Huffington Post: There is a camp of feminists out there who would like us to believe that wearing the hijab is a discriminatory, male-biased, patriarchal practice, note the article by Adele-Wilde Blavatsky on the ‘privileging’ of race above gender, to a deluge of uproar from another camp of women who were totally shocked by her one-sided, un-nuanced views on the Islamic sartorial practices.
Well, I have got news for this camp of feminists because I came to the hijab very recently and after years of mulling over the decision, through research of the Quran and the teachings of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), and reading of several exegetes of scholars, both male and female, I as a woman made the sole decision of wearing the headscarf. I am totally satisfied that all scholars from differing schools of Islamic thought come to the same decision that hijab is indeed a practice that God has commanded upon the Muslims, men and women. Note the distinction I make between hijab and headscarf. Hijab is effectively speaking about modesty of men and women and not indeed just a piece of cloth one places over one’s head! If we scratch the surface Muslims understand hijab to be an overall modesty: modesty of the heart, modesty of the eyes, modesty of the ears etc. In other words it is guarding the heart from evil intentions, guarding the eyes and ears from evil intentions and so on.
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Women such as Blavatsky in the aim to emancipate all of womankind seem to forget that many of us women who chose to wear the headscarf and cover ourselves to the degree that we indeed want to, is our choice. We do not do it because we are forced by other men in our lives, we do not do it to appease men’s sexual gratification but we choose to do it after coming to a rational understanding of our faith.