Yahoo News brings us a story of fashion designer Anniesa Hasibuan, who for two years now has been featuring the Muslim hijab, the garment that wraps around the face of Muslim women so that no one can see their hair.
The designs are elegant if a bit gaudy: there is a photo of Hasibuan in a black robe with ornate silver embroidery, and another of twenty or so fashion models looking exactly like fashion models, wearing gold and silver and laden with jewelry… except that every one of them is wearing a silver scarf covering their hair. It’s Muslim Chic, to the roars of applause from the New York fashion crowd, one or two of which, I will dare to guess, are unmarried women and gay men.
Hey, sincerely: so far, so good. Westernized Muslims can maintain their religious practices — many of them, anyway — and look stylish as well. That’s terrific.
But there are deeper issues at play here. Frankly, my first glance at a runway of stick-thin New York models looking like some fabulous Libyan bodyguard contingent filled me with apprehension, because to look at that picture of not only westernized Muslims, but New York Fashion Chic westernized Muslims filled me with a kind of dread: this is what an Islamic New York would or will look like; and here is where we get into trouble.
It is absolutely true that here in America, there are millions of peaceful Muslims who came here to work hard and who are willing to abide by western laws. If their religion calls for them to wear a hijab, it’s none of my damn business whether they do or not.
What is my damn business, however, is whether or not the United States becomes a predominantly Muslim country, in the manner of France and Germany and Sweden: western democracies that have thrown open their doors to Muslim immigration and gotten more than fashion shows in the bargain. This picture of gold and silver clad models in hijabs produces an immediate cognitive dissonance for me, so hopefully some of the Daily Wire’s multitude of progressive readers can help me out here.
First, the entire idea of the hijab is to divert attention from a Muslim woman, not to call attention to her. The justification of the hijab in the first place is the Islamic belief that should males catch sight of a woman’s hair, they will become so overpowered by lust that their honor is in danger. And, obviously, in much of the Muslim world, a woman whose honor has been compromised is more likely to wear acid washed headscarves rather than fashionably silver ones.
The reason this causes so much cognitive dissonance is that if any of these women wore these gaudy costumes in many Muslim countries, they would be lucky to get away with only being pushed, mocked or beaten. And that’s at the core of it, really: these Muslim chic designs can be worn in New York only because New York is not a Muslim city run by Muslim laws and customs.
It is painful to point this out, because I have met many patriotic, hard-working, family-oriented Muslims here in America; however, the fact is that alone among the religions of the world, Islam, as it is written, is not only incompatible with American ideals, it is alone in being antithetical to them.
If you stand on a street corner across from the fashion show, and hurl insults at Mohammed, his followers and his religion, than in a Judeo-Christian New York you’re just another nutcase speaking his mind. In an Islamic New York — Islamic as in as written in flowing gold Arabic in the Koran – insulting Islam and the Prophet is a capital offense. Our First Amendment also restricts the government from interfering with our right to practice whatever religion we want, or to have no religion at all. In Islam, as it is written, leaving Islam is also a capital offense.
Hindus, Confucians, Buddhists, Animists, Zoroastrians, Druids, Wiccans and Jedi — not to mention Christians, Jews and atheists — can have their religion and preach it too, here in America, without having to make a profound decision: are you governed — externally but much more importantly internally — by a love for and belief in these constitutional rights, or is your heart and your desire to live as Muhammad commands you?
Because you cannot have both. The vast majority choose to live by our laws, and all of this would be just completely swell if we did not see, time and time again, the demands for Islamic law and Islamic justice in liberal democracies once the Muslim population reaches some (relatively small) percentage.
At the end of the Yahoo article, Chiara Sari, Indonesia’s vice consul in New York and a representative of Designer Hasibuan’s home country, says that she supports the hijab clothing line by saying, “Hopefully that will increase familiarity with Islam in general, especially now when it is getting a lot of bad press.”
With all due respect, Ms. Sari, Islam is getting “a lot of bad press” because members of your religion are committing a lot of bad deeds, all around the world, pretty much all of the time. And the Muslim fashion I would like to see in America, and Europe as well, would be a declaration that Muslims in the west denounce terrorism, work with law enforcement to turn in radicals, and state clearly and publicly that your clothes and your heart have made a decision on the mutually exclusive ideas that you can say and believe whatever you want versus believing that those who insult or try to leave the religion of the hijab should be killed, as your religious law decrees.
It is not the fact that millions of Muslims — the vast majority — here in the west despise and reject terrorism, and have chosen Constitutional values over Koranic ones. It’s the fact that none of the rest of us see any of you openly saying so that alarms us.
Gaudy hijab fashion that glamorizes and sexualizes women is a rejection of core Islamic beliefs, not the inclusion of them. It’s great to see you on the walkway, but it would be even better to know where you stand.