LA Times columnist Meghan Dunn weighs in on modesty from a woman’s point of view in a column “The chador and feminism don’t always fit”.

Lubna’s case — and that fact that 43,000 women in Khartoum-area were flogged last year — reminds us that the “fanciful, romantic notions” of Naomi Wolf, expressed in her 2008 Sydney Morning Herald column from August 2008, that full-coverage dressing is ‘liberating’ has a very dark side.

My own column from last week is being translated in the Middle East: Beyond the Veil: The Intersection of Sensuality, culturally Appropriate & Women’s rights. I discuss Naomi’s article and the Phyllis Chesler’s reply.

Meghan Dunn raises a question that’s been on my mind since we launched our own burqa conversation at Anne of Carversville end of June. How many of the English-speaking women who endorse “extreme modesty” are converts to Islam?

In no way does conversion invalidate their point of view, but I’m sensing that Western women converts to Islam are leading the “burqa debate”.

Lubna Ahmed Hussein and her supporters were called “prostitutes” on the streets of Khartoum last Monday.

Photo taken July 2009 at the market place in Khartoum, Sudan. Woman is selling freshly peeled garlic. via Flickr’s PRI’s the WorldThe comment of Whortti Bor Manza, published in the Sudan Tribune reveals prevalent attitudes about women in Sudan, often considered one of the more progressive societies for women in the Middle East and Africa.

Women’s activism has a strong history in Sudan. Several commentators on this article are encouraging Lubna to run for president.

I print the following comment from the Sudan Tribune, not only for what it says about Lubna, but as an excellent example of the patriarchal mentality that runs throughout the region. Women are pawns in a political Sudanese chess game, as they are throughout Africa:

Comment on Sudan Tribune article: Sudanese ‘indecent’ female journalist freed unexpectedly. In this case, the UN office is also brought into the criticism. The comment is filled (obsessed really) with sex.

This case of Lubna doesn’t warrant such internetional attention. These are predesigned and prefabricated agenda of the CNP regime to make the international community believe that the regime is democratic and can conduct a fair trail and deliver a fair verdict simoultaneously. This is a complete fallacy. How many times have girls from Southern Sudan been abused by the notorious Sudan social police forces? In the subburbs of Haj Yussuf, Kalakla, Ombada, Jebel Aulia and Mayo, Southern girls have been lashed and raped openly in the police custody. Lashing of Southern and Western women in the Kangaroo courts set up by the regime in these areas are conspicuous daily scenes. It is a common thing, when the police feel like, they go and round up any girl from the South or Western Sudan because of improper dressing code. Why the abuse of the women from the South and the West does not draw attention? Do you know why the case of Lubna drew such immense attention? This is because Lubna is a girl friend of Ashraf, the UN special representative in Sudan. This woman was caught indulging in the act of open prostitution and the police does not want to say so because it will defame the arabs who believe their women are holy and cannot be screwed by foreigners. Lubna is just a common slut who deserve execution rather than lashing. All the UN offices are filled with Northern girls simply because they are favoured and can offer sex for positions. Girls from Southern Sudan are mostly employed as guards or in petty positions.

Morocco Bound

Moroccan woman via Flickr’s Amy’s SketchbookWhen Naomi Wolf writes, after meeting with Muslim women in their own countries that “Muslim attitudes toward women’s appearance and sexuality are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one’s husband”, she makes a mockey of women’s lives and the issue of “international women’s rights”.

Donning her chador, Naomi visits a Moroccan bazaar, where she has an epiphany: “As I moved about the market — the curve of my breasts covered, the shape of my legs obscured, my long hair not flying about me — I felt a novel sense of calm and serenity,” Wolf wrote. “I felt, yes, in certain ways, free.”

One of our readers has posted a very thoughtful article, written in October 2008 on Freethought Today. Writing Moroccan Feminine Wiles, Sarah Braasch writes a dramatically different article from Naomi’s quick tour of the region.

Arriving to live in Morocco for a summer, Sarah writes: I was shocked from the moment the plane landed at the reaction I elicited. I had never felt so sexualized and objectified. It was a suffocating and overwhelming deluge of incessant, aggressive, unwanted male attention. Taxi drivers tried to kidnap me. Soldiers harassed me. Strange men tried to lure me into their shops, their homes, their beds. I was baffled at the rudeness of these men who felt absolutely no compunction in trying to touch and grab me.

In my own experiences in Morocco, I was with my then-partner on vacation and cannot attest to the details or ordinary women’s lives in Morocco or any other country in the region.

I do know that Western women are not respected in the region. We are whores and sluts. I read that fact everywhere and Muslim men have often confirmed that fact to me. I wore a long skirt in Marrakesh, rather than pants, after consulting with the concierge of my hotel, concerning my preferred dress.

Naomi’s romantic attachment to chadors is easy to abandon the day her garb becomes a noose around her neck. Presumably Naomi Wolf’s American passport will still get her out of most countries, unless she manages to make an unscheduled trip into the Atlas mountains.

Other women — the 43,000 women who were flogged in Khartoum last year — do not have the luxury of getting on the next Greyhound bus out of town. They are permanently humiliated, bearing not only the physical scars of their flogging, but the loss of their reputations.

Retaining their virginity in many cases, these humiliated women of every age join the ranks of international prostitutes, whores and slut girls, aka women of the 21st century — women like us. Anne

Read Beyond the Veil: The Intersection of Sensuality, Culturally Appropriate & Women’s Rights for links into the articles referred to in this post.