… has attracted growing interest in democratic countries, with the latest proposed crackdown on it coming from Denmark, where a commission has recommended a hijab ban in elementary schools.

Between 12 and 14 ain’t so cool either, and 7, as this writer correctly notes, is absolutely out of the question – parents are in the position of forcing modesty garments on someone too young to choose to wear them.

The parents are doing it because you want to get your daughter used to thinking that covering up is her only option in life. It’s the only thing she’s ever known. She’s always hidden her hair (and probably her body – such girls are often put in body-hiding robes).

The observation in my headline is one of many comments on a NYT article about multiple lawsuits, character-assassination, and life-destruction resulting from a seconds-long incident in which a 7 year old hijabi’s teacher touched her hijab. Was it an innocuous effort to clear the girl’s vision, which seemed to the teacher for a moment to be obscured by the hijab? Was it a vicious humiliating “stripping” of the girl’s clothing, self-respect, and personal integrity?

Another commenter:

[W]hy is a seven-year old girl wearing a hijab? A hijab is a statement of modesty, a way of deflecting unwanted attention from unrelated males. The girl is seven! In what culture are such innocent creatures the objects of unwanted sexual attention?

The answer is clear: You want girls from the moment they enter the public realm to see themselves as destructive temptresses; and you certainly want them to regard all males as people to whose drives and dominance they must in every way from the very beginning of their conscious lives defer.

Another commenter:

I’m sorry, why is a seven-year-old girl covering her hair? What does she have to be modest about at age seven?? I thought girls were only put under hijab when they began menstruating? How early in our lives do girls and women have to have others’ expectations and projections of what it means to be a “good girl” or “ladylike” foisted upon us?

Another:

I am mostly sorry for the child. Having lived in very conservative parts of the Middle East for some time, I know that seven-year-old children typically don’t wear hijabs unless their parents are really extreme religious fundamentalists.

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In Muslim countries where I lived, hijabs are not worn by 7 year olds. Girls starting puberty wear them. Forcing a 7 year old to wear one sounds…

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[T]he early Muslims including Prophet Muhammad PBUH did not preach covering the heads of pre-pubescent girls. This trend simply marks the increase of religious conflict and religious fundamentalism (across many religions).

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More on this controversy.

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Tarek Fatah on Twitter: “Forcing #Hijab on a 7-year-old American girl? Has my Muslim community lost their bearings? Imagine telling a child, her hair triggers sexual desire among men! What has gone wrong with my Muslim community? What next? A hijab for newly-born infant girls?”

The argument in support of the hijab proceeds on a deeply flawed assumption that girls have an option to wear or not wear it. And since they have exercised their free agency and chosen to wear the hijab, the laws of the land must respect their choice. This argument fails to recognise the fact that the families that prescribe and subscribe to the hijab usually make it mandatory for their female children, when they are as young as four or five years old, to wear the garment whenever they step outside their home or when they are in presence of male family members. The choice of wearing or not wearing the hijab is already made for them by the accident of their birth. The collective pressure exerted by families, especially the male members, a deeply conservative society, and the burden of arcane interpretations of religious dogma make it virtually impossible for any of the hijab-clad girls to exercise free choice.

See the post directly below this one for background.

One needs to parse the pro-hijab Council of Europe message to understand the problem here.

BEAUTY IS IN DIVERSITY.

AS FREEDOM IS IN HIJAB.

Let’s start with the first statement. Variety is the spice of life, I grant you. But surely not everything that meets the eye in a highly diverse environment will strike everyone as beautiful; and indeed given the notorious subjectivity of the concept “beauty,” mixed in this case with the feel-good vacuity of the sentence’s sentiment, it’s not terribly surprising that a lot of people were turned off. Karabash has a richly diverse urban setting, with unusual bright red water features, but I don’t find it beautiful. Los Angeles is highly diverse, with gated communities for billionaires down the road from rancid encampments, but I don’t find this diversity beautiful. The hijab campaign means to educate me, to make me more tolerant of people who wear hijabs; but it starts with an insult to my intelligence.

Plus, I’m not sure defending hijabs as diversity really… works anyway. I mean, they’re diverse from what non-hijab wearers wear, to be sure; but within the hijab community the whole modesty point is to make children and adults all pretty much look alike, right? Not a very diversity-positive community.

With the second statement, real trouble ensues. Beauty is to diversity as freedom is to the hijab. So… beauty inheres in diversity, just as freedom inheres in the hijab. The hijab is as obviously about freedom as diversity is about beauty. To wear a hijab is to say I am free. I am a free person, a free woman.

Now, if the campaign stated

FREEDOM OF CHOICE IS AN IMPORTANT FREEDOM.

