Reply to Muslim women speak out against the hijab as an element of political Islam

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I just don't read it that way at all. The Quran talks about overall modesty, and not simply in terms of covering breasts. It asks women (and women) to lower gazes. It asks to cover adornments/ornaments/beauty. This is quite different from western standards. So it certainly isn't limiting modesty to covering breasts. In fact, the spirit of the Quranic text seems to be broader than that when explaining modesty.

Now I can see that if a woman wears her hair like Leila Ahmed, short, cropped, uncombed, uncolored, greying, and easy to disregard, then perhaps it's not being used to draw attention. But otherwise, it just makes no sense that God would be okay with the use of hair to attract men.[/quote]

Adornment is one way the word zeinat in the verse in question is translated.  Zein means beautiful, and zeinat means beautiful things, and is referring to that which inherent to women, not extrinsic ornaments, which adornments connotes. So adornments is not exactly what is meant in the verse.

The verse explicitly allows women to display their beautiful things that are apparent. While this is expressed in a way that seems somewhat contorted today, in context it would mean those things women normally show. At the time, this did not generally include breasts, but women were known to show them in pre-Islamic Arabia, hence the command to cover them.

Otherwise women wore clothing that covered them from the waist down but the garment was not necessarily sewn and could open, which could cause thing not normally seen to be seen.  In addition, women wore a khimar, a kind of large shawl that most women drew over their chests.  It might have been used to cover their heads as I did today with my winter scarf or draped over their shoulders

How do we get from beautiful things to hair?  It is not as though the word for hair were rare at the time.  If it was so important to cover hair, the Quran would have mentioned it.  The Quran itself says its meaning is clear.  So why the stretch to make words mean much more than they were meant to?  I in fact see very little in this verse distinguishing Islamic modesty from Western standards for modesty at the time.[/quote]

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