babushka, something old and wizened
you saw in upcountry villages. Now you see them in
the heart of the metropolis—and I don’t mean Beirut
or Abu Dhabi so much as Paris and Brussels.
It’s very strange to be able to walk around, say,
Zarqa, hometown of the late “insurgent” Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, and look 90 per cent of
the women in the eye, and even be rewarded
with a friendly smile every so often, and then
to fly on to London and be confronted by one
masked face after another while strolling down
Whitechapel Road in the East End.
The burka, the niqab and the hijab are not
fashion statements but explicitly political
ones, and what they symbolize in a Western
context is self-segregation.
***