Thread: Reason for Hijab: Womens hair emits dangerous sex rays

Thanks for the info guys, very informative thread...

Originally Posted by mostlymad

this is true. You and chandragupta both, for Islam and Hindus.

Here is your award. Share it!

he he dude ,that was cool. where is the cash cheque they give away with that award and i dont have the slightest intention of sharing that cheque with nisaar

Nisaar

Amish , i guess i have an equal to that.
My great-grand-pa , wouldnt sign documents,will not touch money and when an ant bit him , he gently removed it , instead of pushing it away and killing it.
And he never eat without sighting a eagle(garuda) of some sort daily , considerd one of assistants of lord vishnu....sounds so similar to amish.

Religious education and upholding morals, are a bit needed in every age

Hindus had their own versions of madrassas in vedic ages called "gurukulas" where most people learnt.they combined both religious,moral and then sciences like art of war,such and such.Its sad that such "gurukulas" are non-existent today.Why ?. Mostly they couldnt adapt themselves to times and rigid caste,religious things saw their end.


Are madrassas facing the same today ? They are modernising , but are they fast enough ?. As a suggestion ,how about teaching other religions in madrassas too ? *THAT* would solve the "kafir" attitude at its grass roots.And the fact that students of madrassas dont get a chance to mingle with other communities is a bad thing IMHO.

Its not a bad idea to look at how non-arab,"out of touch with arab" muslims have fared.ex: malayasia,turkey(? not sure ? ) . Does racism associate itself with islam in the arabian mullah mind ? perhaps it sees a solace in the "ummah" and that becomes its excuse.

just for info, hindus too have a equivalent of "ummah" , called "vasudheva kudumbam" /something .

i know i have asked many questions, but answers lay within those questions.

Ray
It was standard practise to marry "n" no of wifes.
Esp , when you are a king, or a powerfull person in society.
The Imperial Chola Emperor -> Raja Raja Chola , my hero had 15.
And child marriage was common 1500 years ago.
It hurts me , to see Indians curse mohammed for marrying a 9 year old Ayisha(?) , when they cant stop child marriages in India.

Can you see my voice?
Inas Younis
Clad in black, anonymous in a world that capitalises on her brilliance without acknowledging her person – is hijab a testament to faith or a manifestation of subjugation?



Although I am typically cloaked in full hijab, when it comes to writing I am always naked in both spirit and understanding.

I prefer neither to cater to the vulnerability of those who approach every Islamic initiative with a defensive posture, nor to those who come equipped with preconceived and borrowed ideas, and for whom spiritual conviction is precluded by a state of chronic ignorance and religious constipation.

I am addressing readers who have an absolute confidence in their ability to think.

Fifteen years ago, I attended a Muslim youth conference where I was persuaded to yield to the anguish of an entire ummah (nation) by submitting in full blind faith to a strain of Islam championed by the Afghani rebels (pre-Taliban), who had been invited to motivate us into religious compliance. They appealed to our sentiments by way of an original anthem, exhorting us to hear the weeping of Afghanistan’s most innocent victims – the orphans. But words and songs were not required when theirparalysed and amputated bodies served as the most powerful testament to the sacrifice they had made in the name of Islam.

A seed of guilt was planted by the suggestion that our Islamic ummah was reaping punishment because of our religious apathy. And as a condition to our collective survival, we were beckoned to atone for our shortcomings by submitting ourselves to the “cause”. The nature of that cause was masked with a generic plea to vindicate the suffering of Muslims by volunteering to amputate something less valuable to a teenager than bodily limbs – our infantile minds. We were called to commit practically, to that which we had been taught to embrace ideologically. It was hardly a sacrifice considering that at fifteen my mind was practically and ideologically constrained by only one thought: the boys on the other side of our segregated lecture hall.

But before I could surrender my moral autonomy, I had to extinguish a few reservations. And so in a public forum I asked the visiting scholar to explain the significance of polygamy. He replied that “it is a social solution for a social problem.” Then I questioned him about hijab, the Islamic head covering. He pronounced that it is a fard, a religious obligation, on all women.

So although I had come in wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, I left in full modest regalia, headscarf and all.

I knew almost nothing of religion, but it did not matter, because knowledge was a minor technicality in light of the precedence that crying orphans commanded. I knew that I must act before I think, because as even the ancient Christians proclaimed, lex orandi, lex credendi, action precedes faith.

Now I am thirty years old and a little more difficult to satisfy, and although I still believe that action precedes faith, I am convinced that it is the action of the mind, not the body, which precedes not only faith, but the physical action itself. Fifteen years have passed, and my commitment to faith has not betrayed the cries of theorphans in Afghanistan. In fact, it has only become aggravated by the cries of routinely overlooked victims of persecution – Muslim women. Women’s voices are being used, with or without their consent, to wage a resistance movement designed to use them as props in counteracting Western colonialism.

