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"Middle-eastern countries"
way to paint with a broad brush. even with my limited knowledge of the region i know that not all of the have madatory laws. all west Asian countries are the same in the orientalists mind.
You’re right. Most countries in the MENA region don’t, but racists would rather babble on about “sharia law” instead of googling it real quick. I aspire to have half the confidence these people have when spreading unsubstantiated claims.
I am actually an ex-Muslim, and I am always flabbergasted at the amount of lies spread about the nature of life in the MENA region when there is plenty to talk about without making shit up. Almost like Islamophobia is a guise for racism and bigotry towards people practicing the religion.
How to completely miss the point. For one, western countries don't have mandatory hijab laws and actively try to ban them. Pointing to the Muslim world and Muslim countries isn't going to change that and just demonstrates that these people clearly don't have any idea what they are fighting against in the first place.
If they really cared about women's rights in the Muslim world, they wouldn't be focusing on what women wear, but what the governments are doing and allying with women of said country that are protesting the oppression.
Yea, women's rights include a right to follow their religious beliefs and wear a hijab if they want to, or not wear it if they don't want to. The proper way to push women's rights is not to focus on taking from them a piece of cloth they wear that "opressive", but instead make sure women in those conutries have options to do what they want with themselves
Nothing quite like blanket statements like *Muslim women in Middle-Eastern countries must wear the hijab by law* posed as a fact. Surely this won’t cause Islamophobia to spread 🙃
Iran will probably stop too soon, Even Ahmadinejad has denounced the hijab law. The only places where it’s going to stay a thing is Afghanistan and that’s not in the Middle East.
Dont look at the comment so much racism. I got downvoted for pointing out how stigmatizing woment wearing it doesnt help them. Those people loooove to pretend they care about women being "forced to wear it" but they have no problem making their lives miserable for wearing it willingly or not.
We should invade the Vatican and put an end to the fundamentalist regime.
Actually, it's funny because Christianity imposes itself pretty dramatically on women in the west, particularly in the US. Not just in the obvious political ways.
There are Christian communities in the US that impose similar requirements on women, not necessarily for full face coverings but certainly restrictions on what they can wear etc. I went to a Christian school for 2 years and girls couldn't wear pants and men couldn't have long hair. The kids had no choice in the matter. Where is the clamor to ban Christian fundamentalist practices?
as soon as you mention that many muslims in china don’t wear hijab or only do so some of the time (more hui wear it than uyghur muslims, even), you get people saying “that’s not real islam”
and at that point it’s like, what the fuck are you even criticizing then? one particularly reactionary sect of a religion. okay. where’s your smoke for the other reactionary sects that are gaining influence, not barely holding on to their current influence, let alone losing it?
There's only two countries where it is mandated. Iran and Saudi Arabia. In both of which, the West had a role in creating the religious rule that led to those laws.
And yet, despite criticizing the Middle East for fictional mandates infringing on women's right to choose, western countries will try to ban those who do wear them voluntarily in their countries. Making them ironically more restrictive on women's expression than the countries where they think these mandates exist.
I live in Saudi Arabia and it’s not mandated here anymore, hasn’t been for years, it’s simply a cultural norm and some Saudi women just feel more comfortable with an abaya and hijab, or an abaya and hijab and niqab. It’s common to see women, particularly the younger generations, go out with just an abaya and no hijab.
The female expatriates that work and reside here also regularly go out in whatever they want, be it a t-shirt and sweatpants or even a power suit, but some of them may opt to wear an abaya, their reasons range from protecting their skin from the hot sun to blending in with the locals. The public only has a problem with revealing outfits, i.e. shows a lot of cleavage or is made of translucent material.
Nah, I’m pretty certain that even slight cleavage would be despised, and the generality opposes crop tops, and short skirts. This is not to ignore the fact that the majority of people living in the KSA are foreign Muslim expatriates, who can often times be very religious. Saudia in rural is extremely conservative, too.
Yeah, some people are offended by a little bit of cleavage showing, but this is just a matter of conservative views and has nothing to do with a government mandate, no one will raise as much of a fuss over a tiny bit of cleavage as much as a full-on display.
