• Surreal: Muslim woman defends the “choice” of wearing the hijab even as she admits it is no choice

    Exhibit A: Ideology can trump not just self preservation, but even the motherhood instinct.

    For those of us not enslaved by dedication to religious dogma, the religious “logic” is at times hard to comprehend. The defense of this (British) woman of the obligatory dress code for women in Islam would certainly be one such example.
    http://youtu.be/GCYZtxKB9aM
    While the video speaks for itself, there is one point that deserves rebuttal. Her assertion that the main concerns of women in Islamic world have nothing to do with the obligatory dress code is certainly not true for all women. In fact, books have been written about how some women continuously challenge the system.

    As for those like Ms Ansari (in the video) who enthusiastically embrace these rules, they need to remember that some have given away a lot more than rights such as personal choice in matters of dress in the name of ideology. Hence this by no means indicates that hijab is good for women; it simply means they are blinded by ideology.

    As an example, look at how the Nazis treated women. The Nazis had a straightforward (if reprehensible) rule for how women should behave, know as 3K’s. It would translate into “children, kitchen, church” (roughly, same as keeping women barefoot and pregnant). And yet there were many women who were dedicated Nazis. Perhaps none more so than Magda Goebbels (picture above), who murdered her six children one after the other, since she didn’t believed life without National Socialism was worth living. The fact that Magda Goebbels was a Nazi fanatic doesn’t mean that Hitler’s ideology was not misogynistic, Ms Ansari, and the fact that you are adamant about wearing the hijab doesn’t mean that Islam is not misogynistic, either.

    Category: Uncategorized

    Article by: No Such Thing As Blasphemy

    I was raised in the Islamic world. By accident of history, the plague that is entanglement of religion and government affects most Muslim majority nations a lot worse the many Christian majority (or post-Christian majority) nations. Hence, I am quite familiar with this plague. I started doubting the faith I was raised in during my teen years. After becoming familiar with the works of enlightenment philosophers, I identified myself as a deist. But it was not until a long time later, after I learned about evolutionary science, that I came to identify myself as an atheist. And only then, I came to know the religious right in the US. No need to say, that made me much more passionate about what I believe in and what I stand for. Read more...