I AM FREE TO WEAR A HIJAB.

no one would have complained. But if you are trying to say to me that you are free because you wear a hijab, that when I see a woman (or, horribly, a child) in a hijab I’m supposed to say There goes a free person. The hijab proves it. I’m going to refer you to Orwell’s 1984. You are not going to be able to make me believe that the very opposite of the truth is true.

I’m perfectly okay with all sorts of religious people marking their submission to God in any number of ways, but the whole point of this gesture, you understand, is to publicly reject “freedom” as the French, and ol’ UD, understand it. So the campaign lies, and since most people don’t find lies very persuasive, the campaign fails.

Rather unfair of the NYT to end its piece about the latest legal decision in favor of allowing employers, in very restricted circumstances, to ban the hijab in public work settings, with this dismissive statement from a lawyer for the hijabi who sued. And rather unwise tactically.

I mean, on the reasonable assumption that the NYT is appalled by burqa and hijab restrictions, it does its position no good by featuring the it’s all a tempest in an abaya line, which people are always doing. People are always telling us how risibly few female children and women wear the burqa, the abaya, the hijab, so why make a fuss?

Whereas numbers are actually going up in most places.

So to align yourself with people who dishonestly downplay a phenomenon which does in fact demoralize many citizens of secular countries (they tend to vote overwhelmingly in favor of restrictions) is to put yourself in a place which is itself subject to dismissal.

And as to the amusing pathetic crumbly fragility of a laicity which would fail to stand up to brave little Belgium’s little case — pshaw. Obviously it IS standing up to theocratic threats — by recognizing and managing them.

Quebec’s bill prohibiting public school teachers from wearing the hijab remains popular. Here, from this time last year, are comments — from immigrants from Muslim countries — on the bill:

“For me the hijab is a symbol of inferiority even if they [the Muslim teachers] say they don’t feel inferior or superior or equal to men. It’s a symbol of inferiority and I insist on that point,” said Ferroudja Mohand, who immigrated to Quebec from Algeria in 2011.

Mohand said she is worried that her daughter will be influenced by a teacher who wears the hijab at her school and decide to take up the practice. 

“Teachers must be neutral because children are impressionable,” Mohand said.

Ensaf Haidar, whose husband is the imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, said she is “shocked” when she sees Quebec women dressed in Muslim religious clothing given how they are treated in Saudi Arabia.

“The hijab is not a good image for Quebec,” said Haidar, who fled Saudi Arabia not long before her husband’s arrest in 2012.

Djaafar Bouchilaoun, an Algerian immigrant and father of two, told the court he considered the hijab an affront to his “dignity as a man” because it supposes men are sexual threats to women.

A teacher who wears a hijab, he said, is sending “subtle messages” to children. He called the hijab a “symbol of Islamist proselytizing,” adding: “It is pernicious because of it.”

The parents were called by two pro-secular groups — Mouvement laïque québécois and Pour les droits des femmes du Québec — who have intervenor status in the case. 

As part of their defence of the law, lawyers for Mouvement laïque québécois are arguing that rather than strip minorities of rights, Bill 21 upholds the rights of parents to have their children receive a secular education.

“This is a necessary condition for the freedom of conscience,” Guillaume Rousseau, a lawyer for the Mouvement, said in a recent interview.

‘[A] distinct feature of the current protests is the presence of very young women at the forefront. In many of the protests, women appear to outnumber men and do not seem afraid of being seen without hijab, even in the presence of security forces…

As evinced by the outburst of public indignation triggered by [Mahsa] Amini’s death, her case is not seen as an isolated incident but the visible tip of an iceberg of injustice, humiliation, indignity, and oppression routinely felt by countless Iranian women intercepted by the so-called guidance patrols charged with enforcing Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code: refusing to comply with state’s conception of “Islamic hijab” in public spaces is a criminal offense punishable by flogging, incarceration, or a fine…

More than four decades after the Islamic Republic embarked on the Sisyphean enterprise of bureaucratizing a very narrow definition of Islamic morality, with an almost obsessive focus on women’s appearance in public, mandatory hijab as well as the institutions set up to enforce it have failed veritably at forcing the state’s interpretation of “Islamic hijab” on Iranian women.

Instead, this encroachment on women’s liberty has gradually sown resentment in the hearts of millions of Iranian women and their families—resentment not only toward a dehumanizing law but also toward the state as a whole. Countless videos now course through social media showing the humiliating way Iranian police officers routinely manhandle women into vans before they are taken to detention centers to be “guided” and “educated.” Such encounters are at best stressful and patronizing, and at worst lethally brutal.

