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February 16, 2004
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
February 14/15, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Milk Bars, Hollywood and the
March of Empires
Jeffrey St. Clair
Oil Grab in the Arctic
William A. Cook
Faith-Based Fanatics
Stan Goff
Beloved
Haiti
Dave Marsh / Lee Ballinger
Rock, Rap & the Election
Hughes / Weiher
Tupac, the Patriot Act and Me
Michael Colby
Bush v. Kerry: the Power Elite's Dream Ballot
Mickey Z.
Michael Moore's Lesser Party: the General and the Lieutenant
Josh Frank
Dean's Demise No Big Loss for the Left
Peter Wolson
The Politics of Narcissism
William James Martin
Clean Break with the Road Map
Daniel Estulin
Religious Extremism in Africa
Standard Schaefer
The Privatization of Culture: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Dave Zirin
Maurice Clarett Gets Off the Plantation
Tracy McLellan
Oprah's Birthday Greedfest
Poets' Basement
Holt, LaMorticella, Guthrie, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Progressives Scorecard: Where Do the Dems Rank on the Issues
That Matter?
February 13, 2004
Alan Maass
Kevin
Cooper's Fight to Live
Karyn Strickler
McCarthyism in the Sierra Club
Annie Higgins
On
a Street in America
Adam Federman
Democratic Snipers Target Nader
Mike Whitney
George W. Faces the Nation
Brian Cloughley
Our Imperial Leader Has Spoken
Website of the Day
Lying Action Figure Doll
February 12, 2004
Ray McGovern
George
Tenet's Spin Cycle
Robert Jensen
Bush's
Nuclear Hypocrisy
Saul Landau
Elegy to the Salton Sea
February
11, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Hail, Kerry: Senator Facing-Both-Ways
Steve Perry
Bush
v. Bush?
February
10, 2004
Kurt
Nimmo
Inquisition in Iowa
Ron Jacobs
Politics and the Beatles: Don't
You Know You Can Count Me Out (In)
Elizabeth
Schulte
The Many Faces of John Kerry
Mickey
Z
Meet the Oxmans: "The Rich
Shouldn't Sleep at Night Either"
February
9, 2004
Michael
Donnelly
Will Skull and Bones Really Change
CEOs? Inside John Kerry's Closet
Chris Floyd
Smells Like Team Spirit: the Bush
B-Boys Replay Their Greatest Hits
Bill
Christison
What's Wrong with the CIA?
Dr. Susan
Block
Janet Jackson's Mammary Moment:
Boob Tube Super Bowl
February
7/8, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
Offending Valerie: Dealing with
Jewish Self-Absorption
Jeff Ballinger
No Sweat Shopping
Dave
Lindorff
Spray and Pray in Iraq: a Marine
in Transit
Alexander
Cockburn
McNamara: the Sequel
February
6, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Are the Kurds in the Way?
Joanne
Mariner
Anita Bryant's Legacy
Saul
Landau
Happiness and Botox
Kurt Nimmo
Horror Non-fiction: A How-To Guide
from Perle and Frum
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Real Intelligence Failure:
Our Own
February
5, 2004
Benjamin
Shepard
Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free
Zone
Khury
Petersen-Smith
A Report from Occupied Iraq: "We Don't Want Army USA"
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003
Teresa
Josette
The Exeuctioner's Pslam? Christian Nation? Yeah, Right
David Krieger
Why Dr. King's Message on Vietnam is Relevant to Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
Monkey Business: Of Recess and Evolution in Georgia Schools
Norman
Solomon
The Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Presenting President Edwards!
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
Mark
Gaffney
Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel
Judith
Brown
Palestine and the Media
Frederick
B. Hudson
Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's
Junta?
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating
the Spooks
M.
Junaid Alam
Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract
Fran Shor
Whose Boob Tube?
Kevin
Cooper
This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It
February
3, 2004
Alan
Maass
The
Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"
Nick
Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded
in Iraq
Rahul
Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure
Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?
Laura
Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures
Terry
Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts
Fairness Campaign
Hammond
Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless
Website
of the Day
Waging Peace
February
2, 2004
Gary
Leupp
The Buddhist Nun in Tom Ridge's Jail
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Manners of Their Deaths: Capital Punishment in a Smoke-Free
Environment
Tom
Wright
The Prosecution of Captain Yee
Winslow
Wheeler
Inside the Bush Defense Budget
Lee Ballinger
Janet Jackson's Naked Truth
Leonard
Pitts, Jr
For Blacks, the Game of Justice is
Rigged
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean
Website
of the Day
Resistance:
In the Eye of the American Hegemon
Jan. 31 / Feb 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
January 30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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Weekend
Edition
February 14 / 15, 2004
A Complicated Question
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
By SARAH ELTANTAWI
The government of France approved last week by
a vote of 494 to 36 a ban on religious emblems in state schools.
France's Commission of Reflection on the Principle of Secularity
and Jacque Chirac, in his December 17, 2003 speech, made it clear
that the measure, which would ban the wearing of head scarves
by Muslim girls, Jewish skull caps and crucifixes in public school
was well on its way to being implemented.
