Letter to the editor of the Canadian National Post Newpaper, by Pixie:
I am often offended by people wanting to "liberate" me. I feel like the Spanish have just come to the new world, and have stripped me of all my rights on the basis that they have decided I have but a primitive soul and so, they call me a savage for my beliefs. At least, one blogger, Kashmiri nomad does on your website that moderates MY comments, who writes, and quote [If the west cannot cannot civilise these savage woman and make them realise that Christ is their Lord and he died for their sins what hope do they have of ever becoming a part of the human race ?] Have I not two eyes that see, two hands that feel, a tongue that speaks? The newspapers want to take away my right to go to school, to have a job, to be seen as a human being.
This is a letter I wrote in response to an article in the National Post and I addressed it to msoupcoff@nationalpost.com.
Dear Editor,I wish you would read this, even more that you would take the time to investigate the story I am going to give you, so that I could continue to tell women from other countries that Western-born Canadian women are indeed free. You would justify my faith in my citizenship.
I learned of Aqsa Parvez’s brutal, unjustified, and barbaric murder from the pages of the Post. No faith can justify murder without a trial (even if it is justified by the law---and even under Islamic Law only if Miss Parvez had been married and committed adultery could she and her lover have been punished at all---and that, in brief, not without a trial and three physical witnesses). Such law cannot exist in Canada, as Muslims are a minority, and Islamic law can only be applied to Muslims. Aqsa Parvez’s killers are murderers and should be condemned as such. They are monsters. Aqsa Parvez deserves to hear a public outcry against their actions (whether they are adhering to the tribal customs of another country or not!). She does not deserve to have her life’s ending and its tragedy overshadowed by the controversial issue represented by a piece of cloth called “hijab” if we are to affect true change. If the writer does not want a two-tier system between Western and immigrant women in Canada the writer cannot make an issue out of hijab in the same breath, giving her killers a motive. Their actions were wrong whatever motivated them. In fact, they had no motive. There is not a word in the Qu’ran or Canadian law that allows murder for not adhering to a dress code. The girl deserves more than that after a tragic struggle for freedom. She deserves her murderers to be brought to justice, and that people be educated about what freedom really is. It is not a piece of cloth, but the right to choose it or the right to disregard it. Bring her killers to justice, then come learn about hijab and Islam so you can educate others of it.
I would like to call out the writer of “How Canada Let Aqsa Down” when they wrote [“you’ll never hear a feminist murmur a word of complaint about these girls’ lack of autonomy.”] I was just peacefully walking down the street the other day and this woman figured she had the right to judge me and called out: “Live you life!” I said, “Excuse me?” She said, “I hoped you’d say that.” I wear hijab. I hope that doesn’t discredit everything I am going to say. Your writer said ["The hijab marks those wearing it as chattel, leashed to their men as surely as if they were wearing a dog collar"] so maybe my words don't count, maybe I am "a non-person" who owns nothing of herself and is fully absorbed by "her men". This is a stereo-type a Muslim woman will have to deal with every day if she decides to wear a head-scarf. Why do I do it? Sometimes I wonder. Well, Western men assume I am treated as a non-person by Arab/Muslim men all my life, and so, always go out of their way to hold doors open for me, and bus drivers always wait even if I have to run all the way down the street. That wouldn't be a good reason for a Muslim woman trying to be modest would it??? And women think that I am too timid to respond to their stereo-types and actually answer their questions (because, as a Western woman herself not born Muslim, I know there’s a lot Western women don’t know about Muslims) so maybe I like the shock value??? “Why are you bringing your backwardness to Canada?” Some women come up to me and my friends. “I’m from Canada,” I say and watch them draw a blank. “I’m more Canadian than you-” would quip my friend to these women with a sly smile from underneath the folds of her hijab (with dark eyes, colouring and exotic beauty she looks unequivocally Arab while my blue eyes and paleness always give me away for the Norman-Anglophile I am even under my own pink hijab- “I’m Metis.” She then giggles her ridiculous sweet laugh. “My ancestors were here long before yours. Your people stole my land. Go back to your countries. Cuz I'm not moving to Saudi.”
