HUMAN EVENTS: Russia appears to be taking serious moves to combat the “radicalization” of Muslims within its border.
Recent pro-Islamic reports are complaining that Russia is banning the Islamic hijab—the headdress Islamic law requires Muslim women to wear—and, perhaps even more decisively, key Islamic scriptures, on the charge that they incite terrorism.
In the words of Arabic news site Elaph, “Russia is witnessing a relentless war on the hijab. It began in a limited manner but has grown in strength, prompting great concern among Russia’s Muslims.”
The report continues by saying that women wearing the hijab are being “harassed” especially in the “big cities”; that they are encountering difficulties getting jobs and being “subject to embarrassing situations in public areas and transportation. The situation has gotten to the point that even educational institutions, including universities, have issued decrees banning the wearing of the hijab altogether.” Moscow’s Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University appears mentioned as one of the schools to ban the donning of the hijab on its premises, specifically, last September (the
New York Times bemoaned an earlier instance of anti-hijab sentiment in 2013).
While this move against the hijab may appear as discriminatory against religious freedom, the flipside to all this—which perhaps Russia, with its significant Muslim population is aware of—is that, wherever the Islamic hijab proliferates, so too does Islamic supremacism and terrorism. Tawfik Hamid, a former aspiring Islamic jihadi, says that “the proliferation of the hijab is strongly correlated with increased terrorism…. Terrorism became much more frequent in such societies as Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, and the U.K. after the hijab became prevalent among Muslim women living in those communities.”
Read on and comment » | Raymond Ibrahim | Tuesday, November 25, 2014