I can't speak authoritatively about the
internal politics motivating the French political establishment
into taking this step, nor am I able to assess comprehensively
all the implications the head scarf and this ban have on the
ground in French society. At a recent conference called the U.S.
Islamic World Forum co-sponsored by the Brookings Institute and
the state of Qatar that I had the pleasure of attending in that
country, I had the opportunity to meet incredible European activists
who forced me to reassess and fine tune my previously idealized
notions of secularism. These activists and intellectuals were
actively challenging the exclusionary and ultimately internally
inconsistent and illogical way European secularism is often enforced,
usually on the Arab and/or Muslim "other". One attendee
described the enforced secularism of his country, Belgium, as
'neutrality, our way'; 'our', meaning, plainly and simply, white
and Christian.
I oppose the French ban on the head scarf,
but not only for the obvious reason that in principle, the ban
trumps the laudable ideal of individual freedoms and liberty.
The ban on the head scarf, or hijab, also ironically strengthens,
rather than weakens fundamentalists. By problemitizing and forbidding
hijab, a favorite fetish of Muslim fundamentalists and the Western
press alike, the French government has forced a reaction from
those forces that includes sworn proclamations that the head
scarf is a mandatory religious duty for women, and that banning
the scarf is tantamount to interfering with the fundamental practice
of Islam itself.
Putting aside the case that can be made
that France is interfering in religious freedom, the not-oft
repeated truth is that many Muslim scholars do not think the
head scarf is mandatory in the first place. Sticking strictly
to the Qur'anic text and the hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammed),
the Qur'anic verse most frequently pointed to tells women to
pull a covering over their bosom, since women in 7th century
Arabia were known to have worn outfits that exposed their chests.
The second doctrine most frequently used to justify hijab is
a saying in which the Prophet Muhammed is said to have said that
women were to cover all parts of their bodies except for their
faces and hands. The isnad, however, or chain of transmission
by which most hadith is evaluated ( a methodology for analyzing
hadith that is itself man made) is in fact weak for this hadtih,
meaning that this saying can not be traced directly back to the
mouth of the Prophet. A third justification for mandatory hijab
argues that the preponderance of scholars have come to the conclusion
that hijab is fard, or required. However, what is radical about
Islam, and what makes a certain notion of Islam a truly revolutionary
one is precisely the fact that there is no authoritative clergy
structure built into the faith. Translation: no man, (and I use
the word 'man' pointedly), is to stand in the way of a worshipper
and her creator. Moreover, the majority of traditional scholars
were men who lived in worked in a traditional, patriarchal milieu,
and who were bound to incorporate the norms of their society
and culture into their decision making.
All of this is to say that the case for
mandatory hijab is by no means closed, and that's what makes
the reaction to the French headscarf ban so interesting
and a little suspicious. At a meeting I recently attended in
Washington D.C., an active, intelligent Muslim woman I know who
is politically active and who wears hijab took me aside after
the meeting we both attended. She confided in me that the pro-hijab
protests that had been held in Washington had been almost totally
organized by men, and that she herself had been forced onstage
to demand that she be allowed the wear the scarf at all times.
Ironically, this woman, an African-American Muslim, is in the
habit of wearing the scarf or taking it off according to the
context she is in and according to her "spiritual meter"
for the day: when she feels like being spiritual, she wears the
scarf, for the scarf has that effect on her when she wears it
of her own free will. When she is not in the mood, or when the
scarf ceases to have that effect on her, she simply doesn't wear
it. Now that's choice.
Many Muslim women, even those who don't
wear the scarf, assume that it is mandatory and that they are
"bad" Muslims or "weak" for not yet donning
the scarf. Unfortunately, this repressive mentality is reinforced
by many of our mosques and religious organizations. The other
evening I met an active, professional woman at a restaurant in
New York to discuss, among other topics, politics and religion.
This high-powered, confident, extremely intelligent and articulate
Muslim woman does not wear the scarf and does not partake in
Islamic rituals on a regular basis, but supports fundamentalists
(almost always men), who claim the scarf is mandatory because
she had never heard otherwise. Because of her professional orientation
as an American of Arab descent working in politics, her perspective
was more focused, understandably, on attacks directed at Arabs
and Muslims by others as opposed to from within. My dinner partner's
view was that those who called hijab mandatory and fought against
the French ban tooth and nail were upholding Islam and defending
it against the undeniably dangerous and neo-conservative, right
wing Zionist and radical Christian fundamentalist forces that
systematically attack Islam.
I would argue that this logical leap,
however is in fact illogical and dangerous. As our discussion
about whether groups had the right to call hijab mandatory started
to turn into a debate, I started to wonder how this woman would
react if those forces that were calling hijab mandatory were
ever to really come into power and directly effect her life.
What would happen when the wearing of the scarf was no longer
a theoretical right but a mandatory duty punishable by law, when
my colleague's stylish clothes were to be deemed by a council
of men as "lewd", when her elegant lipstick was called
too sultry red and her beautiful jewelry too sparkling? Is it
only then that when the question of authority over these matters
becomes relevant? When it's too late?
