Sultan Knish
Over in Toronto, a Muslim cleric with the unwieldy name of Al-Hashim Kamena Atangana
had a great idea. Al-Hashim's idea was for Toronto to pass laws forcing
women to wear Burkas. "Cover up or get raped", was the implied message.
Toronto only has an estimated 5.5 percent Muslim population so the
Toronto Taliban probably won't be getting their way until they have
higher double digit numbers, but they can wait.
Meanwhile in Egypt where the population is 90 percent Muslim and the
other 10 percent are running for their lives, a new TV channel
represents a brave new frontier in Islamic feminism. Maria TV features
women giving lifestyle and makeup tips while wearing the Niqab, which
covers their faces and leaves only their eyes exposed. According to some
Saudi clerics who think that women are only allowed to leave one eye
exposed, this makes them either a bold feminist experiment or shameless
strumpets.
In a country where Tahrir Square has become synonymous with sexual
assault; the Al-Hashim paradigm is taking hold. There are photos of female students at Cairo University
from the 60's and 70's that showed them dressing like women did in the
60's and 70's. But by the time Obama showed up to praise Cairo
University as a great representative of Islamic civilization, the
cover-up had begun. The question is where will the cover-up end and what
will the Cairo University class of 2020 look like? They probably won't
have faces, but will they even have eyes?
You can attend a university with your head covered, even with your face
covered, but it gets harder to attend class when your eyes are covered.
If the trend means anything in a decade Muslim feminism will mean
fighting for the right to keep one eye open in a religion that wants
everyone to keep their eyes shut.
The liberal West has reacted to the Islamic cover-up with its own
cover-up. The Western liberal will run through the gamut of his own
civilization's sins before reluctantly admitting that some parts of the
Muslim world may not be an ideal place to be a woman, but he immediately
reaches for a rolled up copy of the New York Times and uses Tom
Friedman's latest report from an airport's luxury lounge in Dubai or
Kuala Lumpur as proof that the reforms are coming.
Indeed if you read anything from Tom Friedman, who is expert at writing
books about how the world is becoming a global village because it's so
ridiculously easy for him to fly anywhere on his frequent flyer miles,
that is all he can talk about. Saudi Arabia is constantly being
reformed. Why in 1962 it abolished slavery and recently the Saudi king
has agreed to let women vote in municipal elections in 2015. This is
naturally a big deal in an absolute monarchy that has been ruled by the
same family for longer than it had oil companies.
There is no question that King Abdullah is a great feminist. If you
doubt that just ask any one of his 13 wives. It may be true that women
in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive or leave the country without
permission from their husband and have their lives controlled by a male
guardian; but so long as Tom Friedman has a comfortable seat and an
alcohol-free drink whenever he flies to Saudi Arabia, the reports of
reforms will keep on coming about this cheerful outpost in our global
village.
Outside of an airport there is no such place as a global village.
International travel hasn't flattened the world. It may be possible to
fly to a remote location in twelve hours, disembark into a luxurious
modern terminal designed by British architects and constructed by slave
labor, but it can take you another twelve hours just to make your way
through a city that may be ornamented with the occasional noveau riche
skyscraper but is still built on a plan designed to defend desert tribes
from nomadic raids. Travel twelve hours out of that city and you will
encounter millions of people living in actual villages who don't think
that globalism is flattening, but do think that the world is flat.
Jet setting is exciting, but not transformative. Tom Friedman in Jeddah
is still the same man he is on Fifth Avenue. The only difference is that
there's more sand in his shoes and sweat under his mustache. And the
Saudi whose great-grandfather grew up in one of those villages, fought
the Ottoman Empire, bought children from Syrian traders and kept them as
slaves or concubines, and taught his children that living this way is
what convinced Allah to open up some oil wells under the desert, is
still that man even when he's having lunch with Tom Friedman on Fifth
Avenue.
We all live in villages. Our village is a place where women are
considered human beings, but in the village that is an ocean and a
desert away, women are considered property. For all the ridiculous
noises about Islamic feminism and all the reforms coming out of Riyadh, a
proper Muslim can no more consider a woman his equal, than he could
consider a sheep or an African slave his equal.
The problem is that lately our two villages have been overlapping thanks
to the heap big magic of the airport. Americans travel to Saudi Arabia,
where they are told to cover themselves up and respect the local
customs, and Muslims travel to Canada where they tell the city of
Toronto that it needs to cover up its women or they won't be responsible
for the consequences. Our village just can't seem to win.
