On 30th of March 2016, the news network Al Jazeera reported that the French Minister for Women’s Rights, Laurence Rossignol, likened Muslim women who wear Hijab to American “Negroes” who accepted slavery. Her comments were made on RMC Radio and BFM TV in response to the growing trend in so called ‘Islamic fashion’ and mainstream design houses that are producing so called ‘modest’ lines of clothing for Muslim women.
The comments of the French Minister are ironic given that she as a minister for women’s rights personifies the very secular values that oppress women – those that discriminate against the culture of religious minorities and breed intolerance for religious differences! As one employed to champion democracy and liberal values, she could not have betrayed her cause more in revealing the hypocritical and disingenuous nature of western secular culture. Her opinions are formed from a toxic mix of misogyny, Islamophobia and racism in a vain attempt to win people over to her extremist political viewpoint. Does the French minister not see that by demonizing the strongly held Islamic beliefs and practices of Muslim women and limiting their ability to pursue their religious convictions due to draconian anti-hijab and anti-niqab laws, she and the state she serves act the role of slave master by creating conditions where Muslim women are devalued, alienated and coerced into conforming to a ridged set of social expectations defined by the restrictive secular beliefs. Today, thousands of Muslim women in democratic nations live daily nightmares in schools, work places and other public services as a consequence of practicing their religious beliefs.
As a minister employed to fight for the liberation of women, rather than hurling absurd accusations at those who adopt the Islamic dress, she should rather account her own French forces who are currently being accused of the most sickening abuse of young girls in the Central African Republic. What vexes these secular extremists who are obsessed with the Islamic dress and who appoint themselves as so-called liberators of Muslim women is that Muslim women choose to be a slave of Allah سبحانه وتعالى the Lord of the Worlds and Owner of the Day of Judgment rather than a slave to the whims of their authoritarian secular state. How ironic it is that while Ms. Rossignol accuses Muslim women who wear the Islamic headscarf of being enslaved, she ignores the fact that so many women in France and other Western states are enslaved to the dictates of the beauty and fashion industries and their sexualized, degrading, restrictive view of how women should look and dress to be seen as ‘beautiful’ and successful – spending thousands of dollars and sometimes undergoing life-threatening cosmetic surgery in order to fit this ideal. She also ignores the fact that the enslavement of women in prostitution and trafficking is at epidemic levels across France and Europe due to the very ‘liberal personal and sexual freedoms’ that she is coercing Muslim women to accept in the name of supposedly ‘liberating’ them.
The Muslim woman who adopts the Islamic dress represents the identity of a woman who is free from enslavement to the expectations of men or women and instead embraces the expectations of the One Who created her. And it represents the identity of a woman who refuses to accept for her thinking to be enslaved by the dictates of human beings and the superficial, irrational templates of beauty they expect her to aspire to.
يُرِيدُونَ لِيُطْفِؤُوا نُورَ اللَّهِ بِأَفْوَاهِهِمْ وَاللَّهُ مُتِمُّ نُورِهِ وَلَوْ كَرِهَ الْكَافِرُونَ
“They want to extinguish the light of Allah with their mouths, but Allah will perfect His light, although the disbelievers dislike it.”
(As-Saf: 8)
Women’s Section in the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir
Friday 1st Rajab 1437 AH
08/04/2016 CE
Issue No: 1437 AH / 031