The Chicago Tribune published last month an interview with six Chicago-area women “about why they wear the hijab…” While the Tribune emphasized statements like, “The hijab can be a very American assertion of the right to self-expression. It can be flat-out feminist,” many women in the Islamic world are chafing under its yoke and risk their lives to remove it. As Asra Nomani, co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement, has previously explained the hijab is used by Islamists to enforce their ideology and an expression of an honor-shame social system at odds with U.S. notions of liberty, “we have to be smart about the ideology that is putting this idea into the world that a woman must be defined by her idea of modesty, that she is the vessel for honor in a community. And I believe that we have to be very pragmatic, too, about the consequence of this. Women in Iran and Saudi Arabia are jailed, punished and harassed if they don't cover...(Read Full Post)