Observe the concrete example of this onslaught on women as embodied by the person whom I shall dub “the heart surgeon”. I cannot name her, or describe her, because the person who related his recent interaction with this gifted female surgeon, who had saved his life after he suffered a heart attack, has never “seen” her voice. She was clad in black from head to toe and had but two slits in her face veil to allow her a restricted view of a world that was prepared to capitalise on the brilliance of her mind, as if it were a public commodity, without acknowledging her person. A world where she is told to allow her talents to be plundered for the benefit of her intellectual inferiors, without the incentive of recognition and respect; a world which insists that her orthodoxy is a testament of her elevated status instead of what it has really become – a visual manifestation of her subjugation.

But what the world of the female surgeon has imposed through physical coercion, ours has sanctioned through the psychological coercion inherent in the decree made by the consensus of those scholars who insist that the peripheral custom of veiling is mandated in Islam. A claim which, I have come to discover, is grounded less on theological evidence than on the religious vulnerability which seeks to use the visual imagery of women as an antidote to the helplessness we are experiencing at the hands of Western dominance.

Frustrated by all these visual and intellectual contradictions in my faith, I sought out that very scholar who had satisfied my questions some fifteen years ago.

Although he did not remember me, one peek into his lowered gaze and I was satisfied with the purity of his heart.

This time however, I had no mercy and started at the very beginning, by concerning him with the question of God. He replied that there are some things you cannot understand or explain. After I felt hammered by that realisation a few more times, I elected to dispose of the esoteric questions and get down to concretes. So I asked him the modern value of enforcing the hijab. He said that it is his opinion that it is obligatory, but of course a woman can choose.

But where is the choice when her salvation and love for God is contingent on her willingness to comply with those opinions you deem compulsory to circumventing a grievous penalty? He wisely resorted to the same answers I received from the many other people whose counsel I sought and finally said, “There are some things you just have to accept, and Allah has commanded it so.” I asked him what he thinks I ought to do with my inconsolable mind. He declared, “Where your mind ends, revelation begins.”

Hence I was left without answers, but I was contented nonetheless by the reassurance that answers are not always possible and I should finally take consolation in faith – thus God, thus divine law, thus salvation.

I was prepared to accept matters as they are decreed even if they did not appeal to my intellect. But before I could take one day’s comfort in that realisation, another irksome question demanded to be asked. What of those matters that contradict human intellect? For even if I succumb to intellectual apathy and blind faith I could not ignore the visual contradiction embodied in that female surgeon. Dumb was one thing, but dumb and blind was more than I could bear to sustain. If I drive myself to accept that my commonsense, my intellect, is extraneous in matters of faith, then I must not only accept the corollary of that assertion, but also its remedy - dogma and literalism.

If I am not permitted to exercise my uniquely human capacity to integrate and conceptualise reality as I experience it then I too would be bound to the same prescriptions which compel that female surgeon to apply religious mandates across every situation no matter what her circumstances dictate. Some environments are innately devoid of any sexual context, where notions of modesty or vanity, female vs male are completely immaterial, as would be the case in an operating room. Hijab in the context of some environments, much less extreme than hospitals, does the exact opposite of its intended purpose – it injects the notion of sexuality where none exists. But before we even bother about arguments on the letter vs spirit of the law, we have to be aware of an even greater, more insidious danger to the natural progression of literal thinking and that first axiom of blind obedience which we have been called to embrace.

The intellect vs Islamic law

If the things we cannot explain and do not understand are the means by which we seek to reinforce our belief in God’s presence, if accepting religious law submissively without question, laws and fatwas which are not grounded in intellect but on vague interpretations of revelation, are the greatest reinforcement we have of the validity of any religious claim, then the measure of faith in God becomes contingent on the degree to which one is willing to forgo logic.

What happens when one is able to intellectualise the rigidity of dogma out of existence, is that then tantamount to intellectualising God out of existence? Is the God who demands adherence in defiance of logic and reason not the God of superstition? If we accept what we are told, that static laws are moral truths, and then allow others to attach our adherence to them as a testament of our commitment to God, then ask yourself if you are willing to act on it, without just applying it to others and then using repentance as a scapegoat to exempt yourself. Ask yourself if you are willing to live according to the dictates of the faith-minus-logic world of that female surgeon. Or will you continue to rely on the luxury that a free society permits you by evading the very real and more pertinent question here: do you believe that you have a right not to believe and still be a believer?

Are you prepared in the name of the God who granted you free will to renounce the attitude towards faith that relies on your ability to not justify things, to not understand, and worse to resist the temptation to know them, making renunciation of the mind a qualification of faith in God?

