Women's Place In Islam

"The emancipation of women is Westernization; both for traditional conservatives and radical fundamentalists it is neither necessary nor useful but noxious, a betrayal of true Islamic values. It must be kept from entering the body of Islam, and where it has already entered, it must be ruthlessly excised."
Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response

When the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan any woman who refused to wear a burqa could expect to be taken to a public exhibition area and lashed. Any woman who was a widow and had no way to pay for the necessities of life for her children could anticipate slowly perishing, since women were not permitted to work outside their homes. Any girl who anticipated she might attend school was abused of that fanciful notion.

Now that the Taliban are no longer in power, but edgily planning to return as soon as the interfering foreign interlopers depart come 2014, women in Afghanistan, free to dress as they will, under the present government of President Hamid Karzai, still dress in confining, stifling burqas. It is expected of women to comport themselves in this manner, meekly, modestly, accepting. Even while girls are now educated in schools spared Taliban assaults and even while women are forging careers.

In Egypt where once burqa-wearing women were as frequently seen as Japanese women in traditional kimono in downtown Tokyo, more women than ever wear head-to-toe, eye-revealing-only covering. In a part of the world where all-consuming dry heat of the desert is stifling and pervasive. Where Kamal Ataturk entirely revised Turkish politics and society toward equality and headscarves were forbidden in universities, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his veil-wearing wife have newly popularized Islamist garb.

The freedom of Western women to wear comfortable clothing and in warm weather body-revealing fashions as well, the appearance is at one and the same time anathema and alluring to the minds of Muslim men schooled in the wisdom of promiscuity among women who are careless of their garb and the passions they arouse in men incapable of commanding their own bodily responses.

Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood lived with his wife in the United States for many years and attended university there, where his wife maintained the Islamic style of traditional veiled modesty. The Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, credited as the father of Islamist terrorism, detested the immodesty of American women whom he came across as a university student in the U.S.

Their "thirsty lips, bulging breasts, smooth legs", were abominations. He denounced "that animal freedom which is called permissiveness, that slave market dubbed 'women's liberation'". And as fanatical Islamism began to dominate the Muslim conversation women became ever more enslaved to a culture that insisted women's place was in the home, raising children, prepared to submit to her husband's sexual demands at a moment's notice.