It is also counterproductive. In the face of such repression, women’s voluntary adherence to the state’s ideal hijab has not increased but drastically decreased over the last few decades, something even authorities openly acknowledge. Support for the hijab law and the morality police is even lower than the rates of public compliance…’

Sajjad Safaei, Foreign Policy

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Injustice, humiliation, indignity, and oppression: It’s important to think hard about the micro-phenomenology of all the heavy black coverups – of face and mouth and breast and head and hands – reserved for the world’s women.

Now, the Syracuse University pool-drapers (see this post) will say the following: We love God, and we know that the right way to humble ourselves before our loved one is to hide from men, because above all God asks that we do not allow our female sexuality to tempt man to sin.

We can point out all we like that there’s no scriptural warrant for self-demeaning behavior whose roots lie above all, obviously, in fear – a fear of exposure and engagement and visibility that must be instilled in women at a very young age. Hijabs are something you put on your eight-year-old.

Its roots lie also in repression and self-hatred — from a young age you regard yourself as a vessel of sin that must be put away. Any stray hair may lead an innocent man to perdition. You must police your hoods and robes constantly, as do the Iranian morality police, for the slightest betrayal of your atrocious allure. It is hard to think of anything more purely, more deeply, more thoroughly, more malignantly, misogynistic.

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Who can be surprised that Iran’s women have correctly identified the state’s “obsessive focus” on… the economy? education?… no – on the perverted and violent erasure of women – as intimately and unacceptably humiliating every single moment of their lives? Who can have failed to grasp the self-annihilating stupidity of a state that thinks tickling the dicks of morality boys is more important than statecraft? It was always a matter of time before the lascivious/homicidal energy against women implicit in Islamic Iran’s twisted founding principle destroyed enough women and girls to detonate a populace enraged by daily sexual degradation.

All of this makes the work of Western hijabis – who disseminate material like this to free women who might be persuadable to be unfree – much, much, harder. Good.

The West’s idiot fashion enthusiasm for the hijab is due for a takedown. Here’s one.

[P]eople in the West continued to regurgitate the Islamist propaganda, insisting to we who know better that wearing hijab is simply “an empowering choice.” … You continued to parade the hijab on the cover of your magazines and books as if it was nothing more than benign cultural dress…

You actively supported extremists who encouraged you to make child-size hijabs in the name of inclusion and diversity.

Endorsing hijab on children is endorsing child abuse and gender segregation. Those are not cultural values; those are toxic misogynist ideals.

Here’s another:

When I see non-Muslim western women donning a hijab in so-called solidarity with Muslim women, I wonder if they take into consideration the oppression of women in Iran. For many, the hijab has become an odd sort of feminist symbol, but they do not take into account that the majority of women in the Muslim world only wear a hijab when they are forced to do so.

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri issued two statements yesterday, one in praise of pro-hijab activists in India, and the other in praise of child bride legislators in Tennessee.

All praise to the noble veiling women of India who defy the law to assert their modesty!

All praise to the noble Tom Leatherwood who has freed the men of Tennessee to marry infant girls if that is their wish!

We are currently advising Brother Leatherwood on the framing, introduction, and passage of female genital removal legislation, for what man of piety would marry a baby with a clitoris?

On the same date as World Hijab Day, you can instead celebrate No Hijab Day, when you express solidarity with millions of women and children around the world desperate for freedom and autonomy.

When you give thought (and this Yale student is right to worry that you’re not giving thought) to your freedom not to veil, and, more importantly, to the ongoing withdrawal of that freedom for huge numbers of people in other countries, you are less likely to consider the hijab – and other marks of submission – something to celebrate. It’s something to tolerate, to be sure – but we do not set aside annual holidays to celebrate – and even wear! – that which we tolerate. Freedom is something to celebrate, and No Hijab Day celebrates it.

Free women and men of the secular west most recently had their say after the Council of Europe’s ill-fated attempt to foist a celebrate the hijab advertising campaign on them.

Reminding that women are free to wear the hijab is one thing,” [French] Socialist Senator Laurence Rossignol said, “but saying freedom is in hijab is another. It’s promoting it. Is this the role of the Council of Europe?”

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Gabriel Attal, [French] government spokesman, said after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the campaign defied common sense “because one shouldn’t confuse religious freedom with the de facto promotion of a religious symbol”. Such an “identitarian” approach was “contrary to the freedom of conscience that France supports in all European and international forums”, Attal said.

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Don’t celebrate women who force their eight year old daughters under hijabs. When you wear one, you’re saying that this is okay. Celebrate No Hijab Day.

