Word: burqas
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...Belgium, Denmark and Singapore have taken similar steps. Britain has been both more relaxed about cultural differences and over-anxious about challenging unacceptable practices. Few Britons have realized that the hijab - now more widespread than ever - is, for Islamicist puritans, the first step on a path leading to the burqa, where even the eyes are gauzed over. I have interviewed young women who say they feel so wanton wearing only a headscarf that they will adopt the niqab. Now even 6-year-olds are put into hijabs. Western culture - it is true - is wildly sexualized and lacking in restraint...
...modern Muslim woman, I fast and pray; but I refuse to submit to the hijab or to an opaque, black shroud. On Sept. 10, 2001, I wrote a column in the Independent newspaper condemning the Taliban for using violence to force Afghan women into the burqa. It is happening again. In Iran, educated women who fail some sort of veil test are being imprisoned by their oppressors. Saudi women under their body sheets long to show themselves and share the world equally with men. Exiles who fled such practices to seek refuge in Europe now find the evil is following...
...There have been other warning signs, of course. But until that day at the beauty salon, I had ignored any hint of a return to 7th-century mores, preferring to savor a few extra weeks of denial before the government-issued burqa arrived at my doorstep. A month ago I met a few girlfriends for coffee at a caf? popular with young people. Upon lighting a cigarette, one of them was informed by the embarrassed owner that smoking is now illegal for women in caf?s. Now half the women I know don't go out for coffee anymore. An ingenious...
...times in the past year. "If I see a strange man in my neighborhood more than three times in a week, I know it's time to move," she says. She used to carry her AK-47 to work but was worried that the gun's silhouette under her burqa betrayed her identity. Now her Smith & Wesson pistol--a gift from coalition forces--is her only source of protection. "I want to stay and do my job," she says. "But I have an 8-year-old daughter. If the government can't protect me, I will have to leave...
...wasn't taking chances. During the three-year hunt for him, al-Zarqawi was a maddeningly elusive target--a master of disguise who could pass as a woman in a burqa one day, an Iraqi policeman the next. He traveled in groups of women and children to lower suspicion and frequently moved with ease through checkpoints in Iraq. Although military commanders believe they came close to capturing al-Zarqawi on at least half a dozen occasions in the past two years, few had reason to anticipate an imminent breakthrough. But military and intelligence officials in Washington, Baghdad and Amman tell...