You Say You Want a Revolution

Just because my veil blocks your senses, doesn’t mean it blocks mine. The veil is no blindfold. I see out; you are the one whose vision is obstructed. My senses are alive and have a field within to play, away from where your eye can penetrate. My sex is alive—what on earth makes people think that woman who veil do not take pleasure in eros? Veiling—with us—has nothing to do with aestheticism and self denial. My sense of beauty is alive. I comb out my hair and put on the rouge and the silk, among friends, in a woman’s culture curtained off from you, an outsider. Is that why you find the veil frustrating from your male-identified viewpoint, you who are used to woman putting out for your gaze? Because its aesthetic is the opposite of a strut, is that the secret reason why you take it as such an affront? –Mohja Kahf

Beauty in Western culture is a multibillion dollar business. We worry about our hair, our nails, our skin, our lips, our eyes, our noses, décolleté, stomach, arms, thighs, calves, and any other conceivable part of our body. In this immense marathon where we seek the ‘ideal’ we also worry about the smallest of issues. Labia surgery is on the rise, just in case, you know, you’re are not porn star material. Waxing, bleaching, stitching, cutting, burning, tanning, scraping, and threading have become synonymous with a means to a gorgeous end, besmirching their origins as rather harsh verbiage. 

Starve, purge, expel, fast, cleanse, oh yes, cleanse those toxins. Your kidneys and liver, despite the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to perfect them, have become woefully inadequate. Let us help Mother Nature and shoot water up our orifices and then vacuum out whatever might be in there. Whatever nature intended, nature got it wrong. Bottom line. We must purify and whiten and tone and deprive and work to reach that ultimate goal on that shining mountain. Work, will bring you happiness. Work will set you free.

Now I don’t want to wear a niqab. I don’t even do hijab outside of mosque, but know what I don’t want to wear even more than that ubiquitous veil? A miniskirt. That’s my personal choice and I do not disparage other women for theirs. But considering all the work, depravation and outright danger Western Woman Perfected can cause, why is one considered more oppressed than the other? We speculate on a random picture of a Niqabi but where is the similar concern for Demi Moore, Snookie or Kim Kardashian? Why are we blasé about their diet pills, starving diets or drunken fights but endlessly immersed in the mindsets of women sporting veil in non-obligatory cultures?

Perhaps it’s time to treat Niqabi and Hijabi women as though their decision not to flaunt what they got is equally valid as those that do. Of course that also requires us to treat Muslim woman as fully functioning and autonomous human beings. Yep. You read right. I’m talkin revolution from the being to the human. Are you in?