Hijab Hit-Job: The Chicago Tribune Tosses Muslim Women Under the Bus

The Chicago Tribune, a publication normally as dedicated to championing women’s issues as anyone in the MSM, tossed Muslim women under the bus in the other day. A feature story by Patty Pensa, running under the headline “Many faces under the hijab; photographer aims to educate about those who wear Muslim headscarf,” managed to ignore all of the abuses that Muslim women suffer throughout the world while living under Sharia law, focusing instead on the relative freedom that some Muslim women living in the United States enjoy.

CAIR had to be thrilled with the publication of such misleading propaganda in a once-great American newspaper. For the rest of us, and especially for the millions of abused Muslim women living abroad, this latest example of creeping-Sharia in the United States should be very disturbing.

Pensa’s story championed a book recently published by Muslim photographer Sadaf Syed entitled: “iCover: A Day in the Life of a Muslim-American COVERed Girl.” In it, Syed shows successful American Muslim women who enjoy happy and free lives while living in this country, and who also choose to wear the hijab. For Syed, the hijab isn’t a symbol of oppression at all, it’s rather a celebration of her religion, at least as far as she understands her religion (and she obviously doesn’t understand it very well).

That’s great – for Syed and the women she profiles – but nowhere in the Trib’s story does Pensa even hint at the possibility that Syed’s experience and her views about the hijab don’t come close to representing Islam’s official views about women in theory or in practice.

Nowhere does Pensa suggest that the reason a woman like Sadaf Syed can tailor make Islam to suit her own ends is because she lives in a nation that has thus far been successful in resisting Sharia law. Instead Syed’s naïve views on Islam and the role of Muslim women are summed up neatly in this quote:

“After 9/11, I noticed people were confused, not wanting to learn but just going on what they see in the media,” said Syed, 36. “The impression it leaves is … that Muslim women are being oppressed, suppressed, abused and forced on — everything that Islam does not stand for. Islam respects women. We are a love-thy-neighbor people just like the other Abrahamic religions.”

“Love thy neighbor?” Somebody needs to read her Quran. Muslims are encouraged to love their neighbors so long as those neighbors are devout Muslim males or obedient Muslim females. Other than that, neighbors are strongly encouraged to watch their backs.

Sadaf Syed and Patty Pensa might get a little perspective about Islam if they spent a little time talking to someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the courageous ex-Muslim Somali native who endured genital mutilation as a child and who now lives under death threats for daring to speak about against the misogyny inherent to Islam.

Need we be reminded that Islamic nations that follow Sharia law allow and encourage husbands to beat disobedient wives, require four witnesses before rape can be proved and forbid women from appearing in public uncovered, from driving a car and from walking about without a suitable escort? Syed and Pensa might be able to meld feminism and Islam in America today, but only because this is still America. The Chicago Tribune owes more to its readers than this bit of hopeful fluff. They should have made it clear that when it comes to how Muslim women live, Sadaf Syed’s experience is the exception, not the rule.