This angry pointless diatribe about wearing a hijab does absolutely nothing to push the discussion along. But that’s because you have to acknowledge there’s a discussion to be had. You have to be willing to move away from neurasthenic victimology/finger-pointing and actually debate. You can’t debate when you snivel, and when you mischaracterize your opponent.

You can’t write, for instance, that a doctor described the hijab as an “instrument of oppression” when in fact he wrote that for adult women it is a perfectly acceptable personal choice. The doctor wrote that in several countries in the world the enforced hijab is an instrument of oppression – an obvious truth – and that since three year old girls have no choice at all in the matter it is objectionable when their parents make them wear it, as some do in Canada and various European countries. (Do some parents in the US do this to their children? Probably.)

The fact that you’re pissed off and exhausted because the world makes wearing hijabs and burkinis difficult and unpleasant is not an argument, and people will understandably read it and shrug. When you complain of Trudeau’s “very tepid” response to Quebec’s Bill 21, it only raises a question in your reader’s mind: Why? Why has Trudeau been tepid? Oh, because he’s a racist. He’s part of “an already intolerant country” which includes a “province even less tolerant.”

Well, babe, if Canada is an intolerant country I’d invite you to find a country more tolerant. Go ahead! Find a country more tolerant than a country that routinely lands on the top of World’s Most Tolerant Countries lists.

No, your problem is that you won’t ask even basic questions about escalating worldwide restrictions on various forms of covering. Until you calm down and start thinking rather than reacting you and your cause will really suffer.

… covering your girl child – girl infant – from the moment she pops out, in all her blasphemous sexiness – is big business around the world. The burgeoning popularity of female-blanketing means more and more stores in virtually every location are getting in on the trend. UD’s post title anticipates some product line names…

… And children’s songs… If you’re happy and hijabi clap your hands! If you’re…

Now we all know (if we read UD) that Quebec is in all kinds of trouble in the larger, uh, Canadian entity, because that province passed a law restricting public employees from wearing hijabs while on the job. We also know that everyone dumped on the French when their Senate passed a law (it went no further than the Senate) banning hijabs in public settings on people younger than eighteen. Yet when one of Canada’s most prominent pediatric physicians – the director of pediatric surgery at McGill – writes a shocked and angry response to a recent cover image on the Canadian Medical Association Journal, UD thinks it might be worth your while to read what he says.

“As a pediatric surgeon, I admit I would not typically have gravitated toward the excellent article in CMAJ by Drs. Bloch and Rozmovits if it wasn’t for the image that accompanied it — a picture of 2 girls, probably about 3 or 4 years old, reading together. One of them is covered in a hijab.

The image shocked and infuriated many. Yasmine Mohammed, a Vancouver activist who has championed equality for Muslim women, tweeted, “The cover of @CMAJ features a little girl in hijab. How disheartening to see my so-called liberal society condone something that is only happening in the most extremist of religious homes.” Another Muslim woman, a surgical trainee who wishes to remain anonymous, messaged me to express her horror at seeing the image, which triggered painful childhood memories of growing up in a fundamentalist Islamic society, where she was forced to wear the hijab from early childhood and taught that her body was desired by the opposite sex and should be covered. She later shared her perspective in a private conversation with the CMAJ interim editor-in-chief and publisher.

It has become “liberal” to see the hijab as a symbol of equity, diversity and inclusion. Out of the best intentions, the CMAJ editors probably chose this picture to accompany an article on the application of such principles in medical care.

I work in an urban tertiary academic children’s hospital embedded in an extremely multicultural environment. Many of my trainees, colleagues and patients’ parents (and some adolescent patients) wear the hijab. I respect each woman I interact with, as well as any woman’s choice to express her identity as she desires. Some women face harassment and discrimination for their choice to wear the hijab. That is real, and it is also wrong.

But respect does not alter the fact that the hijab, the niqab and the burka are also instruments of oppression for millions of girls and women around the world who are not allowed to make a choice. We are currently being reminded of this daily, as we see the tragic return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and its effect on the subjugation of women and girls. Girls as old as those in the picture are being sold into marriage to old men — institutionalized child rape. The mentality that allows this to happen shares much with the one that leads to covering up a toddler. But even in so-called moderate Islamic countries, such as the one I grew up in, societal pressures heavily marginalize women who choose not to wear the hijab. In addition, women in these countries who are not Muslim and do not wear the hijab are often subject to intense harassment and discrimination. I know that, because some of these women are in my family. I respect the women who see the hijab as liberating. But we must also remember the women and girls who find it oppressive and misogynistic.

