Start early
Baher Ibrahim notes that making little girls bandage their heads is creepy and stupid.
In general, the age at which Muslim girls in Egypt begin to wear the scarf has dropped. Back when I was in high school, very few female students wore headscarves. Today, my younger brother (who is 15) tells me that almost all the girls in his middle school wear a scarf. It hasn’t stopped there either, having caught on in primary schools.
Which of course means that it’s almost impossible for female students in middle school not to wear the bandages. (That thing is not a scarf.) Primary schools will end up in the same place.
Some suggest that I am overanalysing, and that the reason parents like their little girls to don the scarf is simply so they can “get used to doing the right thing from a young age”. They compare it to how Muslim parents teach their children to fast until noon during Ramadan so that when they are older it won’t be so hard to fast until sunset, or how fathers take their kids to the mosque on Fridays to get them used to it. We all know how hard it is to kick habits we were taught in early childhood. Getting a little girl “used to” the hijab effectively obliterates the “free choice” element by the time the girl is old enough to think.
They’re being trained and conditioned, in short. They’re being trained to Submit.
To make matters worse, what about the brothers of these girls? Will they not grow up with the same mentality? If they see that their sisters have to be covered up from a very early age to avoid being exposed in front of men, it is only natural that they grow up with the concept that women have to be covered, controlled and restricted.
And that men don’t. Exactly.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Start early http://dlvr.it/96lL1 […]
Allah has told me that this will lead to an epidemic of rickets if it continues. I’m not sure how he knew, but he is always right.
What do you mean it’s not OK to indoctrinate and brainwash children into supernaturalist, misogynist, homophobic, authoritarian and totalitarian systems of thought? Teaching girls to wear hijab is identical to teaching them the times tables or how to hula hoop – it’s all just teaching, right?
It may all be teaching, but its not all learning.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime
Give a girl a headscarf and you intimidate her for a day.
Teach a girl to be ashamed to be seen without one and you intimidate her for a lifetime.
Help a girl learn to read and think and you lose her forever.
But they don’t want her anyway. She is an embarrassment to the family, she is shameful, she has to be constantly watched, she is a necessary evil; so she must be covered up, and she must be done away with altogether if she breaks the rules.
Of course they want her, the way slaveowners want slaves. Doesn’t stop them nailing the uppity ones’ ears to trees when necessary.
Well, they do and they don’t want her. They want her childbearing facilities, but only for the sake of having sons. The logic of this in India and China is creating an artificial shortage of female childbearing facilities, but it’s a NIMBY thing – we need some females, but it should always be someone else who actually produces them. Not in my house thanks; just boys here please.
Just boys… God, how positively-worse-than-boring (sorry, just can’t think of any sufficiently depressing epithet). They want a world without women! They really have to be totally horrible – insane, even (culturally insane, of course – and I think this should be a new sociological description). No women’s faces, eyes, voices, smiles… Perhaps they’ll make cloning publicly available and abolish women altogether. Frankly, Ophelia, I think that the human race will be happier without men. We really need more Amazons.
They don’t want a world without women. They just want to live in Stepford.
Women who ‘choose’ to wear the bandage, as you say, are ultimately traitors to ALL women. They’ve folded, they’ve capitulated, they agree to submit to whims of males, and the greater the number who do, the greater the danger to all women.
Of course, pointing out this misogyny just gets you branded a bigot.
And it’s generally the women who teach their daughters and granddaughters and nieces how to “get along”, which includes so-called proper forms of dress, proper attitudes etc. Of course, the “prostitot” phenomenon is just the other side of the same coin.
“Of course, the “prostitot” phenomenon is just the other side of the same coin.”
Not quite, because the prostitot can always opt out once she’s an adult, whereas young girls in Egypt are stuck with the bandage for life.
Considering how hard it is for millions of women even to get out of the house, let alone get an education, how is it possible for them to know that there are other ways of looking at the world than the ones they have been taught? They are naturally afraid of God, and of men. And a lifetime of male and divine hostility to women is not the best promoter of self-respect, of self-assurance. And while anybody can be or become narrow, there is also fear for one’s children to consider.
Even in a modern society there are millions of people who are afraid to abandon the traditional thinking with which they have been brought up. Think how hard it is to encourage the teaching of critical thinking and of science in state schools.
Our problem is that we take for granted that we have freedom of thought. It doesn’t look very likely that any of us actually do. But if we are lucky, we get the opportunity to think something new. Which might be a good thing, if we aren’t too brainwashed or too stupid or too scared. If we are lucky.
I’ve learned not to. I’ve learned how painfully rare that freedom is, and how easily it can be snatched away. Somebody who lived in my own city had it snatched away just a month or two ago.