'Let there be no compulsion in religion'
Qur'an 2:256
When I see a girl in a burka, or a veil or a headscarf I have to admit I feel a slight sense of melancholy. Yes it’s a free country and people should be free to wear what they want, within reason, but to me it just smacks of misogyny and repression. Equally I am sure that there are many people who feel depressed at the sight of a girl in a boob tube and mini skirt.
On the face of it both girls would appear to have exercised their own free will in choosing what clothes they wear. When a girl wears a headscarf she does so because she thinks that she is honouring a God (albeit one that quite simply does not exist). When a girl wears a mini skirt she does it because she feels that is what she needs to look and attractive and, um, get laid. On the face of it they are both rational choices. If we accept that I am wrong and one billion are right about the existence of Allah then the girl in the headscarf will end up in paradise. Equally the girl in the mini skirt will, well, I’ll leave that to your imagination. So on the face of it both girls are exercising their own free will.
Yet there is one important rider. The girl in the mini skirt is likely to have been heavily influenced by peer pressure but if she chose to wear something more conservative then she would not come to harm. The girl in the burka will also have been influenced by cultural pressures but more than likely she would not be able to exercise her own free will and wear something else. In Saudi Arabia and Iran ‘immodestly’ dressed girls are arrested and sometimes flogged. Of course there are no religious police in the UK but many of the burka clad girls in the UK are likely to live within a culture that threatens violence if she chose to dress ‘immodestly’. If you don’t believe me then you really need to research ‘Honour’ killings in the UK. For me the burka is the sign of the repression of women through fear, intimidation and the imposition of a narrow world view.
Of course millions of girls are happy to wear a headscarf and do so without fear of earthly punishment. Yet they do so because they have been influenced by a meme which tells them that this will bring them closer to God. The girl that dresses in the mini-skirt ultimately does so in order to achieve personal gratification. One sartorial choice displays submission to a supposed higher being while the other shows relative independence of mind and, very, very controversially, greater dignity.
The bottom line is that everyone should be free to wear whatever makes them happy personally; but they must be given full cultural, philosophical and religious freedom to make that choice.
