Dangerous Hair!

CAIR has succeeded in intimidating a Tennessee public high school into changing their dress code to allow the Muslim headscarf.

CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee (AP) — A public high school changed its dress code to allow religious headscarves after a national civil rights group for Muslims complained to the principal on behalf of a student. A spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations said Emily Smith, 18, a senior at Chattanooga’s East Ridge High School, wore her headscarf, or hijab, on campus for the first time Thursday. Smith said that although friends and a few teachers offered congratulations, “I wanted to keep it as low-key as possible.”
Khadija Athman, civil rights manager for the Washington, D.C.-based council, said the group sent the school principal a letter January 6, three days after the student e-mailed the council asking about her rights. The letter said that as a Muslim, the student is “required to cover her hair in public. Ms. Smith stated that despite numerous efforts to explain to you the importance of the headscarf in her faith, you always found an excuse to hinder her.” The letter said religious headscarves are protected by the Constitution and laws against discrimination in a public school. Rick Smith, an assistant superintendent for Hamilton County schools, said the school had banned all head wear, but the principal agreed to allow Emily Smith’s hijab after attorneys were consulted. “This particular item was a little different because it is a religious garment,” Rick Smith said. But as Amir Taheri makes quite clear in this article from 2003, the hijab is not a religious garment at all. It’s a political statement. And that, of course, is why CAIR is so active in pushing for its legitimization. All these and other cases are based on the claim that the controversial headgear is an essential part of the Muslim faith and that attempts at banning it constitute an attack on Islam. That claim is totally false. The headgear in question has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. It is not sanctioned anywhere in the Koran, the fundamental text of Islam, or the hadith (traditions) attributed to the Prophet.

This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shiite community. Sadr’s idea was that, by wearing the headgear, Shiite women would be clearly marked out, and thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian gunmen who at the time controlled southern Lebanon.
Sadr’s neo-hijab made its first appearance in Iran in 1977 as a symbol of Islamist-Marxist opposition to the Shah’s regime. When the mullahs seized power in Tehran in 1979, the number of women wearing the hijab exploded into tens of thousands.
In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that “scientific research had shown that women’s hair emitted rays that drove men insane” (sic). To protect the public, the new Islamist regime passed a law in 1982 making the hijab mandatory for females aged above six, regardless of religious faith. Violating the hijab code was made punishable by 100 lashes of the cane and six months imprisonment.