If you can’t bring yourself to do it, then you are not alone. Countless doctors, scientists, and professionals at the height of their academic fields become absolute numbskull idiots when it comes to matters of religion. Observe the man who needs confirmation on whether or not he should divorce the woman he loves, should it please his mother, or if he can be alone in an exam room with his female patients? Here is a man who is trained to make life and death judgement calls but cannot make the simplest decisions when it comes to his personal life or work. Or notice the woman who asks if dancing is permitted if only for her husband. But what is even more absurd than the questions are the answers they were given, which were – yes, divorce her; no you can’t be alone with your patient; and yes, you can dance for your husband as long as you do not imitate that infidel Brittany Spears. For more comical examples of the intellectual liquidation of our ummah I refer you to www.sunnipath.com, a site I was referred to by an even more mainstream organisation, the Zaytoona Institute.

What is not so comical is the sense of urgency which is driving Muslims to abdicate their commitment to a rational faith in the interest of the anti-rational dogma of legalism according to and championed by our leadership, the abstraction of which can be embodied by a scattered collection of voices who have been eulogising the merits of an Islamic state, all the while ignoring the reality and corruption which is our Islamic “state”.

But here is the secret fear of our leadership, of our mullahs, from which all their irrational decrees are designed to hold back and deflect. It is the deep down realisation that the literal materialisation of everything they have been preaching has already been actualised in one of the most loyal, literal and failed experiments in Islamic history, Saudi Arabia, the land that is the logical conclusion of our illogical approach to religion.

They will of course go into a diatribe about how that sham of a kingdom is not an Islamic ideal but rather its corruption, but they will not be able to tell you why. Not because they do not know why, but because to answer the question why, you have to be prepared to follow through with the answer and its subsequent implication – making public that which you have already painfully conceded in private, proclaiming your independence from every authority that up till now has held us all emotionally detained and united under a philosophically flimsy banner of blind compliance to Islamic laws which are intellectually indefensible.

Proclaim your independence from laws which have kept women physically or psychologically gagged and men spiritually impotent. Say your farewell to edicts which are supposed to reinforce revelation, but have in essence denied its most fundamental premise, the premise where your mind ends and revelation does indeed begin. Your mind ends at the very beginning, with the most fundamental question and answer from which every other question and answer should stem. Are humans inherently good or evil?

It is with this question that revelation kicks in with undeniable force and tells me what my intellect cannot, which is that humans are inherently good, a premise which not only makes my faith unique, but which is also one of the firmest of my religious beliefs.

Since our revelation stresses our inherent goodness, our fitra, then it stands to reason that the letter of the law is a superfluous mechanism in harnessing our nature, which revelation says is predisposed to goodness. No legalism or holy spirits are required for guidance if and when our natural proclivity is allowed to serve as our most qualified guide. But our natural inclination is not a given; it is a product of a soul that is under no compulsion, a soul which is completely free. Natural inclinations can only find representation in a world that is free of every variety of coercion and intimidation, making a free society the organic expression and incarnation of an Islamic state, and the more free the society, the more Islamic it becomes.

No amount of rationalisations or explanations can convince any thinking person that a stricter adherence to the codification of our traditions will cure our current crisis. We must stop insisting that ideological unity is measured by uniformity in practice and recognise that ideals are abstract and timeless and their implementation will have different expressions depending on time, culture, place and circumstance. We should also recognise that pity and loyalty to the feebleminded and spirited of society who seek security through unity and uniformity is a betrayal and a crime against the intellectually gifted members of our society, who will either, in an effort to alleviate their anguish, use their intellectual prowess to become the most destructive force in the trend towards fundamentalism, or leave religion for the masses, and become either disgruntled atheists or mystics.

If uniformity in practice continues to become the standard by which we derive and uphold religious law, instead of reality and intellect, then we will forever be compelled to yield to the lowest common unifying denominator where the exceptions become the rules, the hypotheticals become the standard, and the what-ifs become the what-should-be. And in order to insure uniformity in practice, scholars will be forced to spend their lives making concessions for every single legal contingency. Islamic scholarship, philosophy, and art will have to be sacrificed in order to relieve the constipation which results from questions like:

What if it rains in the morning, can I join my prayers?

What if my shorts are one eighth of an inch above my knee?

What if my wife kisses me before I had the chance to stop her, should I repeat my wudu?

These sorts of questions become completely legitimate when reason is isolated from religion.

You have only to look at the reality which is our present state to recognise that where there is impotence of the mind and spirit, there is subjugation of the body, specifically women’s bodies. If man is the metaphor for the material world, the world of progress and development, then woman is his spiritual counterpart. Man’s spirit is bound by his capacity to produce, and whenever man feels he has no power to effect change or to produce material goods, woman becomes the mirror of his castrated spirit. In an effort to alleviate his paralysis in the physical world, he will seek to bind and gag the spirit which demands he fight for it, the spirit which is woman, the spirit whose movements he seeks to control to compensate himself for the tyrannical politics of bigger men who seek to control him.

