NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 8, 2007
A woman's clothing
Should a man have the right to an opinion about how a woman dresses? We could argue about this all day, but the short answer is, yes. Women may obviously comment on what men wear, and I’m tired of conceding “rights” to people who do not recognize my own.An example is the Pakistani police woman, in Islamabad this last week, who found Maulana Abdul Aziz wearing a full-length burqa. She did not think this was an appropriate way for him to dress, and turned him over to her male colleagues for their opinion. A bit of background might be supplied at this point. The imam in question is very famous, at least in Pakistan. He is the firebrand who was (until very recently) leading prayers at the Lal Masjid, or “Red Mosque,” in that capital city of Islamabad. He, and his grey beard, have established themselves as cult figures, especially among Aziz’s students (all male), whose own sartorial practices include smart turbans, long beards, and a selection of weaponry. More than a thousand of them were arrested in Islamabad this last week, and many killed, in the course of a disagreement with the authorities that involved the use of substantial firepower on the government side. For comparison, imagine our Canadian authorities, with tanks and helicopters, fighting a pitched battle against several thousand armed choirboys and theological novices, under the instruction of some militant Dean, encamped at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Ottawa, a few blocks away from our Parliament buildings. Imagine them having taken umbrage against the exceedingly secular disposition of the Harper government, and demanding that the country be placed immediately under Canon Law, restricted to statutes of the 7th and 8th centuries. With rallies by Christian militants to support them, from St John’s to Victoria, after dozens had been killed in related riots in downtown Karachi, I mean Montreal. Can’t imagine that? Oh come on, try. This Aziz gentleman -- the one found wearing the burqa -- fancies himself the Mullah Omar of a Pakistan that might be ruled the way Afghanistan was by the Taliban. (There are several others contending for this honour.) He has never been shy in demanding armed resistance against the government of Pervez Musharraf. Those who find General Musharraf’s administration arrogant, corrupt, undemocratic, and so forth (I certainly do) might ask themselves in passing for whom they’d wish to vote. Musharraf or Aziz? It is not entirely clear which one would win a free election in Pakistan. You’d prefer some third candidate? So would I. Now, why would such a manly man, as Imam Aziz, be cross-dressing like that? A man who had just inspired so many of his followers to surrender their lives, to the steel of the Pakistan army, rather than surrender the Lal Masjid? An unusual moment, my reader must agree, to be coming out of the closet. Perhaps you have already guessed. This brave warrior for a “purified” Islam was in the act of fleeing the mosque. The noble “martyrdom” he had just enjoined upon his footsoldiers, was not the fate he had envisioned for himself. Unluckily for him, a detachment of female police were doing fairly thorough searches on the women of the mosque, whom the authorities had gallantly allowed to depart from the field of carnage -- all properly attired in black, head to toe, under humidex approaching 50 degrees Celsius. And ... well, how embarrassing! Not that men like Aziz embarrass easily. According to them, all is fair in war, if not in love, and I’m sure Aziz would grant himself a fatwa permitting cross-dressing at the most convenient moments. People who find suicide bombings against non-combatants to be acceptable methods for advancing the Islamist cause, can hardly be fastidious about escape tactics. Indeed, from what I’m able to discern, reading the blogs and emails of our allied soldiers fighting the Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan, this method of making oneself invisible is a common practice among them, and may well have been the method by which such glamorous figures as Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and the late Zarqawi, repeatedly slipped from imminent capture. In Britain, we learn, our enemy is now dressing in the lab coats of medical doctors from the National Health Service, having entered both the country and the NHS easily, with medical qualifications from Iraq, Jordan, India, and Saudi Arabia. Essentially the same tactic, and the same result, for they could expect no one to question their bona fides. Clothing is important, we should have more opinions about it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top