Do they not see what’s happening in much of the Islamic world, where the hijab is mandatory? In Iran, women are whipped, tortured, incarcerated and sometimes killed for violating the hijab rules. Afghanistan’s hijab laws are similarly oppressive. Since the Taliban seized power in August 2021, women and girls can be arrested, detained and lashed for not complying with the government’s hijab rules.
Yet these stories and many others like them have been met with silence by Western progressives. These people claim to be on the side of female victims of male oppression – except, it seems, when the perpetrators are Islamists. They call out all manner of male behaviours in the West as sexist – from ‘manspreading’ to ‘mansplaining’ – yet they are silent when it comes to the most egregious examples of violent misogyny in Islamic societies. The double standards here are off the charts.