Ironically, the article explores evaluating interventions to address social risks to health. A young girl such as the one depicted in the image is typically also banned from riding a bike, swimming or participating in other activities that characterize a healthy childhood. She is taught, directly or indirectly, from an early age that she is a sexual object, and it is her responsibility to hide her features from the opposite sex, lest she attract them. A heavy burden for modesty is placed squarely on her shoulders. So many women have been traumatized by such an upbringing, which, I believe, frankly borders on child abuse. Is that not a social risk to health? Are these children not a vulnerable population?”

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What will it take for you, and many other well-meaning people, acting “out of the best intentions,” to see what some subcultures are doing to their girls? Do you think that legitimizing bordering-on-child-abuse by featuring it on the covers of medical journals is a good idea?

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UPDATE: After complaints, the letter has been retracted, with cringing apologies from the editor, along with her pledge never again to trespass onto the truth. A commenter at Retraction Watch gets it said:

‘Could someone explain exactly what is so terrible about the author’s claim: “Some women face harassment and discrimination for their choice to wear the hijab. That is real, and it is also wrong. But respect does not alter the fact that the hijab, the niqab and the burka are also instruments of oppression for millions of girls and women around the world who are not allowed to make a choice.”

Is that such a fundamentally unreasonable statement? Is the author incorrect that the hijab, niqab, and burka have—for many girls and women—associations with oppression? I expect that for many people the hijab is a harmless symbol, or even a mere fashion statement—but can’t the same be said of the Confederate battle flag, which is certainly a symbol of oppression to many people?

To be clear, the author did not argue that women shouldn’t wear hijabs. In fact, he explicitly said women should be able to dress however they please without being subjected to discrimination or harassment. What the author argued is that showing a toddler in a hijab isn’t a good way to represent cultural diversity. Perhaps the author is wrong about that—but if he is, then isn’t the appropriate course of action to present a counterargument pointing out the flaws in the author’s statements? Instead we get a retraction and a generic, uninformative statement from the editor apologizing for hurt feelings.’

As in Europe (see my various posts below about the ill-fated, taxpayer-funded love the hijab campaign), so perhaps in not too long a time in America, we must prepare for training in the proper attitude toward women who cover themselves and their children.

Actually, America seems to be tolerating burqas (we’re one of fewer and fewer countries where they haven’t been outlawed) and hijabs quite well – incidents of intolerance/violence appear to be rare. We don’t have laws that permit some employers under some circumstances to keep their employees from wearing a hijab; we don’t have laws that ban hijabs in the public sector. You’ll see such laws in parts of Europe and Canada. Stories about European schools banning the hijab are rampant. Several Muslim countries have significant legal restrictions on burqas, niqabs, and hijabs.

Our need for training derives from two false perceptions:

1. Covered women are oppressed.
2. Covered women need “white saviors” to liberate them from their veils/oppression.

Hafsa Lodi explains that “Women who follow traditional guidelines of hijab keep their bodies and hair covered while in the presence of men who aren’t close kin, usually from the age of puberty.”

Is a pubescent girl a woman? The average age of puberty for girls is eleven. Is an eleven year old a woman? Some girls begin puberty at eight. Is an eight year old a woman? Do I feel comfortable concluding that parents who put their eight year old in face and body coverings are oppressive? You bet I do.

Lodi writes: “As a Muslim woman who doesn’t cover her hair, I have a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for young women who have the courage to commit to wearing the hijab. It takes guts and an impressively strong conviction of faith to cover your hair in a [looks-based] society.” Here is a person who admires the courage of ten-year-olds who wear the hijab because their parents mandate it. I think we must also conclude that she respects and admires parents who can look at their ten year old child (not their boy, of course; their girl) and swathe her, morning, noon, and night in clothes that tightly cover her head and body. Respects and admires parents who “deprive [their daughter] of her childhood.” We are to take moral instruction from this person.

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Do I think it’s twisted that some people think girls from eight to twelve years old (though to be sure plenty of parents put their five and six year old girls under hijabs) are such sexual threats to men that they have to be covered? Do I think that the understanding of herself such a child will adopt over time is twisted? Yes, and yes. Do I think that this form of upbringing is in any way preparing this girl for life in a liberal democracy? No.

I await my reeducation.

Yes. People really don’t take kindly to finding out that their taxes are paying for campaigns aimed squarely at the liberal values they cherish most.

Plus, there’s a major… er… branding problem with the hijab. Our global associations with it are routinely, completely ick.

