"Take your Islam and go!"

The world's media, across the spectrum, have been providing blanket coverage of protests in Iran, as they should, following the murder in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a healthy twenty-two year old woman, on 16 September 2022. She dared to show her hair from under the hijab every woman in Iran must wear. This is astounding, for it gives attention to a nation of "anti-Muslim bigots," people who oppose the hijab, and risk charges of "Islamophobia," for not siding with Islam. Social media is awash with condolences to her family and friends, and outrage at the presumption of those in power not only in Iran, but in Islam, that everyone will automatically submit.

It has been one-thousand-four-hundred years in coming: the strand of hair that broke the camel's back. After losing his daughter to yet another Iranian police murder of a woman in custody, Mahsa Amini's father had to face the affront of a mullah turning up at his daughter's funeral to say the Islamic last rites over her body. This mullah perfectly illustrates the amazing disconnect in the minds of those who want Islam: everyone whom Allah has favoured to be brought up Muslim wants to be Muslim, and wants to die Muslim — what else! It is inconceivable that a woman showing hair from under a hijab could possibly be making a statement against Islam; she is only a Muslim who is going astray, and would return to the straight path as soon as we command the right. That mullah, it would be safe to say, was genuinely perplexed that he should be hounded out by people who should be turning to him in their grief. Why would these people not want her to be saved from kufr?

Ah, yes. Kufr. Unbelief. Not being a Muslim. The heaviest chain on the deepest part of the Muslim's mind, so deep that the very idea can make a Muslim feel physically ill. "Don't die in kufr," a pained Sheikh Yasir Qadhi's wagging finger enjoined his audience. You do not urge people to not die in kufr, if there isn't an issue with people dying "in kufr." In the mess that Islam has reduced the once-mighty Iran to, Islam is more dead than the Islamic clergy could ever conceive of. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, it's more or less equally so, or well on its way to it. In Egypt, for example, al-Azhar's sheikhs get shouted down. Increasingly, to different degrees in different Muslim countries, "Don't die in kufr" scares fewer and fewer people. Amongst Muslims in the West, the "people of knowledge" are alarmed that a quarter of Muslims are unfazed by dying in kufr. They warn of Tsunamis of apostasy. They yell, "Your child's going to become an apostate!"

The Shari'a is unequivocal about the gravity of a lay Muslim not consulting, obeying and imitating a sheikh. "We hear and we obey," is the watchword the Qur'an determines for lay Muslims. In so many ways, big and small, Muslims increasingly defy this order. What they all amount to, never before so clearly articulated, is: "Take your Islam and go!" Me die in kufr? Bring it on![1]

The hijab is an instrument of oppression, as it has always been. It allows those who oppress to interfere with anyone and interrogate them as to their compliance with the prescribed standards for wearing it. Everyone to whom this restriction applies must eliminate all possibility of a single strand of hair escaping from under their headgear, and be constantly on their guard for it happening despite their best efforts. In other words, they must constantly police themselves. And Shari'a being Shari'a, anyone, man or woman, police or civilian, is enjoined to ensure such compliance.

We must not lose sight of the fact that the morality police are but one brutal arm of Shari'a. The family is another. Fathers and brothers kill daughters and sisters for a whole host of transgressions, including refusal to where the hijab, and not only in Iran. The hijab turns women into their own oppressors, while in no way diminishing the arbitrary abuse it makes them subject to. This is exactly how totalitarianism works. Even where the hijab is not compulsory, wearing it is flaunting Islamic oppression and making a virtue of it. It is grotesque to hear feminists, and even ex-Muslims, talk of the hijab as "a choice." A Hitler moustache is also a choice. ...Exactly.

Notes:

1. "Take your Islam and go!" is even better than "Russian ship, go f*ck yourself!"