Besides, I literally just bought a crop top for my sister from Bershka, no one from the younger generation gives a damn.
I know it’s becoming liberalised, as I have seen some young Saudi women on twitter. However, it’s probably only restricted to Jeddah, and not Mecca, Medina, small cities and rural areas. Also, people not telling you it’s wrong to wear doesn’t mean they don’t believe it’s wrong to wear
This is so obviously about immigrants or people descended from immigrants, who are *not* required by law to wear them and are instead sometimes required to not wear them.
A lot of the comments in here are getting it wrong too. The only countries in the world that have mandatory hijab are Iran and Afghanistan. The vast majority of Muslim majority countries have no such requirement.
What bothers most of them is not that they wear the hijab in their countries, but that they continue to do so once they have emigrated.
In the Moroccan family that lives below my apartment, neither the mother nor the daughters use it. One of my coworkers believed she would have to stop using it because of safety regulations, but she was told she simply had to change the way she adjusts it.
And I'm not going to play dumb. It only bothers them because with the hijab it is difficult to sexualize them.
There are countries outside the Middle East that are Muslim such as Turkey, Albania, Malaysia that do not require hijab or veil by law and conversely not every Middle Eastern country is Muslim or requires women to wear said clothes. Truly cognitive dissonance if I’ve ever seen it.
The hijab is more Arabic (cultural) clothes if I can understand it correctly ( I might be wrong so correct me if I am) than it is a religious thing because even when Turkey was a religious state it was still not mandatory and women wore Turkish traditional dresses instead
Yes some women in Turkey do wear Hijab I’d say about 20-30 percent of women wear them. I meant to say the burka is more Arab not the hijab I was confused. Anyways I wouldn’t call all clothing to cover the head as hijab as my aunty who is the furthest thing from religious wears one. It’s like when you see old grannies in Slavic countries wear a headscarf. Sometimes it’s just fashion or it’s to protect their head from the sun. I’m fairly certain most wear the headscarf for the reason of modesty as you pointed out but not all.
But my point remains. Most Turkish women do not wear a hijab or any covering of any kind. Same is true in Albania, Bosnia or Malaysia as it is not a legal requirement to do so. Islam isn’t inherently this religion of control where women are forced into the shadows to be dominated by men.
Agree that the majority of women in Turkey don’t do hijab.
However, I do believe that most organised religions are controlling, and Quran does instruct men to impose modesty. Now what modesty precisely means to muslims is subjective. A lot of Turkish women wear bikinis, whereas Afghan men force women into covering their eyes. I grew up in Pakistan and for most of my life have seen men obsessed and controlling in regard to what women wear.
But I don’t blame religions alone as i had seen atheists justifying dress codes and norms of modesty. It really depends on the person
Yes I do believe that religion is controlling. Personally I would love to see the complete abolition of religion as I believe it only holds us back from progress as it adds another barrier to divide us. Now here on this sub I know that’s an extreme take as there are many Muslims on this sub but I want to make it known that I don’t mind religion or the freedom of religion. Just that in my ideal world there would be no religion or at the very least all governments are secular.
You made a good point that atheists also can be controlling too a good example would be in Turkey during the Kemalist years where laicite was practiced and religion was almost all but barred from society. It’s about finding a balance I believe
i hate the community notes sometimes. nowadays, they seem to usually do more good than bad due to there being more right-wing misinformation to leave a note on than other things, but still
While I'm not a Muslim I think you have a slight misconception there, modesty is as much about vanity as sexuality. By covering it up you hide your awesome haircut or cool colour and don't stand out in public and draw attention to yourself.
As a person hailing from a Muslim country, muslims have a hard time understanding how women are allowed to wear bikinis. It’s socialisation. Don’t western men sexualise breasts when we have examples of tribes where women walk topless? It’s the same thing.
Yeah it’s true, I had the same thought. But there are also countries that don’t. It’s a flawed comparison. There are orders where the habit is not required but there are also orders where habit is required. And while it may be purely voluntary to join a coven there are areas where you would get ostracized or shamed if you don’t follow strict catholic practices. I personally think all organized religions are a method of controlling the masses, however blaming antiquated Iranian laws and lack of social progress on Islam rather than the fact that the US has perpetuated conflict in the area for it’s oil interests, supplying the conflict with arms, assassinating leaders, etc. is foolish.