This is not the sort of stuff that you put in tourist brochures, this is
the sort of stuff you cover up, and these days our nations exist as
long tourist brochures covering up the problems and extolling the
virtues of all these people who visit, move in, learn to fly planes and
ram them into buildings because a medieval warlord claimed that a fellow
named Allah wanted him to conquer the world, but didn't provide him
with any transportation more reliable than camels and a flying horse.
Our tourist brochures say, "Diversity", but diversity is another one of
our village's unique virtues. It's not a virtue when you reach Saudi
Arabia, and it's not a virtue when Saudi Arabia reaches us. Our noble
commitment to diversity leads us to diversify by investing in
multiculturalism, but many of those villages full of men with thirteen
wives and sharp knives are not interested in multiculturalism.
The Taliban showed us what they thought of multiculturalism when they
blew up Buddhist statues and the Islamists in Mali are showing us what
they think of multiculturalism with a rampage directed against Sufi
shrines. The Muslim Waqf in Jerusalem is continuing its vandalism of the
remains of the Second Temple. All of them are following in the
footsteps of Saudi Arabia which has waged a campaign of destruction
against the cultural artifacts of every other culture.
In India, Hindus had the temerity
to sing in their own country during the month of Ramadan, which ended
in violence as furious Muslims tried to explain their views on
multiculturalism with big rocks. In that same spirit, Al-Hashim Kamena
Atangana, like so many other Muslim clerics, is trying to explain to us
that while in our village it may be the custom to treat women as human
beings, in his village it is the custom to treat them as property.
Common sense says that our village means our customs, but diversity says
that our village is on the shores of the global village which is moving
into our village and insisting that it's now their village. This is a
problem, but only for those of us who are Jews, Christians, Hindus,
Atheists, Zoroastrians, Wiccans, Buddhists, Sikhs and Bahai. Not to
mention female or in any other way differing from the Muslim male that
runs the other village and is trooping through our airport with thirteen
wives in tow.
It used to be that when in Rome, you did like the Romans. Now it's when
in Toronto, you do like Al-Hashim says. Because his voice is the booming
echo of diversity and like all the voices of diversity, it isn't
promoting multiculturalism, but a single culture. Their culture. One
Ummah, one Caliph and one Burka.
The Muslim Brotherhood succeeded in changing Egypt through the twin
expedients of propaganda and violence. 70 years after educated Egyptians
wanted to be more Western, the Brotherhood is in power and Westerners
are told to want to be more Muslim. The Al-Hashims bellow that Western
women should act more Muslim and Western feminist groups encourage their
members to try on Hijabs as gestures of tolerance and servitude. That
great Islamic feminist, King Abdullah and his thirteen wives, whose
kingdom spends billions on such propaganda, no doubt approves, and
wishes they would move on to not driving cars as another gesture of
tolerance for our new wonderfully diverse village.
The Hijab is the gateway to the Burka and both are just forms of mobile
Purdah, the segregation that requires a woman to stay at home. And if
she can't stay in her tent, then she can only go out while wearing a big
black tent that goes everywhere she goes. The cover-ups function like a
cattle brand informing other Muslim men that this is someone else's
property. That was the ancient function of the garment when bands of
Muslim raiders were collecting slave women and some distinction had to
be made between married women who couldn't be raped and slave women who
could.
Under the Burka, the Muslim woman is still locked up in her room in her
husband's house even when she's out and about in the marketplace. It is a
liberal concession that allows her to occasionally leave the house
while still being locked up in the house. And this brilliant bit of
Islamic feminism, this reform which says that women can occasionally
leave the house and shouldn't be raped so long as they're wearing a tent
that makes it look like they're still in Purdah, is just one of the
ways that Islam is enriching our multiculturalism with its
monoculturalism. To say nothing of all the Muslim rapes of women who
refuse to walk around wearing tents.
Western liberals respond to the problem with the same methods as
Middle-Eastern Islamists. Their solution to everything is the great
cover-up. Muslims cover up women, Western liberals cover up the Muslim
abuse of women. Muslims are afraid of dealing with the idea that women
are more than mobile property and Western liberals are terrified of
dealing with the idea that this is what Muslims actually believe about
women.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, whether it's for the bacteria that
thrive under full body robes or the kind that thrive in ideologies which
try to control everyone. No matter how many cover-ups are made and how
many cloaks, Hijabs and Burkas are thrown over the truth, sooner or
later the cover-ups have to end and the truth has to shine forth.
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