Shaikh of Al-Azhar, Shaikh Tantawi announced that there would be a ban of the fully veiled face called, niqab or a burqa in all-female areas of public universities. There was a protest against this by women who wanted to wear it. This is an admittedly tough issue for me. The fully-veiled body has damaging effects on women. Rickets leads to prolonged labour and eventual death because these women don't get any sunlight. There is something that wretches in me when the justification for such is because men can't control themselves and so women must be the one who is controlled. However, I voice loudly that women who do not CHOOSE to wear this covering should be free from contempt, rape, violence and even death. So if women should be free to choose not to, a full-out ban on those who do, makes equally no sense. The key is choice...and fear of the burning hell if they don't, makes me nervous that 'choice' has relinquished its true application in the name of religion. This is peculiar since many Islamic scholars, including the body of deciders in this case, have determined that full covering was never a tenet of Muhammad's Islam, but rather a practice of tribal groups that extremism has adopted (including the punishments for not wearing the complete covering...)
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/10/13/niqab/index.html
3 comments:
i just listened to a Ted Talk this week about Turkey. back when the leader of the country wanted to "modernize" the country, he felt that wearing the burqa was holding their society back.
But he knew that if he banned the burqa, it wouldn't work. people want what they can't have, or what's being denied to them. and many women would receive pressure from the men in their lives to do it "voluntarily".
so to achieve his goal, he passed a law that prostitutes and whores HAD to wear them. no one wanted to be known as such, so they fell out of fashion and the Turkish society as a whole has done pretty well comparatively.
♥
That is a really interesting tactic. The other thing that Turkey has going for them is that they have a secular government rather than a theocracy. That makes a huge difference.
here's a link to the talk. this bit is here and starts at 4:45 minutes (although the whole 16 minutes is very good). this time i put on subtitles so i could catch every word he says, and he does admit some of his tales are unsubstantiated, i thought the concept was great. ♥
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