Listen.
If I insisted that Krisztina wear this every time she left the house, so as not to send sexual signals to other men, and you considered me anything other than batshit crazy, a candidate for a quiet psychiatric ward, a man who needs serious help, then there is something deeply wrong with you.
That is the test.
That is the whole test.
Because the same demand, the same garment, the same logic, the same control over a woman's visibility and movement and presence in the world, is somehow excused, contextualized, defended, even praised the moment it arrives wrapped in the language of religion and tradition.
And I am done excusing it.
Done.
Obviously am not talking about a woman who, in full freedom, on her own terms, somewhere private and at her own choosing, expresses something between herself and her God in a way I will never understand. If that woman exists. People do strange things in front of the eternal. That is not my business.
What I am talking about is the structural demand. The one that is taught, enforced, monitored, and punished. The one the women of Iran have described to me with a grief that has not stopped flowing since 1979, when their mothers and sisters and grandmothers were suddenly told what their bodies meant, who they belonged to, and what would happen if they refused. The one that fell away in a single weekend in Tehran in 2022, the moment the cost of refusing dropped below the cost of obeying.
Wherever the apparatus collapses, the veil falls. Every time. Without exception.
The niqab in its current standardized form is not timeless piety. It is a relatively recent political-theological project, exported across the Muslim world over the last four or five decades by a specific ideological current, and it carries that project with it wherever it goes.
It is not neutral cloth. It is a flag. A banner. A signal. A confrontation.
And it is not compatible with a civilization built on the dignity of the Human, on the equality of man and woman before the law, on the freedom of the face in public space.
I am respectful. I am tolerant. I have wide doors.
But I do not have an open door to the Cage.
And that's that.
❤️🔥🪽
And yes. I know the legal landscape -
This garment is ONLY banned in public space in France, Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Bulgaria, Switzerland, and partially in the Netherlands.
In MOST of Western Europe, including Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, Italy, and Portugal, it remains entirely legal.
What a disgrace, when you look at the foundation Europe was built on. The Human, created in the image of God. A dignity that no power can revoke. An inviolability that begins at the face and ends at the soul. From Genesis through Augustine through every cathedral, every codex, every constitutional preamble, the West has said the same thing in a thousand voices, that the person is sacred because the person bears the image, and the face is where the image becomes visible.
A civilization that permits the public erasure of the face has not betrayed this foundation. It has forgotten it. And the forgetting is worse than the betrayal, because the forgetting does not even know what it is losing.
(dansk version altid i første kommentar fremadrettet fra idag)
