The warped dialectic of the ḥijāb East and West
An ancestor of mine publicly tore off the ḥijāb in Irān as an act of revolutionary millenarianism and social defiance in 1848, a woman proclaimed and proclaiming Herself to be the return of Fāṭima (ع) from whose very gaze all things were deemed to be purified: 1848 the very same year Europe broke out into revolution itself and when Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto. The West's obsession with tearing off the ḥijāb from Muslim women however is something else entirely. It is a species of white male patriarchy and its hegemonic system seeking to dominate and colonize the bodies of black and brown Muslim women by its warped standards and, especially, to humiliate and emasculate black and brown Muslim men (as this is the process of noospheric colonization). This obsession of white male patriarchy is the same obsession that erects a global industry out of pornography, objectifying and destroying women and men alike the world over, and then labeling it as progress.
As much as it will piss off many westernized Iranian feminists to hear this, and particularly those deluded enough to have bought into the Baha'i narrative about Her, if Qurrat'ul-ꜤAyn (d. 1852) were alive today confronting this predatorial system of global white male patriarchy she would put the ḥijāb right back on as an act of revolutionary millenarianism and defiance against the Man and his system; and I say this as someone neither whose mother ever wore the ḥijāb, nor his sisters, nor his late wife, nor will any future woman he decides to couple with and definitely not his daughter (unless they wish to).
What sister Arundhati Roy is saying is 100% the Truth. The ironic tragedy in all of this is that it sometimes appears that the white male patriarchy of the West and the old school patriarchy of the Muslim world seem to have conspired together in a warped dialectic to re-veil the female, one by reviling it as a symbol of oppression and forcing female unveiling with the other making it the symbol of its resistance against such compulsion and unveiling.
