Summayyah Meehan\u2019s article<\/a> for the Khaleej Times<\/span> starts out like this: \u201cThe headscarf, or hijab, is just a small piece of fabric but the controversy that often surrounds it is immeasurable. Muslim women who wear the hijab are often socially stigmatised, in non-Muslim and sometimes even Muslim countries, as being mindless drones who are under the thumbs of their domineering husbands.\u201d<\/p>\n Agreed.<\/p>\n But then Meehan proceeds to educate us why Muslim women really wear the headscarf: \u201cThis could not be further from the truth. The reason Muslim women wear the hijab is because Allah commands us to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n Really? All Muslim women who wear the headscarf wear it because of everybody\u2019s favorite sura? Not a single one<\/span> of wears it for political or traditional reasons? Not a single woman in Saudia Arabia or Iran wears it because the law tells them to?<\/p>\n This kind of generalization leads to outright ignoring of the facts later in the article, but I\u2019ll touch on that later.<\/p>\n Meehan makes a good point that advertisements for movies are full of scantily-dressed women with \u201cbulging bosoms and voluptuous bodies and hair\u201d that \u201cturn thinking and living souls into nothing more than sexual objects.\u201d She contrasts this with the idea that women who are \u201cdressed modestly and her hair is properly covered, she can only be seen for what she truly is, which is an intelligent woman with ideas and a voice of her own. She is not a piece of meat to be drooled over and defamed.\u201d If this were true, and being \u201cproperly covered\u201d allows others to see only an \u201cintelligent woman with ideas and a voice of her own\u201d, why is it that Meehan had to write an article slamming people for assuming that Muslim women who cover their hair are \u201cmindless drones\u201d? Why is it that a woman who wears a headscarf is just as aware of and subject to sexual harassment?<\/p>\n From here, we travel to Meehan talking about how Islam liberated every single Muslim woman in the world. Don\u2019t get me wrong: I believe Islam and feminism (and humanism) are compatible and even synonymous. Nor am I insinuating that Islam didn\u2019t improve the situation of Arabian women at the time of its inception.<\/p>\n But Meehan wants us to believe that the world holds no more ills because of Islam. When stating the lot of pre-Islamic Arabian women, she tells us,<\/p>\n \u201cShe was not entitled to hold property and her husband could divorce her at his whim without compensating her. He could also simply throw her out of the home, not divorcing her, which meant she would spend the rest of her life in limbo unable to remarry. And she had no voice in her society either. Women were not even allowed to seek an education. All of this changed<\/span> when the Quran [sic] was revealed to the Last Prophet and women were given their rightful voices.\u201d [my emphasis]<\/p>\n So\u2026does that mean that none of this stuff happens in countries with predominantly Muslim populations, then? This article appeared in a Kuwaiti newspaper. Are we to assume that Kuwaiti women (who, by the way, only received the right to vote within the last three years) are never thrown out of their homes by vindictive husbands, are never ignored in societal debates, are never denied educations?<\/p>\n Meehan is writing from an American-in-Kuwaiti perspective. I can\u2019t decide whether she is also writing from a na\u00efve perspective or from willfully ignorant perspective. Because she lives and works in Kuwait, I have a hard time believing that she isn\u2019t aware of the trafficking<\/a> or domestic abuse<\/a> issues in Kuwait or the rest of the Gulf. To pretend that there isn\u2019t a problem doesn\u2019t make the problem go away.<\/p>\n \u201cWith the advent of Islam, women were able to vote, seek a divorce and receive alimony, get an education and have her own property amongst other things.\u201d<\/p>\n She is correct that Islam allows these things, but she is not correct in assuming that they are a \u201cgiven.\u201d Most women in the Gulf states were only recently (within the last twenty years) given the right to vote, and in most of Saudi Arabia, women still have no right to vote. Not to mention the social and cultural (not<\/span> Islamic) restrictions on women\u2019s travel, education, and divorce in not only the Gulf countries, but in other predominately Muslim states.<\/p>\n \u201cHey, now,\u201d you say. \u201cStop ragging on a sister. She\u2019s just trying to defend the hejab and Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n The defense of both hejab and Islam are admirable arguments. I\u2019m not disagreeing with the author on her main points. Meehan is correct: Islam isn\u2019t the problem, nor is hejab. The problem is articles like this one, which run a public relations campaign that glosses away problems Muslim women face, while trying to package the beauty of Islam to make it appear that the religion solves everybody\u2019s problems. In pretending that everything is shiny and happy, this article ignores real problems and real suffering of women who are Muslim and who may or may not wear the hejab.<\/p>\n The restrictions and hardship these women bear are not because of Islam, but because of governments and patriarchal societal systems that use Islam to further their own control. This argument shouldn\u2019t be about Islam; it should be about who is controlling it.<\/p>\n