While putting together this post about Linda Sarsour’s race transformation, I noticed that the only male in the video was the fey Muslim media darling Reza Aslan, who claims that “a hijab is a thing that a male Muslim should have absolutely no opinion about.” Later on in the video, someone else assures us that the hijab is entirely a matter of choice, not of coercion.
Those things are easily said, but they don’t match reality. What does Reza Aslan have to say about Aqsa Parvez, whose Muslim father choked her to death with her hijab after she refused to wear it? Or Amina Muse Ali, a Christian woman in Somalia whom Muslims murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab? Or the 40 women who were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab; or Alya Al-Safar, whose Muslim cousin threatened to kill her and harm her family because she stopped wearing the hijab in Britain; or Amira Osman Hamid, who faced whipping in Sudan for refusing to wear the hijab; or the Egyptian girl, also named Amira, who committed suicide after being brutalized for her family for refusing to wear the hijab; or the Muslim and non-Muslim teachers at the Islamic College of South Australia who were told that they had to wear the hijab or be fired; or the women in Chechnya whom police shot with paintballs because they weren’t wearing hijab; or the women also in Chechnya who were threatened by men with automatic rifles for not wearing hijab; or the elementary school teachers in Tunisia who were threatened with death for not wearing hijab; or the Syrian schoolgirls who were forbidden to go to school unless they wore hijab; or the women in Gaza whom Hamas has forced to wear hijab; or the women in Iran who protested against the regime by daring to take off their legally-required hijab; or the women in London whom Muslim thugs threatened to murder if they didn’t wear hijab; or the anonymous young Muslim woman who doffed her hijab outside her home and started living a double life in fear of her parents; or the fifteen girls in Saudi Arabia who were killedwhen the religious police wouldn’t let them leave their burning school building because they had taken off their hijabs in their all-female environment; or all the other women and girls who have been killed or threatened, or who live in fear for daring not to wear the hijab?
All of these women were threatened, brutalized and/or killed by Muslim men for refusing to wear the hijab. Does Reza Aslan have anything to say to those men? No? Why not? Who is standing in solidarity with these women? Those who taunt or brutalize hijab-wearing women are louts and creeps, and should be prosecuted if they commit any acts of violence. At the same time, the women who don’t wear hijab in Muslim countries are far more likely to be victims of violence than hijabis in the West. Who speaks for them?