To resuscitate men’s minds, I would like to propose that we initiate a movement to liberate the male spirit by psychologically and physically liberating women from the impositions of religious mandates that are no longer relevant or sanctioned either in letter or spirit. We should do this one scarf at a time, by re-evaluating the directive imposed on women to cover their hair and demanding that our scholars publicly Abu Dawud. The English translation of Sunan Abu Dawud is in three volumes. This hadith is in volume 3, book XXVII, chapter 1535, and hadith number 4092, titled: ‘How Much Beauty Can a Woman Display?’

Abu Dawud reports that this is a mursal tradition (ie the narrator who transmitted it from Aisha is missing), making this hadith a weak one. Few veiling advocates ever point out that this is a weak hadith and therefore should not be used to obtain Islamic injunctions.

The other hadith, which is sahih (considered authentic), states:


My Lord agreed with me (‘Umar) in three things... (2) And as regards the veiling of women, I said “O Allah’s Apostle! I wish you ordered your wives to cover themselves from the men because good and bad ones talk to them.” So the verse of the veiling of the women was revealed (Bukhari I.viii.395).

But again this was in reference to the Prophet’s (pbuh) wives who were the target of insults and accusations by the “hypocrites.”

The majority of those who have attempted to interpret the Quran to mandate the hijab argue that the vernacular “beauty” includes hair, and its exposure is therefore forbidden. But the term “ordinary” means ordinary to the prevailing social customs. How is hair not “ordinary”?

The word ‘hijab’ itself is derived from hajaba, that is, to hide or conceal. Hijab/ hajaba is mentioned eight times in the Quran. But hijab is never used in the context of a woman’s head covering. Even the word khimar really signifies any covering, such as a blanket, dress, or shawl.

What is clear, even after an analysis of various translations and even if one uses the word veil in translation, is an order that the woman’s bosom be covered, not that the woman’s head be covered. This is not to say that covering the hair does not carry noble connotations. My objective is not to destroy what I believe would be a beautiful custom if it were not marred by the decree that it is obligatory, depriving a woman from the sense of joy that she would derive from choosing it as a genuine expression of her interior state of purity and transcendent beauty.

My objective is to liberate every woman, myself included, who has only adopted the Islamic dress because she was misled into believing that it is an obligation, and even more importantly to liberate all the women who do not wear it from the unearned guilt they harbour, for what they have beentold is spiritual weakness on their part.

I got the impression from the many people I have spoken with that they would secretly agree with me but would rather not rock the boat over what they have, without our permission, deemed a minor issue. I pray that they will evolve the courage to forgo political correctness and stop hiding behind the pretence that it’s the woman who is making the choice. Fear, of eternal damnation no less, nullifies the impression that it is a choice.

But my greatest motivation in seeking guidance on this issue was to speak on behalf of those who do not have the luxury to make an independent decision regarding their religious expression. For while I can take off my hijab, I know that the ramifications I, a mere housewife, will suffer in the hands of a few backbiters and name-callers will be negligible in comparison to the jail time and humiliation a female surgeon in Saudi Arabia would have to endure to assert her right to unveil.

When my friend was lying at the operating table, vulnerable and exposed, he was asked by the thoughtless man who was there to assist in the surgery to furnish some proof that he can pay for the superior quality heart tube which he demanded. The female surgeon terminated his coarseness by giving him her assurance that she would pay for it if my friend could not, proving that she is not only his superior in intellect but also in compassion.

My friend not knowing in what manner he would thank this angel of mercy, in what way he can make her feel singled out, without being rebuked for transgressing any social bounds, elected to do it by means of a poetic note of thanks. She took it from him as if it were a charge slip, only to rush back to plead with him to sign the note. In that act, she expressed both her nature and personality, for while she remains nameless and faceless and claims no credit for her efforts, she insists that he be given credit for his.

And so in gratitude to the female surgeon who has healed and touched many hearts both literally and figuratively, I, in a last literal and symbolic act of faith, would like to take my hat off, or rather scarf off, to you my sister in Islam. For tomorrow I will go out unveiled for the first time, in the hope that the world will see you and me with new eyes and, more importantly, with enlightened hearts. And I am hoping they will join me in public opposition to the veiling of your elegant mind and compassionate voice. A voice which, if it were allowed to sing freely, would triumph over the voices of those who either in their silent resignation or blatant endorsement have contributed to the horrors that will make September 11 both a day of awakening and tragedy for Muslims everywhere.

Tarek,

A very thought provoking article.

It gives impetus to one to attempt to analyse his own religion too to check anomalises that do not appeal to logic.

And carry out self analysis.

Thanks.

Where did you get this article Can you see my voice? by Inas Younis from?

May all the gods give her power to lift muslim women from this injustice. But I dont know if any body (mullah, maulvi) is listening to her pleas!