Islamic Hijab is Honour for Women

By: Safiyyah

The Western world often expresses its false concern for the Islamic attire of Afghan Muslim women. Western media regularly portrays the burqa/hijab as an attack on the freedom of Afghan women to dress as they please. Ordinary westerners are baffled as to why women should have to cover themselves from head to toe instead of being able to roam the streets in shorts, jeans or crop-tops as they do.

They are baffled because they have never been legally required to cover themselves adequately such that their dignity and respect be preserved in society. Sadly, their governments have never concerned themselves with protecting the self-respect of female citizens, rather permit and even encourage them to dress in ways that visually satisfy their male counterparts, even at the expense of their own degradation.

The Western woman spends her youth in this endeavour. In the summer heat, she dresses in a manner that renders her visibly indistinguishable from prostitutes in her country. This, for her, is normal. Her self-esteem is derived from the level of male attention she receives, whether in person or through social media. This is one of her main sources of enjoyment in life. She cannot, therefore, fathom how women elsewhere can live happily without all of this, and in Islamic attire. This is why she shuns the hijab as restrictive — because it genuinely restricts her superficial view of what happiness is.

However, she cannot explain why restrictions are necessarily bad. Every human is bound by restrictions. Restrictions ensure we do not commit moral wrongs. Absolute freedom is present nowhere in the world. The West, too, upholds its restrictions on how much a woman can expose of her body publicly, i.e. does not afford women absolute freedom. Why are the restrictions of the intolerant West relating to how much a woman may uncover acceptable, but those of the Islamic Emirate unacceptable?

The reason for this is that the restrictions on female attire imposed by the Islamic Emirate are revealed by God. The West, however, has adopted an aggressively anti-God position because of which its societies are ridden with utter degeneracy and promiscuity. What follows from this is a general repulsion by its people toward anything godly, pure and good. Unacquainted with the idea of chastity, the western woman despises laws that interfere with her lifestyle in which hedonism reigns supreme.

Western women are poor victims of their secular societies. Magazines, T.V. shows, movies and so forth, work relentlessly, and criminally, in stripping these women of any shred of modesty God has made part of their innate disposition. They are brainwashed into believing that more freedoms to live promiscuously equate to more happiness. However, the removal of hijab, intermingling of the genders, increase in promiscuity and the ultimate breakdown of marriage and families that follows is not what Afghan women desire. If western women are truly open-minded as they claim, they must observe and learn from the lifestyle of devout Afghan Muslim women who have the recipe for real long-term happiness.

They live respectably under the government of the Islamic Emirate that has high regard for their dignity, honour and wellbeing. Unlike western women, they are not sexually objectified for the pleasures of strange, lustful men, rather are protected and bound by law to dignify themselves through donning the Islamic hijab. The Islamic hijab protects their honour and keeps ill-intentioned people far. They are certainly not, as western media claims, being forced to ‘disappear’ from society. Rather, they are active members of society participating in its betterment within the confines of the Shariah and hijab. Surely, it cannot be unfortunate for a woman to be bound by laws that require women to respect themselves.

Afghan women view the lifestyle of western women with repulsion and disgust. Accepting western invitations to challenge the Islamic hijab is viewed as tantamount to jeopardizing their own long-term happiness in this world and the Hereafter. Afghan women can only pity the exploited western woman for whom the very idea of self-respect and purity has become foreign, strange and regressive. In reality, it is but her morals that have regressed.

American hero Malcolm X had rightly said that “any country’s moral strength, or its moral weakness, is quickly measurable by the street attire and attitude of its women—especially its young women.” The Islamic attire of Afghan Muslim women is what the Western world wants to begin with in eventually stripping Afghan society of all morals and values it holds dear.