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Courage
in All Its Different Guises
We
are living in a time of crisis and in times of crisis women
everywhere resort to a kind of strength you never dreamed you owned.
Like the women who find themselves with the physical strength to
lift their child trapped under a heavy car, or the women who
struggle to keep their families together, against the odds..
Courage
comes in all kinds of guises. In
Australia
there are Muslim women who wear hijab as a political statement, a
feminist statement, a religious statement—or a combination of all
of these. For many non-Muslim Australians they epitomise the ‘poor
oppressed Muslim woman’ when they are nothing of the sort. Then we
have the ‘invisible Muslims’, the women and men who are not
easily recognisable by their dress or accent as being Muslims;
people who have varying degrees of religious attachment to Islam
just like Australian Christians. These days it takes courage to wear
hijab as the casual passer bye may automatically turn away from
you—contempt or pity—the reaction is the same—you become the
Other.
The
majority of Muslim women in
Australia
do not wear hijab—this also takes courage because in the eyes of
your ‘hijabi’ sisters you are often labelled as less
devout—you are certainly seen as less ‘authentic’. Often you
remain silent when you want to argue that the Islamic notion of
female modesty does not mean that you must cover your head—and
certainly not your entire face as with the nikab…
You remain silent because you know that the hijabis are the
ones facing the most overt hostility—the dirty looks, the rude
comments. The minority have become the public face of Islam—and
too often in the eyes of the media and perhaps in their own
minds—they are the authentic Muslims—the defenders of Islam.
(Extract from Speech
given at Islamic Women's Welfare Council - 2005 AGM)
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