Devotion = Respect
For those of us, women and men, actively concerned with issues of gender equality and respect for the feminine, what message should we take from the contrasting image of Muslim Olympic female athletes competing in hijab and headdresses? Last week when we watched sprinter Ruqaya Al Ghasara from the country of Bahrain run her heart out in the 200 meter qualifying rounds dressed in a colorful – but full-bodied – hijab, what emotions sprang up first? Sympathy for what we perceive as a symbol of oppression? Admiration for her determination to compete despite being pressured to bear that kind of disadvantage? Frustration or even anger directed at countries that continue to persecute women? 
I’ll be the first to admit that I felt all these things, but it wasn’t until I read interviews with Al Ghasara and other female Muslim Olympic athletes, and realized that my emotional first-reactions were perhaps too black-and-white to accommodate what we’re seeing. Al Ghasara said in a Daily Mail interview, “I hope that my wearing the hijood [a kind of sporty-looking hijab] sports top will inspire other women to see that modesty or religious beliefs don’t have to be a barrier to participating in competitive sports.” And a Reuters article quotes Al Ghasara as adding, “You can choose to wear the hijab or not. For me it’s liberating.” The same article asserts that Al Ghasara “hopes to help quash the perception among many in the West that the veil is akin to repression.” Whoa, hit the brakes! That is exactly my perception of the burka (veil), and here is a Muslim woman basically telling me to stop pitying her and start respecting her.
It’s too simplistic (not to mention a bit of Western chauvinism) to write off Al Ghasara’s own statements to being “brainwashed” by the Muslim culture, as some bloggers have tried to do. If we are truly committed to the ideal of valuing the feminine and equalizing respect for both genders, we have to take Ms. Al Ghasara at her word. That means accepting her perspective, shared by many devout Muslim women, that her religion and culture are to be cherished and their traditional tenets to be obeyed and respected – with joy, not resentment.
Philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand pioneered a fledgling social science called psycho-epistemology, a core belief of which is that our thoughts are the roots of our emotions, and that we can therefore control our emotions by disciplining our thinking. (Whether this is a feminist approach is a though for a different article…) There is no more striking or glaring context to watch a Muslim woman wear a hijab than in the Olympic games, where her fellow athletes compete scantily clad in aerodynamic garb to gain every competitive advantage. But perhaps we need to re-think whether the Muslim veil is always a symbol of oppression, and to pause to inquire whether the particular woman wearing it feels oppressed, before reacting with emotions that might just be misplaced, though well-intentioned.
This kind of subtlety in thinking may be hard to come by in the Antelope Valley, however, with the American Islamic Institute of the Antelope Valley has to contend with events like last week’s speech in Lancaster by former Muslim Egyptian writer Nonie Darwish, whose book Now They Call Me An Infidel criticizes her native-born religion and culture with very broad strokes and has been accused of fanning the flames of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States. Acknowledging the anti-feminine and anti-woman elements of Islam remains a legitimate endeavor, yet it is just as important to respect the sincere adherents to that religion without dismissing them as brainwashed or anti-feminist.
By the way, after winning first place in her heat in round one and again in round two of the 200 meter sprint qualifying rounds, Al Ghasara ran well but failed to qualify for the finals in that event. She remains the only female athlete born in Bahrain ever to win gold in a major international competition after taking first place in the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, Qatar.
