Humor–de oorsprong van de chador, waar er in Frankrijk en ook wel België een tijdje geleden zoveel om te doen was. Dat het een beknotting zou zijn van de vrijheid van moslimmeisjes als ze hun hoofddoek niet kunnen aandoen, en dat het racisme is dat paspoortfoto’s zonder hoofddoek moeten gepakt worden en alles:
All these and other cases are based on the claim that the controversial headgear is an essential part of the Muslim faith and that attempts at banning it constitute an attack on Islam.
That claim is totally false. The headgear in question has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. It is not sanctioned anywhere in the Koran, the fundamental text of Islam, or the hadith (traditions) attributed to the Prophet.
This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shiite community.
In an interview in 1975 in Beirut, Sadr told this writer that the hijab he had invented was inspired by the headgear of Lebanese Catholic nuns, itself inspired by that of Christian women in classical Western paintings. (A casual visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or the Louvre in Paris, would reveal the original of the neo-Islamist hijab in numerous paintings depicting Virgin Mary and other female figures from the Old and New Testament.)
Sadr’s idea was that, by wearing the headgear, Shiite women would be clearly marked out, and thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian gunmen who at the time controlled southern Lebanon.
Sadr’s neo-hijab made its first appearance in Iran in 1977 as a symbol of Islamist-Marxist opposition to the Shah’s regime. When the mullahs seized power in Tehran in 1979, the number of women wearing the hijab exploded into tens of thousands.
Brusselmans (of was het Lanoye) was er dus helemaal niet zo ver naast als hij zei dat al die Vlaams Blokkers die klagen over moslims met hoofddoeken best eerst eens naar tante nonneke zouden kijken.
Muslim women, like women in all societies, had covered their head with a variety of gears over the centuries. These had such names as lachak, chador, rusari, rubandeh, chaqchur, maqne’a and picheh, among others.
All had tribal, ethnic and generally folkloric origins and were never associated with religion. (In Senegal, Muslim women wear a colourful headgear against the sun while working in the fields, but go topless.)
Muslim women could easily check the fraudulent nature of the neo-Islamist hijab by leafing through their family albums. They will not find the picture of a single female ancestor of theirs who wore the cursed headgear now marketed as an absolute “must” of Islam.
This fake Islamic hijab is nothing but a political prop, a weapon of visual terrorism. It is the symbol of a totalitarian ideology inspired more by Nazism and Communism than by Islam. It is as symbolic of Islam as the Mao uniform was of Chinese civilization.