[T]he campaign was more interested in promoting sexist modesty codes than upholding human rights or opposing anti-Muslim bigotry… While the campaign would have been in poor taste at any point in time – given that the hijab continues to be enforced upon millions of Muslim women around the world – for it to have come out as the Taliban’s gory gender segregation is endangering Afghan women’s lives is truly repugnant. The hijab is not ‘freedom’ for the women in Afghanistan being killed and threatened for defying Islamic mandates. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are tearing off clothes and even targeting women who do Fighting bigotry against Muslims is no excuse to endorse the hijab, derailing the everyday struggle of millions of women pushing back against religions hegemony in the Muslim world. Those designing the next Council of Europe ad campaign would be best advised to acknowledge that any religious mandated code for women, embraced by autocratic regimes, does not signify freedom.not wear the ‘right’ kind of hijab…

The hijab continues to be enforced on women across the Muslim world, even when it isn’t codified in law.

[And of course on girls: “[Indonesian] schools in more than 20 provinces still make religious attire mandatory in their dress code.”

“Many public schools require girls and female teachers to wear the hijab that too often prompt bullying, intimidation, social pressures, and in some cases, forced resignation.”…]

[I]n Afghanistan or Iran, … many risk imprisonment to defy the hijab’s imposition. It is little surprise that Iranian feminists, such as the Belgian Member of Parliament Darya Safai found the Council of Europe’s campaign, and its misrepresentation of hijab as a symbol of feminism, especially repulsive...

Fighting bigotry against Muslims is no excuse to endorse the hijab, derailing the everyday struggle of millions of women pushing back against religions hegemony in the Muslim world. Those designing the next Council of Europe ad campaign would be best advised to acknowledge that any religious mandated code for women, embraced by autocratic regimes, does not signify freedom.

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The reason the CoE launched a love the hijab campaign is that it knows millions of free, and struggling to be free, women hate it. Okay. But they had far better options than trying to make us love it. Here are two.

1. Do not launch a campaign of any kind. Do not go there. As with the burqa, so with the hijab: You have millions of fellow citizens upset in a suppressed way by modesty code women. Since these citizens value tolerance, they are willing to seethe, firmly direct their female children out of eyesight of this reactionary garb, and leave it at that. If you make a big deal out of it, forcing their eyes upon a problem they’ve been able to avoid looking at directly, you’re simply going to make a shaky latency powerfully manifest. What they’ve been hiding from themselves – they really find the hijab pretty dreadful – you yourself will blast out into the open. Drop the idea and make do with the uncomfortable peace secular women have forged with the hijab.

2. If you decide to try again, deal honestly and forthrightly with the hijab’s significant unpopularity with your audience. Do not mindlessly, mendaciously celebrate it and excitedly invite free women to join in the hoedown. Acknowledge that in real terms the hijab is irredeemable. It is not beautiful. It is not joyous. It is for much of your audience an off-putting statement of self-abnegation.

Okay, NOW write your ad campaign. The only real card you have to play is religious liberty. Not that the hijab is beautiful, or diverse, or elating – but that it is a mark of religious fervency, and we are bound as liberals to tolerate religious fervency. Don’t sex it up, in other words. You make yourself ridiculous when you try to make one of the world’s most powerful icons of sexlessness sexy.

I AM A MUSLIM. I EXPRESS MY LOVE AND OBEDIENCE TOWARD ALLAH THROUGH MY HIJAB. WHEN I WEAR MY HIJAB I FEEL CLOSE TO GOD. PLEASE UNDERSTAND THIS. Something of this sort will do.

Too tired even to say why you wear it, what it means, if it’s religious, why lots of people in secular countries have difficulty with it in certain settings… This writer is just too tired to do anything but lament her victimization by fools and bigots.

“It’s just a piece of cloth,” she writes, as if this vacuous statement settles the case. Clearly, for her and for others, it is far, far more than this. Look at the non-negotiable energy she brings to a mere bit of cloth. But she will not tell us what this enormous thing that the piece of cloth means is. If she would tell us, we could begin to talk.

It is part of who we are, the meaning it holds is for us. It is not intended as a symbol, protest, political expression or as a challenge to anyone else.

So it symbolizes for you nothing. Really? It is not a form of expression. Really? If the meaning it holds is for you, and if that meaning is non-problematic, why don’t you tell us what the meaning is? Obviously, a lot of secular people, citing your religion, take it to mean that God is displeased by women who do not hide themselves from men. Women, be modest! It is a modesty mandate, no? If that is not its meaning for you, you should let us know. Because everything we have come to understand about Muslim women covering themselves comes down to it being a response to a religious commandment to hide yourself from the sight of men. It says I am a chaste, modest woman. It is purity garb.

This submission to a religious mandate that reduces your visibility in the world of women and men speaks volumes to many secular women and men; it says that women are lesser beings, hopelessly seductive beings, defined by their seductive physicality that leads men astray. Your hijab says that we must put the welfare and freedom of men before that of women; for we can imagine a fairer, more logical, more egalitarian religion which mandates, let’s say, blinders for men lest they be led astray by their lusts, for after all they are their lusts. But you represent a less egalitarian religion, which says women bear responsibility for the reaction of men to them, and must be the ones who swathe themselves to remove their powers of seduction.

