France's Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has just appointed a committee to draft a law to ban the Islamist hijab (headgear) in state-owned establishments, including schools and hospitals. The decision has drawn fire from the French "church" of Islam, an organization created by Raffarin's government last spring. Germany is facing its own hijab problem, with a number of Islamist organizations suing federal and state authorities for "religious discrimination" because of bans imposed on the controversial headgear. In the United States, several Muslim women are suing airport-security firms for having violated their First Amendment rights by asking them to take off their hijab during routine searches of passengers.
All these and other cases are based on the claim that the controversial headgear is an essential part of the Muslim faith and that attempts at banning it constitute an attack on Islam.
That claim is totally false. The headgear in question has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. It is not sanctioned anywhere in the Koran, the fundamental text of Islam, or the hadith (traditions) attributed to the Prophet.
This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shiite community.
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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.
Sadr's neo-hijab made its first appearance in Iran in 1977 as a symbol of Islamist-Marxist opposition to the Shah's regime. When the mullahs seized power in Tehran in 1979, the number of women wearing the hijab exploded into tens of thousands.
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Last year, the Islamist regime authorized a number of colleges for girls in Tehran to allow students to discard the hijab while inside school buildings. The experiment was launched after a government study identified the hijab as the cause of "widespread depression and falling academic standards" and even suicide among teenage girls.
The Ministry of Education in Tehran has just announced that the experiment will be extended to other girls schools next month when the new academic year begins. Schools where the hijab was discarded have shown "real improvements" in academic standards reflected in a 30% rise in the number of students obtaining the highest grades.
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The delicious irony of militant Islamists asking "Zionist-Crusader" courts in France, Germany and the United States to decide what is "Islamic" and what is not will not be missed. The judges and the juries who will be asked to decide the cases should know that they are dealing not with Islam, which is a religious faith, but with Islamism, which is a political doctrine.
