Another angle on Muslim sexual inequality

A correspondent writes:

Yesterday TV was showing how Iraqis especially in Baghdad have very poor electricity service. They can’t even count on electric fans, let alone air conditioning. Yet in that heat, 120 degrees I believe, the women still go around in black robes and headscarf. A woman and her husband were shown sitting together. He was dressed in light Western style clothes, short sleeved open neck cottony shirt and slacks, light colored. She was fanning herself with a little hand fan, and complaining of how she was suffering with the heat, yet still wearing her black robe and scarf. I think the scarf was light colored; perhaps that is their version of a sleeveless dress. But do you think anyone is putting two and two together? What kind of society with that kind of heat still demands that women dress in that fashion—and no doubt the women themselves have internalized the demand for one reason or another—simply because hundreds of years ago Muhammad got a hard on looking at his nephew’s wife in her nightie? Do you think any of our modern feminists who made the panty girdle the equivalent of the chastity belt chafe at seeing those robed women walking around in misery in the 120 degree desert heat? Especially since the men are allowed to dress reasonably? Perhaps they do but they bite their tongue because of multiculturalism and not wanting to make our society seem superior in any way. (BTW, the robes and scarves are appearing on American streets as well.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 18, 2005 12:15 PM | Send