So take up every point in the above; if it is grossly mistaken, say so, and correct it.

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Secular states often prefer, in the public and work setting, religious neutrality.

So what is neutrality? There is no objective answer because even deciding on what constitutes neutrality is by definition a non-neutral act.

No, religious neutrality is exactly what it says it is — Non-expressiveness in regard to any religion. No overt religious markers. There’s nothing relative here; it’s quite absolute. Unlike religious states, secular states are neutral in regard to religion, which means that all religious citizens of secular states may be subject to the same constraint on the wearing of religious clothing, jewelry, what have you. Of course in fact in most secular states, in most settings, no constraints on the wearing of religious items exists at all; but increasingly some of these places have been introducing some constraints.

We can certainly talk about why burqa bans and hijab restrictions are beginning to appear, but only if we can stipulate that the reasons involve something more complex than Islamophobia. I think that the burqa bans are pretty straightforward: There are obvious security issues; the entire shielding of the face and mouth constitutes a refusal to enter into the civic realm as an open, free, and equal individual; in educational settings, the burqa seriously impedes learning; to put a six year old child in a burqa is to impose radical invisibility and constraint on someone without any agency in the matter, etc. In the case of the hijab, it seems clear that its values of female fear of the male, or at least insistence on accommodating male lust and subsequent shrinking from full and equal physical presence in the world offends significant enough numbers of modern secular men and women that some real and negative consequences may ensue for commercial settings. Offended people may take their patronage elsewhere.

Let us by all means discuss whether these are contemptible responses to the primary Islamic meaning of the hijab, unworthy of the sort of judgment the EU court just handed down. One could argue that one ought not be upset at one’s six year old daughter seeing another six year old girl entirely covered in cloth; or one could argue that one is free to be upset, but not free to refuse to enter a store/restaurant where that little girl is playing behind the counter. You are living in a free country where people may freely express their belief about modesty and six year old girls; your task as a citizen of such a country is to tolerate this parental behavior.

But of course people are going to do what they want. Secular people might well – legitimately – care deeply about the formation of their female children into free and equal citizens of secular republics; they might legitimately regard visible female unfreedom as threatening to that formation. One might indeed begin to see a sort of boycott of spaces where the sight of unfree children and women is routine – a situation that the EU court is clearly responding to in its judgment.

It is not Islam, and it is not religion generally, to which these people are responding so negatively, I would argue. It is simply the sight of significantly unfree and unequal women and children that offends.

“While people with liberal values are highly tolerant of Muslims, such values are not predictive of support for the headscarf.” [Marc] Helbling hypothesizes this is because “people with liberal values are tolerant of immigrants in general but feel torn when it comes to religious practices that are perceived by some people as reflecting illiberal values.”

Again – by all means insist that hijabs are empowering and we seculars are getting it wrong, wrong, wrong. But realize that in making this claim you have a very high mountain to climb.

For the first installment of UD’s attempt to be reasonably self-aware about the fact that she’s a liberal, go here, and be sure to read the comments, which include a lengthy give and take between me and my old friend Rita Koganzon.

It’s clear from this blog’s long preoccupation with the genital mutilation of children, enforced veiling, enforced sex segregation, child marriage, various forms of erasure of women and images of women from the public realm, etc., etc., that an absolutely crucial liberal value, for UD, is gender equality.

One of her boyfriends at Northwestern University was an Iranian, from an extremely poor family, who scored so well on a national exam that he got one of the Shah’s special fellowships to study engineering at an American university.

His mother, he told me, was literally taken from playing with her dolls and married off to a man in his thirties. She was if I remember correctly nine years old.

Her husband’s sister could not have children, so this woman’s first child – she must have given birth at twelve or something – was simply taken from her and given to the sister.

I don’t remember the rest of her life story, but I remember my hopelessly naive shock at this tale, my hopeless effort to imagine this woman’s life in all its horror; and this of course was an early lesson for UD in the difference between liberal and non-liberal cultures. (Forget rule of law: “[T]here is no specific age limit for marriage in Iran and marriage is possible at any age.”) Culture (FGM) and religion (all the other stuff; including, in plenty of settings, FGM) continue, all over the world, to subject women to unspeakable cruelty as a routine part of life. We ignore most of it, since it’s so huge, but our attention will certainly be riveted to it at least for a little while as the Taliban begin reinterring Afghan women and girls.