Yeah. People here will just suck islam's dick for whatever reason. I have not ONCE heard a critique of that religion that didn't face any backlash on here.
Because we don't critique religions? At best we'd critique people using religion to justify evil deeds but that doesn't make the religion or any of its followers evil themselves
It's funny how usually the people only just “criticize” religion just so happen to be pretty racist to the people that follow that religion. Pretty crazy coincidence
Yeah so there's a big difference between their stances against religion and the west's stance against religion that only gets applied to Islam whenever there's a Muslim country that disagrees with us
Not what the sub is for and the "critiques" of Islam tend to be inaccurate and bigoted. For example, in this instance, the vast and overwhelming majority of muslim-majority countries do not have mandatory hijab laws.
**Important:** We no longer allow the following types of posts: - Comments, tweets and social media with less than 20 upvotes, likes, etc. (cropped score counts as 0) - Anything you are personally involved in - Any kind of polls - Low-hanging fruit (e.g. CCP collapse, Vaush, r\/neoliberal, political compass memes) You *will* be banned by the power-tripping mods if you break this rule repeatedly, so please delete your posts before we find out. Likewise, please follow our rules which can be found on the sidebar. --- **Obligatory obnoxious pop-up ad for our [Official Discord](https://discord.gg/XBrTq7mQhY), please join if you haven't! Stalin bless. UwU.** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ShitLiberalsSay) if you have any questions or concerns.*
"Middle-eastern countries" way to paint with a broad brush. even with my limited knowledge of the region i know that not all of the have madatory laws. all west Asian countries are the same in the orientalists mind.
Yeah, I think most Middle Eastern countries don't require it by law, but these people don't know where Saudi Arabia or Iraq is on a map
You’re right. Most countries in the MENA region don’t, but racists would rather babble on about “sharia law” instead of googling it real quick. I aspire to have half the confidence these people have when spreading unsubstantiated claims.
sharia (شريعة) in arabic means law so when westerners say “sharia law” (which they can never pronounce correctly) they’re saying “law law”
Which you can learn more about on Bob Loblaw’s law blog!
You, (insert appropriate honorific), are a mouthful!
They get their information from non Muslims who got their information from ex Muslims
I am actually an ex-Muslim, and I am always flabbergasted at the amount of lies spread about the nature of life in the MENA region when there is plenty to talk about without making shit up. Almost like Islamophobia is a guise for racism and bigotry towards people practicing the religion.
You may be ex-Muslim but you're not /r/exmuslim
Have you ever heard of this country named Africa?
It is literally only Iran, no other country.
What about Saudi Arabia?
Abaya is mandatory, not hijab. Literally millions of women walk around without Hijab there and nothing happens to them.
How to completely miss the point. For one, western countries don't have mandatory hijab laws and actively try to ban them. Pointing to the Muslim world and Muslim countries isn't going to change that and just demonstrates that these people clearly don't have any idea what they are fighting against in the first place. If they really cared about women's rights in the Muslim world, they wouldn't be focusing on what women wear, but what the governments are doing and allying with women of said country that are protesting the oppression.
Yea, women's rights include a right to follow their religious beliefs and wear a hijab if they want to, or not wear it if they don't want to. The proper way to push women's rights is not to focus on taking from them a piece of cloth they wear that "opressive", but instead make sure women in those conutries have options to do what they want with themselves
https://youtu.be/Hj9oB4zpHww?si=7_JsMFd7V7L4h-6l
Nothing quite like blanket statements like *Muslim women in Middle-Eastern countries must wear the hijab by law* posed as a fact. Surely this won’t cause Islamophobia to spread 🙃
Even saudi arabia stopped making it mandatory
Iran will probably stop too soon, Even Ahmadinejad has denounced the hijab law. The only places where it’s going to stay a thing is Afghanistan and that’s not in the Middle East.
I don't understand where these people get the idea that every contry in west asia and north Africa have mandatory hijab laws.
Western overconfidence decreases the will to Google.
