Monday 4 May 2009

The Veil

I have long despised the Islamic veil. Often I'm challenged on why it should bother me so much, especially here in a free country, why should it bother me if women choose to wear it?
Well today I read a paragraph which summed up why I loathe it so much:

"I look out of my study at the common and see a wife fully burkaed on a sunny day. She sits still. Her children and husband run around, laughing, playing cricket. She sits still, dead, buried, a ghost. She is complicit in her own degradation, as are countless others. Their acquiescence in a free democracy is a crime against their sisters who have no such choices in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere."

From The Independent Monday 4th May by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

She is complicit in her own degradation. That's why I hate it. Why I will never be able to explain to my sons why some women are so brainwashed that they think it's ok to cover up, to hide themselves in case it inflames men. That women exist that collude in this ridiculous nonsense.

It makes me angry and I hate it and I won't apologise for the way I feel.

It's your right to wear it and my right to despise you for it.

1 comment:

  1. I feel kind of uncomfortable admitting it but I feel the same way. I have heard Muslim women say that they feel freer wearing a veil because they are being judged just for their mind, not for their womanly features or whatever. Call me crazy but I think I have a right to expect fair, equatable treatment whilst my head is uncovered. I think it is disrespectful to men also, I mean, I don't know many men who are unable to control themselves in the face of an attractive woman and if they are unable then that is their responsibility to bear, not the woman's. It makes me cross.

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