Another point must be made here. If the
hijab is usually a choice made completely by women, than why
are so many men up in arms about France? The fact is that the
enforcement of the headscarf is often times carried out by men,
including fathers, husbands, brothers and others that for many
reasons, some benign, some oppressive, are concerned about containing
the sexuality of the female in question, in order, perhaps, to
protect their "honor", or, perhaps, to protect themselves
and their honor. Many women chose to contain their sexuality
themselves, but is this really a choice? In other words, in a
social/imaginative world in which the public space is a male
space, in which the expression of sexuality is a male right,
in which the fact of sexuality itself is sometimes understood
to be exclusively male, and often threatening at that, can the
requirement that women hide their beauty really be celebrated?
Well meaning and honorable Muslim men I know have pointed out
to me that the hijab protects women against the carnivorous gaze
of men; but, aside from the obvious objection to this conception
of reality why don't men just control themselves? -- isn't
this insulting to the majority of Muslim men who would never
consider assaulting a woman? Isn't this explanation of hijab
therefore a tragic one -- shouldn't the scarf in this context
be a sad, drooping, gray and depressing commentary on the hopelessly
animalistic nature of man? I, for one, reject this notion of
men, and I suspect that most men do as well.
Furthermore, is the notion of "choice"
really so uncomplicated? Egyptian doctor, activist and intellectual
Nawaal El-Saadawi, in voicing her opposition to the opposition
to the ban, has raised the very important question of false consciousness,
whereby she argues that at least a percentage of the women on
the street demanding to wear hijab are in a complicated way the
architects of their own oppression, the unwitting enforcers of
a patriarchal worldview. Most Muslims would dismiss such a theory
as inherently imperialistic, the "white man" or woman,
as the case may be, telling the oppressed other they don't know
how to think. The problem is that El-Saadawi and others like
her are Muslim women from the Muslim world, and it strikes me
that they're perspective is as valid as any other.
I fear that unless Muslim women stand
up for the right to make their own decisions about what they
are going to wear and what they aren't while they still have
the chance, the fundamentalists will have completely succeeded
in convincing yet more women that the simple act of wearing what
makes them comfortable and adjusted is somehow shameful, traitorous,
or haram.
Some will call this concern about hijab
petty, or missing the point. There are many other problems facing
Muslim women, they will argue, including a illiteracy and inadequate
healthcare. While these concerns are of the utmost importance
and are certainly qualitatively more important than the freedom
to wear or not wear a scarf or red lipstick, as the case may
be, I worry that that a slippery slope may be in effect. If we
let religious "authorities", which, as we have established,
have no real authority, tell women what to wear one day, what
is to stop them from telling them where to go and not go the
next day? More to the point perhaps, will Muslim women themselves
cease to remember that they have a choice in these matters, that
their lives should be their own, and that they are under no religious
obligation anyway to listen to "decrees" from on high
that limit their personal freedom? And if those other issues
are more important, than why do we even talk about hijab, and
why do oppose France so stridently? Presumably, the literacy
rate for women in France is high and health care is by and large
adequate. Lastly, what's wrong with defending one's right to
be comfortable and make decisions that make them happy and mentally
healthy? Especially when we are lucky enough to live in a society
that allows for such nuance?
Do I applaud the actions of the French
government? No. I think it's a silly and exaggerated overreaction
that will only strengthen the forces France is trying to weaken.
Do I oppose hijab? No. But I do not believe the practice is mandatory
and I am uncomfortable with some of the stated reasons I hear
for wearing it, namely reasons that revolve around "preserving
honor" and protecting one's self from the male, sexualized
gaze -- as if this gaze is only male, a male gaze is always sexual
and as if a woman always needs protection from sexuality in the
first place.
Sarah Eltantawi
is an activist and writer in New York.
Weekend
Edition Features for February 14 / 15, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Milk Bars, Hollywood and the
March of Empires
Jeffrey St. Clair
Oil Grab in the Arctic
William A. Cook
Faith-Based Fanatics
Stan Goff
Beloved
Haiti
Dave Marsh / Lee Ballinger
Rock, Rap & the Election
Hughes / Weiher
Tupac, the Patriot Act and Me
Michael Colby
Bush v. Kerry: the Power Elite's Dream Ballot
Mickey Z.
Michael Moore's Lesser Party: the General and the Lieutenant
Josh Frank
Dean's Demise No Big Loss for the Left
Peter Wolson
The Politics of Narcissism
William James Martin
Clean Break with the Road Map
Daniel Estulin
Religious Extremism in Africa
Standard Schaefer
The Privatization of Culture: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Dave Zirin
Maurice Clarett Gets Off the Plantation
Tracy McLellan
Oprah's Birthday Greedfest
Poets' Basement
Holt, LaMorticella, Guthrie, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Progressives Scorecard: Where Do the Dems Rank on the Issues
That Matter?
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