Ramadhan Mubarak!!

Excellent weekend article by Naomi Wolf to be found in The Sydney Morning Herald (obviously an Aussie paper).

If anybody wishes to buy me something for ‘Eid, and wishes to see their brother childishly giggling with happiness, then yes, I would like one of Naomi Wolf’s books.

Ok, well, don’t all rush at once. Here is the Amazon link to make it easy for you.

Oh and guess what, the Ghazali book that is out of stock in London bookshops can also be found here to.

Enough hints. Check out the aforementioned article now.

Ideological battles are often waged with women’s bodies as their emblems, and Western Islamophobia is no exception. When France banned headscarves in schools, it used the hijab as a proxy for Western values in general, including the appropriate status of women. When Americans were being prepared for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban were demonised for denying cosmetics and hair colour to women; when the Taliban were overthrown, Western writers often noted that women had taken off their scarves.

The West interprets veiling as repression of women and suppression of their sexuality. But when I travelled in Muslim countries and was invited to join a discussion in women-only settings within Muslim homes, I learned that Muslim attitudes toward women’s appearance and sexuality are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one’s husband. It is not that Islam suppresses sexuality, but that it embodies a strongly developed sense of its appropriate channelling – toward marriage, the bonds that sustain family life, and the attachment that secures a home.