"If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution."
Emma Goldman
On last December 10, Muhammad Parvez, originally from
Pakistan, killed his 16- year-old daughter, Aqsa
Parvez, because she no longer wished to wear the
Hijab. This crime, committed in the Toronto area, is
the first of its kind in Canada. In Pakistan it would
be considered an honour killing.
When this news broke, how many Canadian women who wear
the Islamic scarf wanted to tear theirs off, even for
a short period of time, in order to express their
indignation at such a crime.
How many hijab-wearing Muslim women in Canada are
prepared to organize a march in honour of Aqsa
Parvez’s memory? How many of these women are prepared
to remove their headscarves and march bareheaded? How
many would have enough awareness to measure the
alienation created by the veil?
This is a perfect opportunity for those Muslim women
who do wear the headscarf to disengage it from the
amalgam, which clouds it, and imbue the Hijab with new
meaning. Removing the headscarf during such a memorial
march appears to me to be a totally appropriate
gesture in the circumstances because it coincides
perfectly with the faith of the believers. I would
encourage them to pursue this striking symbol in order
to underline what they truly believe: that God alone
gives life and only God can take it away. Did not the
Muslim Prophet say that a person who kills another
kills all mankind? I also encourage these women to
remove the veil to show that they are as free to take
it off, as they are to wear it.
Many veiled women are quick to take advantage of media
opportunities in order to stress that wearing the veil
is a question of free will. I ask them to invoke this
same free will when removing it in a good cause.
Aqsa’s murder should convince those among them who
think they owe no one an explanation that all women do
not enjoy the same freedom.
Aqsa’s murder seems to me to be as important as the
Polytechnic massacre. No one is better placed to
denounce it than veil-wearing Muslims who remove those
veils. Whether they wear it again afterwards or remain
forever bareheaded is their business. What is
important is that they leave their mark on the
collective imagination by such a libertarian gesture.
The same gesture that cost a 16-year-old girl her
life.
If even only three or four Muslim women respond to
this invitation, Aqsa will not have lived and fought
in vain.
If I were a Muslim woman that’s what I would do,
because whoever killed Aqsa also killed something in
me.
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