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In reply to the discussion: The family of a woman accused of violating ISIS' dress code says she was tortured to death [View all]anigbrowl
(13,889 posts)What next, calling out any Muslims who have beards as crypto-extremists?
Hijab strikes me as a lot more complicated than the simple patriarchal oppression explanation that is often advanced in western countries. Some years ago when I lived in Amsterdam I had a landlady whose family was Pakistani but who had grown up in the Netherlands. When I first met her (to rent the apartment) she seemed completely westernized, pantsuit, high heels and so on. IIRC she was a loan officer at a bank or something along those lines, and professional dress standards are much the same here so she wouldn't have looked out of place in the financial district of any US city.
Anyway we hit it off socially as well as commercially and would meet up noce or twice a month to chat and indeed to flirt a little (were were close in age and since both of us were originally from other countries we had that in common too. One day she showed up in elaborate hijab, to my great surprise. I asked if she there was some family event or something and she said no, she had been catcalled on her way home from work the previous day and was pissed off about it, and that she sometimes work hijab because she preferred to be left alone, as well as because she wanted to maintain her cultural identity, as well as because she liked the clothes for their own sake. I knew less than nothing about and so she told me all sorts of interesting things about the clothes and Pakistani Islamic culture in general, how it had been more difficult for heir parents to adjust to Dutch norms and so on.
So while Islamic patriarchy invariably tries to impose hijab on women, not all women in hijab are necessarily under the sway of Islamic patriarchy. I'm not inclined to jump to conclusions about people's religious or cultural motivations for wearing it, nor do I think it's appropriate to extend some sort of collective responsibility for the outrages perpetrated by ISIS to anyone wearing traditional religious garb, any more than I would judge a Jewish person sporting orthodox garb for actions of the Israeli government that I find disagreeable.