And the West’s scandal was the plunging neckline.
To be semi-fair, in at least some Islamic regimes the accepted covering need not be more than a ceremonial piece of gauzy cloth. (The queen of Jordan was wearing one in that photo-op where Pope Francis ceremonially bowed to her.) It’s a symbolic religious gesture. That doesn’t make the “Allah” of fanatical Islam any better of course. But it means he hasn’t gotten quite all the final say yet.
It bothers me to see women in America wearing the hijab. I call it the flag of Islam because everytime you see a woman wearing one, it is like saying, “Islam is in your country”. I believe that the Islamists put so much importance on the hijab because they use it as a means to control their own women and also as a form of terrorist warfare since the wearing of the hijab allows Islamists to instantly tell which women are Muslim and which are not. This leaves nonMuslim women as easy targets for rape and abuse. Even a Muslim mullah in Australia did a sermon in which he compared women who did not cover their heads as uncovered meat. If meat is uncovered you cannot blame the cat if he eats it. In other words women who do not cover their heads are “asking for it”. This is rape as a form of warfare.
To be even more semi-fair, most Orthodox Jewish groups have similar strictures about a woman’s hair.