And to be clear: None of this is to deny what Jordan Peterson rightly goes on about: Men have shitty lives too. We all have shitty lives, if you like – as Adam Gopnik, in his discussion of liberalism, points out:

If we got the best government imaginable, with national health care and with actually fair voting democratic voting procedures — we abolished the electoral college and Roe v. Wade was saved — we still would be stuck with the fact of mortality, with the misery of human life, with our inability to get everything we want.

Human life has a deep, deep sadness and the liberal project of reform can seem fatuous compared with the full enormity of human suffering and human unhappiness. That’s not a trivial observation; that’s deep in the richest kind of conservative political philosophy.

More tersely, there’s Adam Phillips:

The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery.

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Now in all of this, one iteration of liberal culture has it that FGM etc is none of our business – that it is indeed one of the crowning glories of liberalism that our tolerance/moral relativism finds ways to normalize these behaviors. FGM is only a nick …no one will marry you if you’re not… nicked… It’s been part of these cultures forever… To be a liberal after all is to be neutral in regard to what constitutes a good life… Only a moral absolutist would judge, let alone militate against, FGM and assorted other women-only treats…

Yet — put aside the obvious cruelty of the FGM procedure – a cruelty to which you’d think morally serious people – and certainly liberals – would respond — wouldn’t you think that since equality is one of the primary liberal virtues, liberals would judge FGM to be, well, wrong?

Or recall my many posts in 2013 about the decision of the governing body of British universities that gender segregation at university events was fine. In the language of the Muslim student groups who held such events, the Sisters could sit in the back, behind a curtain, and be quiet, while the Brothers could sit in the front and make comments.

Another eminently admirable liberal decision, based on respect for diverse ways of life.

Only right away something interesting happened. This wasn’t some far-away degradation, like FGM or child marriage; this was happening next door to my residence hall! I could SEE this – could see women obediently walking through side doors marked BLACKS ONLY I mean WOMEN ONLY… And a HUGE fuss ensued and the liberally enlightened governing body first tried condescendingly lecturing people on their benighted colonialist myopic evil until absolutely everyone starting with the prime minister came down on them like a ton of bricks and they suddenly announced uh no we meant gender segregation at university events is unlawful.

So… liberalism seems to mean standing your ground when your national liberal values are directly attacked, which is great, only UD recognizes her liberalism as equally international in orientation, which means that unlike some people she thinks there are universal non-negotiable human rights/values, and that it’s perfectly okay – even commendable – to be appalled at – call them militant and even vicious illiberalisms – around the world, and to speak and act against them.

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So now let’s return to the story of the day – the EU court’s decision that under conditions of strict across the board religious neutrality, banning the hijab from the workplace might be okay. Might be. This decision is subject to all sorts of local review and approval. But that was the decision; and obviously the broader context is that one liberal European country after another is in various ways restricting the burqa and the hijab, and lots of other in no way liberal countries are also restricting various forms of female Islamic covering.

Clearly, banning certain religious forms of dress is far more questionable than banning sex segregation at university events. The latter takes a stand on behalf of gender equality in a context where such equality is obviously flouted; the former looks like illiberal bigotry against innocuous self-expression. (Marine Le Pen has called for a total ban on the hijab.) Liberal societies enshrine freedom of religion, and only an illiberal person would favor restrictions on religious symbols and apparel.

A practical problem has arisen, however. Some businesses are suffering serious losses, as people who object to the illiberal values of burqas and hijabs vote with their feet and take their business elsewhere. Are these people bigots?

Only some of them. I think some of them aren’t. Consider a woman who doesn’t want her five year old daughter to spend all day every day in the child care center with a woman whose clothing (hijab; loose full-body robe) broadcasts her deep conviction that the public relationship of women and men must be one in which women hide themselves from men; that the proper public posture of women is extreme modesty; that God wants women to hide their bodies. Having grown up in a liberal, secular, culture, this woman wants her daughter to develop in the exact opposite direction: Bold open bodily – and every other form of – self-expression in a context of absolute equality with, and non-fear of, men. (When interviewed, veiled women often talk about how they feel less subject to male harassment – they seem to see sexual harassment as hard-wired in men – when covered.)

I can easily imagine that this woman would without a second thought vote for Muslim-background political candidates, have more assimilated Muslim friends, have no objections to the core Muslim creed, etc. But the profound gender inequality of female veiling (the whole issue would be much more interesting if Muslim men also veiled) is for her a bridge too far; it offends precisely the liberal values she cherishes. It overrides the liberal value of tolerance in this situation because it threatens to have a direct effect on the liberal formation of her child. As Ronan McCrea notes, “Most mainstream religions have teachings on matters such as gender and sexuality that people can legitimately find offensive.” To their liberal values. In a certain setting.