Two women

Consider two women.

The first is Wajeha al-Huwaider from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia:

The single mother of two rails against a system she says treats women as emotionally and intellectually handicapped.

“If I wanted to get married, I would have to get the permission of my son,” she says.

She is 45; her son, 17.

Saudi women like her are pushing back their confinement — entering schools, getting jobs, starting businesses, speaking out.

Yet laws and social norms make it extremely difficult. Women still require a mehram — a male guardian’s permission — to travel, rent an apartment or attend college, to list a few of the restrictions.

In August, Al-Huwaider held a one-woman demonstration, walking on the Saudi side of the causeway with a placard proclaiming, “Give Women Their Rights!”

She was arrested within 20 minutes.

Detained for seven hours, she had to wait for a mutawa — a religious police officer from the state Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Then she had to answer in writing why she protested and who was behind it. She was freed only after a male guardian signed for her.

The second is Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, from Khartoum in Sudan:

Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, who says she is facing 40 lashes, said she and 12 other women wearing trousers were arrested in a restaurant in the capital, Khartoum.

She told the BBC several of the women had pleaded guilty to the charges and had 10 lashes immediately.

As I’ve said before, whenever Islamists champion the religious compulsion of women to wear the burqa on the principles of liberalism (the right to choose what you want to wear), I wonder whether their intention is to only argue for the right to wear the burqa but not the right to elect not to wear it. In other words, do they intend to uphold the principle universally?

It is not enough to fend off any criticism of the enforcement of the burqa, as Bunglawala does, with these weasel words:

No Muslim, male or female, could justify the ‘imposing’ of purdah on any other. The form of veiling adopted by a Muslim woman, or not, should always be result of a decision entered into without coercion or sanction. ‘There is no compulsion in religion’, the Qur’an says as Muslims well know.

Wearing the burqa or the niqab and the general purdah of women as a social norm is imposed by constitutional law in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Afghanistan. This is to say nothing of muslim communities where the burqa is informally imposed such as Pakistan, Malaysia and, increasingly, Bangladesh. When was the last time we saw Bunglawala and friends challenge the enforcement of the burqa with the use the maxim of “no compulsion” to campaign for the rights of the millions of women like Wajeha al-Huwaider and Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein?