Barbie covers up
العروسة باربي تغطي وجهها
أرشيفي ينعش ذاكرتي
Oslo, 4 July 2009
When men are oppressed by the government, they vent their frustration by oppressing women in turn.
Modern woman has, in theory, come far in her emancipation: women hold office in the ministries of the interior and defence, in intelligence, diplomacy, justice, and also among the staff of the International Court of Justice and the UN. And yet, in reality, our women are no different to a Barbie doll whose owners are still deciding what she should wear, how long or short her clothes should be, how tight or loose, what material and what colour. When we talk about women, the conversation makes half our brains stop working. But some women prefer to send their entire brain off on a full, all-inclusive holiday.
Religion can be a matter of awareness, questioning, reason, intelligence and knowledge. The nineteenth century women’s rights activist Qasim Amin defended the values of Islam in one of the best books he ever wrote, The Egyptians, and liberal religious scholar Imam Muhammad Abduh once issued a fatwa that married religion and intellect. If you read the books of Mahmud Shaltut, Malik Ben Nabi Mohammed Asad, Rojer Garaudy, Murad Hoffman, Vincent Monteil and Ahmed Subhi Mansour, you won’t have a single doubt that Islam is a message from God and that it is a logical message.
But religion can also be the opium of the masses: a hallucinatory, sacred drug which brings its users into a headlong clash with logic and reason in blind support of their tyrants. It can be a jailor to lock up freedoms and throw away the key. This is where those who emphasise chastity come in. They are the true enemies of free woman; they are the enemies of her very humanity. They prefer to bury women alive in as many different ways as they can think of. Making women cover their faces and hands in veils and gloves is the biggest attempt to con modern-day Eve out of her dignity and ridicule her humanity. It distorts the interpretation of the Quranic verse in a way that isn’t far off forgery: it’s a brazen conspiracy to put words in the proverbial mouth of God.
You can love God, worship Him and learn from his Holy Book values such as benevolence, tolerance, beauty, love, liberty, equality and justice. Or you can search for what you erroneously believe to be the word of God and you will find racism, fanaticism, killing, murder, injustice, sectarianism, hate and arrogance. You could try to bring yourself closer to God by blowing yourself up in a kindergarten.
You can read this article and feel that women must be honoured and dignified by allowing them to show their faces, or you can wave your clenched fist in the air to threaten and abuse the writer using words always used by the neo-fanatics who always irritate me with their poor command of the Arabic language.
You can breathe in the sweet smell of courage from religion. Or you can resort to cowardice, finding refuge in certain interpretations you have heard quoted by what seems to you a voice of reason, but may well be as illogical and unreasonable as it comes. We see countless guests appearing on TV rattling on like headless chickens, or as if in place of their heads there were fossilised rocks thousands of years old. Regardless of the utter rubbish they spout, their followers are multiplying like rabbits.
Forcing women to cover up is a barefaced conspiracy against Muslim women because it negates any form of emotional communication for the female, who is God’s creation just as man is. The face is home to all our expressions of feeling. This is where we express our love, hate, scorn, anger, pride, naivety, stupidity, resistance, faith, disbelief, denial, joy, happiness, sadness, wretchedness, satisfaction… and deprivation.
God created the face for it to be a mirror to what is going on inside us. It blushes when we feel shy, turns pale when we feel sick. Our faces are an indicator of our emotional health. So many things can be told from the face, including our ethnic background and community, and it’s the intrigue stemming from our idiosyncrasies that makes us want to get to know each other. It doesn’t make sense to have one half of society hidden from the other.
Nothing is easier to understand than a simple line or verse from Quran, too clear to need interpreting and reading between the lines. God didn’t say a Muslim woman should cover her entire face. He said, “Tell your wives, your daughters and the women among the faithful to make their outer garments hang low over them.” The order to do so came directly from God and is clear beyond any doubt from now till Judgement Day. It is clear in the same way that it is forbidden to drink wine, eat pork, give a false testimony or kill people unjustly.
In my generation, we would regularly see the faces of our relatives, neighbours, colleagues, TV presenters… everywhere we looked we saw women’s faces. This is what natural life is all about and it cannot be natural to live without that kind of communication, without forging relationships with female colleagues, relatives or family relations. Like all young men, we spent our tender teenage years coming to terms with our bodies and the feeling of arousal. We all experienced the tribulations of puberty, but we grew out of it. No normal adult ever experienced wild lust and constant arousal just because he was able to see a woman’s face day or night.
That was once. Then those maniac clerics arrived on the scene to preach about sexual piety and their confused, pornographic interpretations of religion. Since then, they have worn us down with their mania and misguidance. They have reduced the entire religion to a treatise about sexual attraction and a prudish warning about its dangers, to protect poor, vulnerable men from the other half of society – supposedly their partners in taking care of Earth. These delirious theologians have established an unbreakable link between her face and his loins.
I once heard about a female doctor who called a Sheikh to ask him whether God would be angry with her for making the opening of her niqab, her face covering, big enough for her to wear glasses, as she couldn’t see well when she was trying to help her patients. All her education, her intellect and her faith in God’s mercy amounted to nothing – it couldn’t help her use her own mind. She buried all that when she put on a mummy’s head in place of her own – the empty head of someone who died a thousand years ago.
This mummified shell of a woman is no different from any girl who chooses freely to respond to the new “guardians of virtue” who know very well that the purpose of their stupid campaign is to spread a new culture of burying women alive behind the veil, while allowing male vice free rein. It is a device intended for good and evil to mix freely, but not fairly, letting men cheat on their wives without anyone knowing the identity of the woman walking by his side. They, in return, turn a blind eye to the corruption in the country.
I know that a transparent and honest conversation about this subject makes the “neo-maniacs” furious. But, whether deliberately or coincidentally, they are helping to encourage behaviour like being unfaithful, corruption, terrorism and sexual harassment.
Islam does not favour secret marriages. Every person in the neighbourhood, village or surrounding area must be made aware that a couple have been married. Religion was supposed to make it impossible for people to try to promote corruption, and that should include their rabid desire to cover a woman’s face. Ministries of the interior are busy protecting people (or the men in charge) from danger, yet there is little they can do if they are blind to the two greatest miracles given to us by God: our fingers with their prints and our faces with their unique features.
There must be thousands of terrorists, criminals, sex offenders, fugitives and unfaithful people hiding behind face-covering veils. They make a mockery of our religion, our countries, our way of thinking, while we stand by like gawking idiots. We let our tyrannical leaders abuse us in any way they choose, yet there are more ways for us to be more abused by those sexually rabid men who want to bury women alive.
I will say it over and over that hiding a woman’s face behind a cover is abhorrent to God. Those who believe in God must stop to consider His great power when it comes to the universe, human intellect, thinking and reason. They must ask themselves how much they truly believe in God. They need to liberate themselves from the pollution of the mind that has spread over the past twenty years like a pest devouring green pastures and leaving nothing behind it, not even common sense.
Since the army of sexual fanatic sheikhs invaded our lands, we are being pushed further and further backwards towards the Middle Ages. Every year we regress another decade and every decade we regress an entire century. The values they promote are the same ones the Quran warn us against, highlighting deplorable pagan behaviour: “When one of them is given news of the birth of a baby girl, his face darkens and he is filled with gloom.”
Freedom, democracy, benevolence, activism, human rights, labour, discipline, sound management, honesty, culture, research, child protection, protecting intellectuals – all these noble values are given short shrift in their system.
I am calling all free, liberal and honest Arab intellectuals to ask themselves: isn’t it about time to take things into their own hands to expose these smutty thinkers? We need to put a stop to this in the same way that we need to stop the brutality of our tyrants and their “heirs” who think they own us.
Those who say that the face of a woman makes men lustful and that the body of a man gets aroused when he sees a woman’s face are sick and abnormal. We should fear for our children when they are around and for our women too, even if they are cloaked in seventy black tents!
Let’s also not forget that the first thing God will ask a woman about on Judgement Day is her mind and how she used it.
I don’t doubt that there is a place for modesty when it comes to women’s dress and appearance. The issue I am trying to raise is how to elevate faith and how religion is understood. We should think about God’s miracle when it comes to fingers and faces, identity and fingerprints. This is a matter of human identity and identity has a role to play in the security of society.
Is a woman who covers her face protecting a sick man from himself or protecting herself from his lewd imagination? I challenge all the sheikhs with their sadistic view of the world to issue a statement, whether independently or jointly, to condemn the dictatorship, the tyranny, the rigged elections and the corruption that is so deeply rooted in our regimes. I urge them to demand the release of detainees and prisoners of conscience, to condemn the assumption that the sons of presidents should be heirs to the thrones of their fathers. I want them to say that Islam is against the president extending his tenure for more than two terms.
Can they organise a campaign against drugs and fraud? Would they stand up against the police using thugs and dangerous former convicts to terrorise honest civilians and opponents of the regime? I don’t think they want to do that. Their battle is focused on sex and sex alone. Their minds can’t grasp anything beyond terrorising women and threatening them with the torments of hellfire if they don’t respond to their husbands at any time of day, whenever he wants a release. They’re too busy warning a female Muslim doctor that God Almighty will be smite her with His fury when Doomsday comes because she made the gaps for her eyes on her face cover wider to see her patients more clearly.
They speak about free choice. If the women of society choose to cover their faces, why aren’t they allowing those who don’t want to cover their faces to show theirs? This freedom is a means to an ugly end. It’s the freedom to create a psychotic society.
What about the freedom of a person to see the face of those whom he/she is talking to at work, in school, in a hospital, at a public institution, at demonstrations, in a factory and at the market? But it’s not about freedom: it’s about male preferences and fears.
I read an article once about sexual attraction that asked which was more alluring: fingers or toes? The author reached the conclusion that it’s the fingers of women that make men feel most aroused.
How low and hard we have fallen! How backward we have become! Now we think with our loins and surrender our souls to the tyrants ruling over us. We have allowed a bunch of mentally ill men to tell us what to do when it comes to religion, science, education, culture and media.
The first step towards good faith in God starts here. Our Barbie doll women are obediently covering their faces and their minds. But it cannot be long until the empire of the fanatical, sex-obsessed sheikhs will fall. Then all the other false idols of the palace of tyranny will fall, too. The words tyranny and reason can’t be put together in the same sentence. Despots and dignity don’t go together.
It starts here. With the acceptance and faith that God is great. God is not a spectator watching a football match, rooting for the Muslim team and helping the midfielders penetrate the field all the way up to the goal for the Muslim to score. Then the Muslim bows to God to thank Him for endowing him with such footballing prowess. No. God is bigger than that. God is also greater than needing women to wrap themselves up before they can come closer to him. He’s greater than all the other thousands of false allegations and claims that we think came directly from the creator of the universe. These are nothing more than the misguided directions of a corrupt government’s maniacal clerics.
It starts here. With renewing our faith in God in a way that makes us rediscover His greatness, His might, His forgiveness, His benevolence, His love, His mercy. Then and only then will we realise that we were worshipping the false idol of the neo-fanatics.
محمد عبد المجيد
طائر الشمال
عضو اتحاد الصحفيين النرويجيين
أوسلو النرويج
Journalist/ Mohammad Abdelmaguid
Taeralshmal
Oslo Norway
أرشيفي ينعش ذاكرتي
