I wish I could be surprised, but really I'm only just depressed: defenders of "virtue" in Saudi Arabia want to force women to cover their eyes if they are "too sexy." Apparently it's not enough for every other part of a woman to be covered -- even the eyes can be "too sexy" and thus "tempt" men, thus requiring that they be covered.
Tell me again whose "virtue" is being protected or promoted by such rules?
The announcement came days after the Saudi newspaper al-Watan reported that a Saudi man was admitted to a hospital after a fight with a member of the committee when he ordered his wife to cover her eyes. The husband was then stabbed twice in the hand.
The CPVPV [Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice] is Saudi's Sharia, Islamic law, executive arm and was founded in 1940 to ensure Islamic laws are not broken in public, yet over the years, the committee has been largely criticized over its human rights violations. ...
The committee, which only accepts and trains volunteers, has questionable powers on the Saudi street, as they operate under the supervision of the King himself.
Source: BikyaMasr
Conservative Muslims insist that women are being "respected" in Islam when they are forced to cover up, but how does it "respect" anyone to say that they are being immoral and must be punished if they aren't completely covered? Where is the "respect" for the human being as an individual, autonomous person? Where is the "respect" even for women generally when women have standards imposed upon them which men would never accept?
These sorts of rules presume that there are only two types of women (virtuous and sluts) and moreover that all the responsibility for men's reactions to women lies with women themselves. Both are not only wrong, but actively disrespectful -- both to men and to women, in fact. In the end, all this renders Islam itself a target of disrespect and scorn.
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