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The Burqa in the West Is More than a Cover-Up

[Chicago Tribune] Georgie Anne Geyer - At the Red Mosque in Islamabad, which was stormed by the Pakistani military last week, the chief cleric at the mosque was Mohammed Abdul Aziz, brother of the deputy chief cleric, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who was quoted before his death as saying: "We have decided that we can be martyred, but we will not surrender!" Mohammed Abdul Aziz had tried to flee the mosque dressed in a burqa, the black robe for women. The four men convicted last week of conspiring to bomb London's public transit system in July 2005 included Yassin Omar, 26, a Somali, who had fled to Birmingham after the bombing dressed in a full-length black burqa. Now, what better way to disguise yourself, if you are a young foreign terrorist, than to play the burqa-covered woman? The covering of women in the Middle East is a mark of subjugation, a signal that they belong to men and not to society. In fact, there is nothing in the Koran instructing women to cover themselves totally, only to dress modestly, and the practice is of fairly recent origin. Employed in the West, it is actually an in-your-face gesture of disrespect for Western principles.
2007-07-20 01:00:00
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