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August 03, 2002"It's the scarves, stupid!"
Iran Freedom Watch: Schoolgirls' Scarves coming off! Those poor girls in Iran...obviously, this is a "gesture" by the mullah-run Khatami government to appear conciliatory and less doctrinaire in light of the recent unrest and outright rebellious resistance that has been seen in reaction to the oppressive Taliban-like theocracy that rules there. Funny how the common assumption among we infidels, i.e. non-Muslims, prevails that the stricture of women wearing head coverings, from the full-length burqa to the head-and-shoulders only hijab, is based on "holy" writ in the Koran. It is, in fact, a Persian custom which spread throughout the Muslim world as a better than good idea for protecting their men against the beauty and allure of their females. So, for the Persians themselves to begin eschewing this practice is cause for interest. (For those Christians we don't know their Bible, the practice of veiling for Mass comes from the Pauline epistles, "Women, cover your heads.") In an interesting correlation, it is the incident of the Schoolgirl fire in Saudi Arabia that has inflamed the anti-government, anti-Religious police furor there. This was the fire at the (Muslim) girls' school where the Religious police made the girls burn alive in the building, rather than be rescued, because they weren't wearing head coverings. Hard to believe, but if f we're to credit all accounts, it actually happened in March. Likewise, there seemed to be no greater emblem of horrible tyranny in Taliban Afghanistan than the burqa. Plainly, in our world this is a similar but more severe instance of the state using the control of things that are in a citizen's personal physical space as a tool to completely control the person. In the West, the state manipulates things like controlled substances, cigarettes, and perhaps someday junk food and fatty food. The freedom to consume these things, while frequently deliterious to the consumer, should be an inviolate freedom none the less. Women in Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia are under no delusion as to why the state and the police demand that they wear these head coverings; to them, they are tantamount to chains or leashes to the their male "Masters." In the waging of the French Revolution, the rebels called themselves sans-culottes meaning without breeches, the pants of rich gentlemen. The sans-culottes thus identified themselves with their brethren who were "common men," citoyens, citizens. So, fashion and an article of clothing have served as an article of dissent and revolt before. When it comes to the matter of revolution in Muslim countries, is it "about the scarves, stupid?" It very well may be. 
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