In response to a NYT article about the recent Quebec ban on religious symbols that’s forced Muslim women to choose their religion or their jobs:
“Perri Ravon, a lawyer who has worked on two of the lawsuits against the ban, said that at least for now, “the law is disproportionately affecting Muslim women because the hijab is an outwardly visible religious symbol.”
====Of course it is, that’s what it was designed to do. We all know Islam is the target for this ban, and Muslim women are the most ubiquitous physical representation of Islam in this world.
“The ban has its roots in Quebec’s historic evolution into an abidingly secular society with a visceral distrust of religion, stemming from the so-called Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, when Quebecers revolted against dominance of the Roman Catholic Church.
====Ah, yes, Secularism. The barely tolerant version of atheism that’s captured the western world’s heart for decades.
“…many proponents of the law saw Muslims wearing head scarves as “the phantom of religion reappearing in Quebec while viewing the hijab as an instrument of patriarchal domination.”
===This is a pretty wild conflation, right here. We got secularist and violent feminist rhetoric all jumbled up. Don’t project your issues with the Roman Catholic Church yesterday onto Muslims today. Don’t try and view Islam through a lens of your distorted western ideas of power and domination.
The hijab has nothing to do with patriarchy and you know that. The nuclear family unit has nothing to do with subjugation of women – it’s how we have survived as a species for countless generations.
What’s really happening is that you are attaching your own meanings to the outward displays of piety associated with Islam and using them to undermine and breakdown the beliefs of Muslims everywhere, thereby making them easier to control. We see what you’re doing. You’re not as smart as you think you are.
“While some supporters say the law will help liberate Muslim women from a garment they call sexist and restrictive…”
===I CAN’T EVEN WITH THIS> So much fallacy. Help liberate Muslim women? Who asked for your help? Who said they needed to be liberated? From what? Who is oppressing them? MUSLIM MEN? Or is the garment on their head?
Hijab is not just a garment, it’s a command from Allah! It’s not something you throw on as you rush out the door, its an external validation of the spiritual state you find within yourself.
Sexist and restrictive? WHAT? So you call modesty sexism, now? You call honor restriction? Just because Muslim women carry themselves in an honorable way, and want to preserve their bodies from being objectified by every passing eye, you want to call them restricted? Well, I say that they have a moral compass guiding them. And that compass is based on revelation from God.
What is your compass based on? Your shifting beliefs? What did you consider moral and right just 20 years ago? The opposite of what you think is right today? So what will you consider right tomorrow, and who are you to tell us what right or wrong is?
Who gave you the moral authority? Why do you get to define what’s sexist and restrictive and oppressive? Why must you always conflate throwing off all your clothes with freedom, with enlightenment?
Excuse me, white colonialist, were you not the one who showed up to indigenous communities around the world and called them primitive and backwards when you saw how little clothing they wore? And now, what, you’re the enlightened ones who shed all your clothes for no reason whatsoever? And now, what, we’re the primitive ones because we wear clothes? You damn colonialists, get out my face.
“She said the suggestion by supporters of the bill that her turban would make her indoctrinate children was misguided. “It is the state that is imposing secularism as a religion on me,” she said.”
====Secularism is the man-made religion, and they are waging war on actual religion. It is the state believing they have power, thinking themselves to be some sort of deity, who are now imposing secularism on anyone who would challenge their self-proclaimed authoritative power.
“Ms. Gehr said the religious symbol ban was based on a “false premise.”“The Quebec government doesn’t seem to understand that the rules of religion are not something you can just leave at the door.”
====Oh, Ms. Gehr, I think the state knows exactly what it’s doing. It makes up the rules of their own secular religion just like it make up the rules of this society that we live in. Seeing that it cannot impose its will on our spiritual practices, and because secularism views any type of ritual worship with great disdain, the state feels compelled to strip us of the ritual aspects of our belief.
Because the state knows once they do that, we will fall apart and become just like them. They will never rest until we become just like them – having no real core foundations, having no strident moral system holding them back, wavering with the wind on what they feel is right, swapping what’s viewed as right for what’s viewed as wrong every decade or two.
“Some feminists in Quebec support the ban, arguing that keeping religion out of public life can help further women’s rights.”
===AH YES, the damn feminists. What a surprise. Here they come touting their western (read: white) views of LIBERATION and FREEDOM and WOMENS RIGHTS, whatever the hell any of that actually means. These banner slogans with no substance to them have become intellectual shorthand for a wave of irrational ideas that the white, western liberal secular feminist movement uses to undermine the core foundations of Islam.
You can’t hold up a flag and say the words on this flag mean more to me than your entire way of being means to you, therefore, you MUST capitulate to my way of life. You can’t call that freedom; it’s colonialism. This is colonization of religion, straight up. This is not separation of church and state, this is separation of person from faith. This is a white-washing of the ways which we operate. This is bringing us down to their level – of only being able to see the physical world before us and discount anything which cannot be “empirically proven with replicable results.” This is how the west operates, and it is infuriating.