A comment came in yesterday, under my post about Krisztina.
Entirely as expected.
I would like to use it to show a pattern everyone needs to understand.
I had shared a post Krisztina had put up, with a picture of herself in a waistcoat, tight black trousers and boots, with a cross around her neck and the afternoon sun in her hair, on her way out for a Saturday night with her husband, to enjoy life and be glad of the freedom.
Under the post a man asked me why I accept that my wife shows her body in this way, instead of covering herself like a devout Muslim.
I have removed his name and picture, because this is not about him - he rarely writes kindly, but I actually believe he meant the part I want to write about seriously, perhaps even kindly, the way you mean something when you have grown up inside an order, Islam, and never seen it from the outside.
First, notice WHO he is writing to.
He is not writing to her. He is writing to me. He asks THE MAN why the man ALLOWS it, and in that one small choice of address lies everything I have been trying to point at for years, when I say 'architecture' and 'not people'.
The woman is not the one you speak WITH. She is the one you speak ABOUT, over her head, man to man, because in that order her body is not first and foremost her own - it is the place where the honour of the man and the family is kept, and so it must be wrapped up, guarded and kept away from other people's eyes.
And I want to say this so clearly that it cannot be misunderstood - it is Islam I am talking about.
Not Muslims as human beings, not the woman who of her own free will puts on a headscarf for her God, I have no quarrel with her.
I am talking about the order that is written down and binds, where covering is a duty, a demand that costs you to turn away from, where the honour lives in her and the account is rendered by him.
And then the decisive part, the thing the whole comment is really proof of.
That order does NOT stay within its own ranks.
Krisztina is not a Muslim. She wears a cross around her neck, she has NEVER promised that law anything, and still she is measured by it, in her own country, under her own picture, and I am asked to enforce it on her.
This is not a man telling me how he and his own have chosen to live. This is a man telling me how MY wife ought to live.
That is the difference between a FAITH and a DEMAND.
A faith binds the one who believes. A demand binds EVERYONE who comes within reach, and a rule for how a woman should look does not ask what the woman herself believes. It just looks at her. Wherever that rule grows strong enough, in a street, in a schoolyard, in a neighbourhood, the covered woman becomes the normal one, and the uncovered woman becomes the one with something to explain - no matter who she is, where she comes from, or what her parents taught her.
So this is not about Muslim women alone. It is about ALL women who live in a place where that order is allowed to set the standard.
Your daughter too!
That is what is new, and that is what is old.
Because we have been here before, we know this idea from our own history, and it has taken the West more than a thousand years, with Christianity's claim that Woman is made in the image of God exactly as Man is, to arrive at something as simple as this: a woman belongs to herself. That is not a given. It is an inheritance, and it was dearly paid for, most of all by the women themselves.
Now the old order is knocking again - and asking to have her back.
Read that sentence again.
And let me go on - because here is something we men MUST understand, and I will say it as it is.
Women can NOT defend their own freedom. Not alone. Not against an order carried by men who are willing to use force to uphold it. This is not about courage, because look at the women of Iran, who take off the headscarf and sing and walk into the streets, and who have more courage than most of us will ever need - and then see that the order is still standing, because the men around them are still holding it up. And the regime killed, by the doctors' own counts, close to 30,000 people in January of this year alone, to stay in its seat.
A woman's freedom has ONLY ever existed where men have wanted it and been ready to stand for it. That is how it came to be among us, and that is how it disappears again, the day we stop.
That is why the question was put to me and not to her.
He knows perfectly well who decides. The order he speaks from ONLY works if men say yes to being guards, and it can ONLY be stopped by men who say no.
There is ONLY us to stand in between.
So here is my answer to him.
I do not accept anything, because there is nothing for me to accept.
Her body is not mine to cover, and my honour does not live in her clothes or inside her.
It lives in whether I can stand upright beside a free woman without becoming afraid of her, and a masculinity that needs to hide her away in order to bear itself is not strong.
It has collapsed, and it is so fragile that it asks her to carry the weight.
I cannot arrange other people's countries, and I do not interfere in what a Human Being freely chooses for herself, anywhere in the world. But I wish the same freedom for the woman in Tehran and Kabul as I wish for my own wife.
And here, with us - THAT FREEDOM IS NOT UP FOR NEGOTIATION.
And that is that.
My problem has never been whether women wear a little or a lot, or whether they dress for pleasure or for God.
My problem is the men, and the order, who believe it is their decision.
Anyone who raises that demand against the women I love - my wife, my mother, my sisters, my nieces, my friends - meets me first, and that conversation - or whatever it turns into - I will not grow tired of.
On the contrary.
I rise in it.
Until it lies down.
She is not mine to give away.
And therefore she is not yours to demand.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy Sunday, friends ☀️
...
Oh, and one more thing.
Notice the sentence in the middle, the one about extramarital relationships, "like the one you are involved in".
It is not random. It is part of a pattern we have seen repeated from profile to profile for a long time now, where stories are made up about Krisztina's virtue and about our marriage.
None of it is true, and I am not going to go into it. Because there is nothing to address. It is a fabricated Lie, made to create rumours.
But notice how it fits with the rest.
When a man's honour lives in his wife, she is the one you go after if you want to hit him, and when virtue lives in the fabric, the uncovered woman is by definition the unvirtuous one. Then you do not need to know anything about her. You have seen a picture, and the rumour writes the rest by itself.
It is the oldest weapon that order has.
That is how women have always been made to keep quiet and men made to keep them at home, because in an honour culture the rumour is the punishment, and it only works on those who believe their honour lives there.
Ours does not.
That is why it does not work.
