Of course, we have examples of “honor killings,” such as those of Amina and Sarah Said, murdered for, among other things, not wearing the hijab, and many other killings of Muslim girls for being “too Westernized,” which includes, of course, not wearing the hijab. And Mogahed’s phrase about wearing a hijab “if a family member requires it” is deliberately too strong, for a family member may have strongly advised it, may have applied great pressure on a girl to wear it, but not literally “required” it. These are different things.
Furthermore, girls need not have been forced to wear a hijab only by a family member; there are other possibilities — the immense pressure of a close-knit Muslim community, of neighbors, friends, clerics — that can explain why a girl might wear a hijab “out of piety.” Does that pressure, if no family member is involved, not matter? And if such widespread pressure should be taken into account, can we still pretend that a girl’s wearing of the hijab is a matter of free choice?
Rather than pity, Muslim American women need respect even when their choices don’t conform to the dominant culture’s idea of what liberation is supposed to look like.
Does Dalia Mogahed respect those 60 percent of Muslim American women who do not wear the hijab? Why do I suspect she doesn’t, but considers them sellouts “to the dominant culture”? And why do Muslim American women “need respect” from Infidels if they have made the islamically correct decision to wear the hijab? Why should they care what Infidels — “the most vile of creatures” (Qur’an 98.6) — think of Muslims, who are the “best of peoples” (3.110)? Dalia Mogahed surely knows those verses. Doesn’t she believe them? Isn’t she a good Muslim?
Writing their dissenting opinion in the travel ban case, Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg maintained that “a reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.” They also said the decision turns “a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens.”
The majority of the Supreme Court, that upheld the President’s Proclamation, were not “reasonable observers” in the view of Sotomayor and Ginsburg, because that majority failed to understand that anti-Muslim animus must have motivated the Proclamation. The five justices who did not think that anti-Islam animus was behind the Proclamation were willing to respect, unlike their colleagues in the minority, the government’s stated reason for its “travel ban” — that in those seven countries covered by the ban, the governments had provided insufficient information about their citizens to the American government, information it needed for security purposes. In some cases, apparently, they failed to provide it because they lacked such information themselves. Two of the seven countries, Venezuela and North Korea, are both non-Muslim. And if this measure, about withholding or granting visas, was supposedly prompted by anti-Muslim animus, why were less than 5% of the world’s Muslims included in the ban? Why did Trump include only five of the 57 members of the O.I.C.?
And many of those suffering [from the Proclamation, and thus unable to obtain visas for America] are women — women actually in need of saving.
This is confusing. Why would women be “suffering” from the Proclamation any more than men? Could it be because they have a more difficult time in Muslim countries than men, and seek the equality, in both law and custom, that America offers? If Islam is not “misogynistic,” but, according to Mogahed, only “allegedly” so, why will those Muslim women who are prevented from getting a visa by Trump’s Proclamation, “actually [be] in need of saving”? This is a “saving” made possible by granting them a visa that allows them into America. Why would they need “saving” if they are living in Islamic countries, where they can wear the hijab or niqab, and be Muslim women to their heart’s content? Where there is no “misogyny” but only “allegedly” misogyny, and where no “white woman” will comment condescendingly on their wearing the hijab? Please, Dalia Mogahed, explain to us why Muslim women might have a particularly hard time of it, in Islamic countries, and need to be “saved” by being allowed into the United States? And tell us, again, why Muslim women “need the respect” of those the Qur’an teaches them to despise?