My best friend Amanda is often with me. She wears jean mini shorts and a white tank top, with her own blonde hair running free in a pony-tail. She adores the latest styles of me and Um Abdullah’s black abayas, even though she would never wear one herself. I ask her if she ever feels uncomfortable being with me, because people stare so much. She replies that she was afraid when I first started wearing hijab, that my new Muslim friends would think she was a slut for wearing tank tops. We smile, because we know women and men are the same everywhere. People are always afraid of what they don’t know. It is the job of the media to educate and relieve fear by information, not to spread the stereo-types that injure another citizen’s chances of employment, public safety, and education. I love my best friend Amanda. After 9/11 I decided to wear hijab. She supported me by walking down the streets of our small town of Sooke, B.C (where weeks before I had had my scarf torn off, been called a murderer, and Taliban by strangers that were once my neighbours) sporting a black Halloween robe that she deemed abaya-esque with pink rhinestones glue-gunned on the back to spell out “I AM NOT SUPPRESSED” in support of my decision. She said, “if it had been anybody else but my [name withheld], I would have been worried about your decision, thought someone had forced you to do it. But no one can force you to do anything, so I know this is right for you.” I would die for her right to wear a mini-skirt, because she would do the same for me to wear a head-scarf, just as I got beat up when I was little with my best friend Fallon Hagreen by a group of wannabe Neo-Nazi punks in the same town because I thought it wasn’t fair her to get beat up alone and to have someone hate her just because she was Jewish. Fallon taught me about the holocaust, how the Nazi’s slowly took away the freedom of the Jews in Germany, and the terrible things that were done to them, and I was proud that we were both Canadian, and believed in the freedom of all people’s to believe what they want as long as they don’t use that freedom to take away the rights of others’. In Iran, I would be forced to wear hijab. In Afghanistan, I would have been hidden behind a chador with a mesh screen common in that region and in Pakistan (burka is the wrong word for the dress-code enforced by the Taliban there-burqa is what the Bedouin women in Sohar in Oman wear). I would rebel against this. I don’t believe any human being can be forced to believe in something. Aqsa Parvez’s father was not adhering to the Qu’ran or any hadith in Islam when he murdered his own daughter. Compassion is one of the most compelled aspects of Islam, and the Qu’ran says that instead of saying “Listen to me!” like a whiny brat or control freak, a Muslim should say, “Look upon me,” and live their own life without judgement as that would be the best example to someone who is truly in error. There is a story in Islam that said there were two men. One prayed every day, gave charity, and did everything required of him as a Muslim. The other never prayed, drank, cursed, but still knew in his heart, that his actions were wrong, and that he loved God (Allah.) One day the good man came up to the one who was rarely good, and said, “You don’t believe in God. You will go to Hell.” The good man went to Hell despite all the good he had done, and the other, to paradise. At his judgement, the good man asked God why. “Because you stole something that belonged to me,” Allah responded. “Judgement is mine alone.”
I don’t believe hijab can ever be made a law, because you cannot force someone to believe in Judaism, or Christianity, Nazism, or Islam if they don’t. Wearing hijab is a confirmation of beliefs, like christening in Christianity. Your writer wrote [“Multiculturalists would have us believe that the hijab is merely a religious symbol, like the Sikh kirpan or the Christian cross, freely embraced by the girls wearing them. I have argued before in these pages that the hijab, however benign-seeming, is still one end of a female-submissive spectrum that ends in the burqa, a garment virtually all Canadians find antithetical to our values.”] If someone forced me to put on the chador of Afghanistan they would have to cut me up to fit me into it (because I have found nothing in the Qu’ran my faith is founded on, to justify the Taliban’s laws against art and laughing, and suppression of women.) But someone else would have to cut out my tongue to silence me speaking out for the women that DO want to keep their veils (there are a minority and I know two-who volunteer to pay for their own car being towed and to be fit in the back of a patrol car driven to the station where a female officer is present before presenting their driver’s licence). They know they are a minority, and volunteer to go out of the way and pay the costs of their beliefs themselves. My opinion: those that don’t want to pay for their own car being towed? Shut-up, move, or adapt. You are a minority. I understand your frustration, but you cannot force your beliefs on others. I don’t want someone to put a veil on my sister, or hijab on my friend, to whom it is just a piece of cloth, and thus, would be a meaningless abuse of power. But I don’t want to see someone take away my right to wear my hijab in school, at work, or on the street safely, the right of someone who has fought for human rights and freedom, in this country, and in others, her whole life. I don’t deserve my rights to leave the home, to work, and go to school to be taken away for a piece of cloth; Aqsa did not deserve to have the same rights and more to be taken away over a square of fabric. I face prejudice every day, but I am proud I live in a country where I have the freedom to walk down the street still dressed as I choose. By the way, I have no real family and I am not married yet. I was given an ultimatum by my own family, as many Muslim-convert girls are: take off that scarf of get out of the house. I was lucky. I was old enough, and educated enough to work. My friend, Um Abdullah, was not so fortunate. She could not afford life on her own, but was willing to live on the street and go hungry, all for the freedom of her right to wear hijab. You said: [“If public schools, which are supposedly secular, had banned hijabs as France did, along with all other religious paraphernalia, in order to create a level social Canadian playing field, Aqsa would have had Canada on her side”] Canada would have lost Aqsa as surely as she is lost now. Do you honestly think a father like her own would have let her go to a school where she could not wear hijab anymore than he would have let her go to school not wearing one at a school where hijab is allowed? Aqsa would have disappeared from public education just the same, and women like me could not pursue university in Canada. I am not hurting anyone by wearing my scarf. Protect my right to wear it. Protect the right of women who don’t want to wear it. It is the dream of Um Abdullah and myself, to set up a shelter for girls like ourselves, and Aqsa, who need a place to live in safety from their families while continuing their education and maintaining their beliefs. To hijab or not to hijab is not a question we should be asking at the time of Aqsa’s death. It should be focussed on giving girls in similar situations other options beyond the simple death of self, and death or dismissal of body. No one should be forced to make that decision in a country that is truly free.
Sincerely and respectfully yours, [name withheld]
P.S I expect a respectful reply.
(No reply was ever given)
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