World Hijab Day Debuts in American Schools

[PeteWaldo]

"World Hijab Day Debuts in American Schools

Muslim human rights activist Asra Nomani pleads, “Do not wear a headscarf in ‘solidarity’ with the ideology that most silences us."
By Meira Svirsky
Sun, February 14, 2016

School officials in Rochester, New York are getting flak from angry parents and teachers for holding an event in solidarity with World Hijab Day. The event, held at the school and during school hours, encouraged the high school girls to wear the Islamic headscarf for the day. Boys were given carnations to wear in solidarity.

Unsuspecting students put on the 150 headscarves that were brought by teachers before the first bell rang. They were encouraged to participate in the “cultural event” by the school’s principal Sheela Webster, who insisted the headscarf had nothing to do with religion, but rather all about the “experiental” and “was actually around learning about the cloth.”

“Our perspective in it was not religious – it was really about experiential,” she said. “We are an experiential school; we engage kids in all kinds of activities and projects all of the time, so the perspective of being able to learn what a hijab is, why some women choose to wear it and why some women don’t choose to wear it, and we provide the opportunity to experience it; it is well within protocol of experiential learning.”

Unfortunately, learning about “why some women don’t choose to wear it” – or more pointedly, what happens to women in certain Muslim countries and societies who have no choice whether or not to wear it -- was not part of the program.

As prominent Muslim human rights activist Asra Nomani writes in the Washington Post, events such as these are a “painful reminder of the well-financed effort by conservative Muslims to dominate modern Muslim societies. This modern-day movement spreads an ideology of political Islam, called ‘Islamism,’ enlisting well-intentioned interfaith do-gooders and the media into promoting the idea that ‘hijab’ is a requirement of Islam."

Concurrent with the advent Islamism comes the culture of “honor,” the idea that a family’s or a husband’s honor lies in the chastity and modesty of their female members. To the Islamist, the hijab has become the quintessential symbol of that honor.

Stories have, unfortunately, become common in our time of women -- both in the West as well in Muslim countries-- who have been “honor” killed by their families or societies for not wearing a hijab."

more
http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/world-hijab-day-debuts-american-schools#