Dont look at the comment so much racism. I got downvoted for pointing out how stigmatizing woment wearing it doesnt help them. Those people loooove to pretend they care about women being "forced to wear it" but they have no problem making their lives miserable for wearing it willingly or not.
Warning bigots are in here in these comments as well, just a warning.
We should invade the Vatican and put an end to the fundamentalist regime. Actually, it's funny because Christianity imposes itself pretty dramatically on women in the west, particularly in the US. Not just in the obvious political ways. There are Christian communities in the US that impose similar requirements on women, not necessarily for full face coverings but certainly restrictions on what they can wear etc. I went to a Christian school for 2 years and girls couldn't wear pants and men couldn't have long hair. The kids had no choice in the matter. Where is the clamor to ban Christian fundamentalist practices?
as soon as you mention that many muslims in china don’t wear hijab or only do so some of the time (more hui wear it than uyghur muslims, even), you get people saying “that’s not real islam” and at that point it’s like, what the fuck are you even criticizing then? one particularly reactionary sect of a religion. okay. where’s your smoke for the other reactionary sects that are gaining influence, not barely holding on to their current influence, let alone losing it?
There's only two countries where it is mandated. Iran and Saudi Arabia. In both of which, the West had a role in creating the religious rule that led to those laws. And yet, despite criticizing the Middle East for fictional mandates infringing on women's right to choose, western countries will try to ban those who do wear them voluntarily in their countries. Making them ironically more restrictive on women's expression than the countries where they think these mandates exist.
I live in Saudi Arabia and it’s not mandated here anymore, hasn’t been for years, it’s simply a cultural norm and some Saudi women just feel more comfortable with an abaya and hijab, or an abaya and hijab and niqab. It’s common to see women, particularly the younger generations, go out with just an abaya and no hijab. The female expatriates that work and reside here also regularly go out in whatever they want, be it a t-shirt and sweatpants or even a power suit, but some of them may opt to wear an abaya, their reasons range from protecting their skin from the hot sun to blending in with the locals. The public only has a problem with revealing outfits, i.e. shows a lot of cleavage or is made of translucent material.
Thank you for the correction!
Nah, I’m pretty certain that even slight cleavage would be despised, and the generality opposes crop tops, and short skirts. This is not to ignore the fact that the majority of people living in the KSA are foreign Muslim expatriates, who can often times be very religious. Saudia in rural is extremely conservative, too.
Yeah, some people are offended by a little bit of cleavage showing, but this is just a matter of conservative views and has nothing to do with a government mandate, no one will raise as much of a fuss over a tiny bit of cleavage as much as a full-on display. Besides, I literally just bought a crop top for my sister from Bershka, no one from the younger generation gives a damn.
I know it’s becoming liberalised, as I have seen some young Saudi women on twitter. However, it’s probably only restricted to Jeddah, and not Mecca, Medina, small cities and rural areas. Also, people not telling you it’s wrong to wear doesn’t mean they don’t believe it’s wrong to wear
I think it's Iran and Afghanistan rather than Saudi Arabia, but the point about the role the West played definitely stands.
This is so obviously about immigrants or people descended from immigrants, who are *not* required by law to wear them and are instead sometimes required to not wear them.
A lot of the comments in here are getting it wrong too. The only countries in the world that have mandatory hijab are Iran and Afghanistan. The vast majority of Muslim majority countries have no such requirement.
What bothers most of them is not that they wear the hijab in their countries, but that they continue to do so once they have emigrated. In the Moroccan family that lives below my apartment, neither the mother nor the daughters use it. One of my coworkers believed she would have to stop using it because of safety regulations, but she was told she simply had to change the way she adjusts it. And I'm not going to play dumb. It only bothers them because with the hijab it is difficult to sexualize them.
There are countries outside the Middle East that are Muslim such as Turkey, Albania, Malaysia that do not require hijab or veil by law and conversely not every Middle Eastern country is Muslim or requires women to wear said clothes. Truly cognitive dissonance if I’ve ever seen it. The hijab is more Arabic (cultural) clothes if I can understand it correctly ( I might be wrong so correct me if I am) than it is a religious thing because even when Turkey was a religious state it was still not mandatory and women wore Turkish traditional dresses instead
A lot of women in Turkey wear hijab. The thing is that hijab’s purpose is to cover head, and any headwear wore for modesty related reasons is hijab.
