Michelangelo's Mother of Christ from "Pieta" (left) and "Slinky Knits" two-piece hijab
"In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic [of Iran], announced that 'scientific research had shown that women’s hair emitted rays that drove men insane,'" writes Amir Taheri at Town Hall:
This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shiite community.
In an interview in 1975 in Beirut, Sadr told this writer that the hijab he had invented was inspired by the headgear of Lebanese Catholic nuns, itself inspired by that of Christian women in classical Western paintings. (A casual visit to the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or the Louvre in Paris, would reveal the original of the neo-Islamist hijab in numerous paintings depicting Virgin Mary and other female figures from the Old and New Testament.)
Sadr’s idea was that, by wearing the headgear, Shiite women would be clearly marked out, and thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian gunmen who at the time controlled southern Lebanon.
Who is stupider, women or men?
[via Charles Johnson]
Meanwhile, Gulf Reporter has the lowdown on what's really on the minds of some fine young men in that part of the world:
Bahrain's own Homer Simpson gives some honest insight on the workings of the Gulf male's mind: We expect and want our wives to be virgins until they are married. We, however, from the age of 12, have our minds mainly preoccupied with sex.
"We do need to find a solution to the problem," Homer writes. But he's perhaps too fearful when he goes on to say, "I dread to know what it will be."
"Look West, young man! Our solution hasn't been perfect, but it's perfectly achievable.
Good advice. Remarkable how the misogynist fantasies of a couple of dystopic guys like Mussa Sadr Al-Sadr and Ayman Zawahiri can infect entire generations of muslim youngsters in much the same way that Nazi and marxist ideologies infected everyday folk in the last century.
I guess we will have to say cats are smarter than some of both.
Posted by: arthur jameson | May 20, 2004 at 04:22 PM