Wearing the hijab: 'It's a choice'

[Scootaloo]

2. No, it's not a choice EVERYWHERE

But that's not especially relevant, as the people screaming about the garments... aren't screaming about them being worn in Saudi Arabia or Iran, but are instead having a raging panic over their being worn in the UK, or Australia, or France.

The Hijab hysteria in western nations is, IMO, an example of a place where feminism fails, and fails hard - in that it supposes that these women are inferior, incapable of their own decisions, because they aren't "like us" and so need a guiding white, Judeo-christian hand to tell them how to think, how to feel, and yes, how to dress. That this belief happens to synch perfectly with standard Islamophobic garbage should be a clue, but... it never seems to be. It's basically the same mentality that leads to women of color often being treated as footnotes, or "oh yeah them" in feminism. Sadly, western feminism, like pretty much everything else in the west, seems to assume a white, Judeo-Christian, Anglo-centric view as "the standard."

In the west, hijab is a choice, consciously decided by the woman in question. In those cases where she's somehow forced to dress a way by someone else, it's that person's fault, not the woman's, nor the other women who choose to dress themselves. Trying to control how Muslim women express their faith isn't just islamophobia, it's straight-up misogyny as well.