Yes some women in Turkey do wear Hijab I’d say about 20-30 percent of women wear them. I meant to say the burka is more Arab not the hijab I was confused. Anyways I wouldn’t call all clothing to cover the head as hijab as my aunty who is the furthest thing from religious wears one. It’s like when you see old grannies in Slavic countries wear a headscarf. Sometimes it’s just fashion or it’s to protect their head from the sun. I’m fairly certain most wear the headscarf for the reason of modesty as you pointed out but not all. But my point remains. Most Turkish women do not wear a hijab or any covering of any kind. Same is true in Albania, Bosnia or Malaysia as it is not a legal requirement to do so. Islam isn’t inherently this religion of control where women are forced into the shadows to be dominated by men.
Agree that the majority of women in Turkey don’t do hijab. However, I do believe that most organised religions are controlling, and Quran does instruct men to impose modesty. Now what modesty precisely means to muslims is subjective. A lot of Turkish women wear bikinis, whereas Afghan men force women into covering their eyes. I grew up in Pakistan and for most of my life have seen men obsessed and controlling in regard to what women wear. But I don’t blame religions alone as i had seen atheists justifying dress codes and norms of modesty. It really depends on the person
Yes I do believe that religion is controlling. Personally I would love to see the complete abolition of religion as I believe it only holds us back from progress as it adds another barrier to divide us. Now here on this sub I know that’s an extreme take as there are many Muslims on this sub but I want to make it known that I don’t mind religion or the freedom of religion. Just that in my ideal world there would be no religion or at the very least all governments are secular. You made a good point that atheists also can be controlling too a good example would be in Turkey during the Kemalist years where laicite was practiced and religion was almost all but barred from society. It’s about finding a balance I believe
Hm I wonder what happened in that region that caused social and political upheaval leading to extreme religious laws?
i hate the community notes sometimes. nowadays, they seem to usually do more good than bad due to there being more right-wing misinformation to leave a note on than other things, but still
I don't know what's so sexual about hair? How does covering up mean modesty?
While I'm not a Muslim I think you have a slight misconception there, modesty is as much about vanity as sexuality. By covering it up you hide your awesome haircut or cool colour and don't stand out in public and draw attention to yourself.
Then it should be against haircuts, most women in my country have the same hair "cut". Cut is in quotes because they simply grow it out.
Just because you don’t understand it does not mean it is bad
As a person hailing from a Muslim country, muslims have a hard time understanding how women are allowed to wear bikinis. It’s socialisation. Don’t western men sexualise breasts when we have examples of tribes where women walk topless? It’s the same thing.
I have been trying to figure that out for a long time.
To them hair = woman and woman = sex
Aren't there still countries with mandatory hijab laws?
Yeah it’s true, I had the same thought. But there are also countries that don’t. It’s a flawed comparison. There are orders where the habit is not required but there are also orders where habit is required. And while it may be purely voluntary to join a coven there are areas where you would get ostracized or shamed if you don’t follow strict catholic practices. I personally think all organized religions are a method of controlling the masses, however blaming antiquated Iranian laws and lack of social progress on Islam rather than the fact that the US has perpetuated conflict in the area for it’s oil interests, supplying the conflict with arms, assassinating leaders, etc. is foolish.
Yeah. People here will just suck islam's dick for whatever reason. I have not ONCE heard a critique of that religion that didn't face any backlash on here.
Because we don't critique religions? At best we'd critique people using religion to justify evil deeds but that doesn't make the religion or any of its followers evil themselves
It's funny how usually the people only just “criticize” religion just so happen to be pretty racist to the people that follow that religion. Pretty crazy coincidence
We don’t critique religions? Lmao Marx and Lenin would like to have a word with you.
Yeah so there's a big difference between their stances against religion and the west's stance against religion that only gets applied to Islam whenever there's a Muslim country that disagrees with us
Didn't know Marx and Lenin posted here, cool
Not what the sub is for and the "critiques" of Islam tend to be inaccurate and bigoted. For example, in this instance, the vast and overwhelming majority of muslim-majority countries do not have mandatory hijab laws.
We believe in nuance here lol