I now know I'm right about little girls and the hijab.....

[PosieComeHereMyPreciousParker]

talking to a beautiful Somali lady today(they all have hollywood smiles don't they, bloody genetic miracles!!) and she confirmed that whilst her 5 & 7 year old dds don't cover their heads she gets harassed and pressured by men at the mosque that her dds should cover. She said that whilst she doesn't because she loves her dds hair, other women do cover their very young dds. She said the men also say that unless they do it from very young they will not do it when they are the right age!

So it's not only about copying Mummy, just like the rise of the burka it's a renewed stick to beat women with.

Addicted, I was told by a Muslim woman...is she lying?

Women cover to protect men from temptation, how is that naything other than prejudice? Treating a woman's hair, not a man's, as a sexual 'ornament'.

Now perhaps 1000 years ago it was better for a woman to be a Muslim, got to have been better than being here raped by Vikings....but through different struggles and challenges Western women have ended up with a much better deal. Throughout the West we have more rights in court, more credibility at work and so on. The West is still not perfect but we are secular, at least religion has it's place which is not creating law.

A muslim woman told you Islam was prejudiced?

'The West is not perfect but we are secular' - well at least this statement is true, but not sure if today's society is something we should be proud of...

Conversations to do with religion are always much more complex than anything that can be covered on a thread. Unfortunately I don't have the time to explain every nuance to you, but I hope that you get the opportunity to do a bit more digging, and maybe talk to a few more muslim women (i know many professional, well educated muslim women that might be able to enlighten you some more).

Good Luck.

No A Muslim woman told me that she is pressured by men at the mosque to cover her dd's hair, they are 5 and 7 (or 3 and 5, can't remember) and not yet for her one year old.

I'm sure Muslim women educated or otherwise don't think about oppression everytime they put on their headscarf.

pedantic again: the Viking's weren't raping and pillaging here 1000 years ago, and Christians were just about to go to the "Holy Land" and rape Muslim women.
As you were.

And for the scriptural record: "The Koran is addressed to all Muslims, and for the most part it does not differentiate between male and female. Man and woman, it says, "were created of a single soul," and are moral equals in the sight of God. Women have the right to divorce, to inherit property, to conduct business and to have access to knowledge.

Since women are under all the same obligations and rules of conduct as the men, differences emerge most strongly when it comes to pregnancy, child-bearing and rearing, menstruation and, to a certain extent, clothing...

Certainly, the Koran requires them to behave and dress modestly - but these strictures apply equally to men. Only one verse refers to the veiling of women, stating that the Prophet's wives should be behind a hijab when his male guests converse with them."

So, Posie, your issue is with your local Mosque rather than Islam per se?

Perhaps the violence suggested against women, suggested in the Koran, and the ripping the unborn child from the womb was what made me think The Koran was anti women.

I don't know where you get you information on Vikings either....but they were here until the 12th Century.

Not raping and pillaging though. They were settled by the time Cnut was on the throne (although there was a slight altercation with Harald Hardraada in 1066).

You are fully aware that the Koran is no more anti-women than the Bible.

Application is far worse though isn't it.

And you're right you are pedantic, quite irrelevantly, as the point was it was probably better to be a Muslim woman than an English/Engel whatever.

We history teachers do tend to be quite pedantic about history. And as I say, it was worse to be a Muslim woman as they were being invaded and raped by the Christians.

Christianity is 2000 years old. In those 2000 years it has done its fair share of mutilation of women. The Inquisition tortured thousands of women for example. The witch-hunts? Catholics burning Protestants? protestants burning Catholics? Stoning for adultery? The removal of breasts was a common punishment. It is within living memory that the Church was also ripping children from the wombs of unmarried mothers.

No-one on MN is defending the extreme "Islamic" practices that occur in some parts of the world. Much of own my voluntary work for Amnesty in the 1990s was to campaign against the Taliban and its oppression of women. We are all aware of the monstrous things that are being done in the name of Allah, just as there are monstrous things being done in the name of God (campaigning against contraception in AIDS ravaged Africa anyone?). I personally don't think that the wearing of the hijab is a sign that those Muslim women who CHOOSE to wear it are oppressed.