#Argen noor free

after she had seen a news item in which a New Zealand Muslim woman said she was now afraid to go outside in her hijab.Īshman, apart from being a doctor, is also a vicar’s wife and occasional preacher.

The suggestion, however, came from Dr Thaya Ashman of Auckland. The New Zealand Muslim Association and the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand promoted the idea that non-Muslim New Zealanders should ‘stand with’ New Zealand’s Muslims by covering their hair. ‘We have women in jail and dead, for refusing the interpretation of Islam you promote.’ ‘It is a symbol of purity culture antithetical to feminist values,’ the Muslim reform campaigner Asra Nomani tweeted at Ardern on Friday. Especially if she is a self-professed feminist. If an elected female prime minister chooses to signal her virtue by wearing a hijab outside a Muslim prayer space, she will appear to be endorsing the hijab as the official and correct public costume of Muslim women, regardless of what they might think, and regardless of what it costs them. In the liberal democratic states into which large numbers of Muslims have recently immigrated, the hijab is second only to the niqab, the face cover, as a symbol of the subjugation of women, and the political assertion of Islam in secular societies.

#Argen noor free

Where the hijab is the marker of Muslim female identity, women are subjugated to custom over free expression, to discriminatory clerical law over equality before secular law, and to male authority over a woman’s right to choose. In Muslim-majority societies where family honor is everything, the presence of the hijab is a barometer of the status of women. But there is nothing simple about a scarf in this context. On Friday, Gamal Fouda thanked Ardern and the non-Muslim women for ‘honoring us with a simple scarf’. ‘In my simple worldview, if you believe in equality, you should be a feminist,’ Ardern wrote in 2015. But the message sent by her hijab, and those of the other non-Muslim women, is politically confused - and an admission of unconscious bigotry. It is good that Ardern has ‘stood with’ New Zealand’s Muslims in a display of simple decency. They are panic reactions, seeking political gain or shelter from as-yet hypothetical consequences.

These are not the reactions of thoughtful leaders. So was the downright ridiculous response of Whitcoull’s, a New Zealand bookstore chain, to ban Jordan Peterson’s self-help manuals. So was the foolishly repressive banning of the shooter’s ‘manifesto’ by the New Zealand censor, presumably under pressure from Ardern’s Labour party. So was the unfounded claim from Gamal Fouda, imam of the Al Noor mosque, that the massacre was ‘the result of the anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim rhetoric by some political leaders, some media agencies, and others’. So was broadcasting the call to prayer over state television and radio. They did this voluntarily - to express fellow feeling, rather than to avoid arousing Muslim men.Īrdern’s choice of headwear was a political statement.

They were not in the gender-segregated prayer area reserved for women, where covering their hair would have been politely insisted upon, and courtesy would have required compliance. When New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern observed Friday prayers in the park outside the mosque, she and many other non-Muslim women wore a hijab. What is alarming is the form the reaction has taken. Inspiring because, faced with a group of mostly recent arrivals who constitute a mere 1 percent of New Zealand’s population, the other 99 percent have chosen not to ignore their loss and distress, but to commiserate and console at a time when liberal democracies are beset by factional resentments. The reaction of New Zealand’s vast non-Muslim majority to the terrorist attack at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch is both inspiring and alarming.