Veil and Wail

The debate in the UK over muslims women's veils and the integration of muslims into British society is long overdue and in the end can only be a good thing, despite the stupidity of some of the people involved. But the comments of Yvonne Ridley, in a column in (you guessed it) the Washington Post was interesting for its obtuseness.
Ms. Ridley is famous for her capture by the Taliban when she was covering Afghanistan just after the terror attacks on the World Trade Center; she is also famous for having been very impressed by her captors, who she reports treated her with the utmost respect and thus convinced her to study Islam. Those studies led her to convert, and she now enters the debate as a fierce supporter of the veil.
Now she is the best judge regarding the treatment she received at the hands of the Taliban. But all I can say is that they apparently showed a chivalry that they did not extend to their own people. I'll return to that, but first I'd like to draw attention to some of Ms. Ridley's other comments, especially her statements that "just about everything that Western feminists fought for in the 1970s was available to Muslim women 1,400 years ago. Women in Islam are considered equal to men in spirituality, education and worth, and a woman's gift for childbirth and child-rearing is regarded as a positive attribute." Once again, I do not debate the fundamental aspects of Islam, but practice is another matter entirely. Does she believes that muslim women in the Taliban's Afghanistan or in Saudi Arabia or in Kohemini's Iran or Basra today are as free as their counterparts in the west? Is she aware that in Pakistan after their late dictator Zia ul-Haq introduced Sharia law, a woman's evidence carried only half the weight of a man's word? A woman who charged a man with rape needed to have two eyewitnesses to back her claim or else not only would her raper go free, but she would be held guilty of adultery by her own word and stoned. Equality and and respect? I think not!
Ms. Ridley goes on to state that the niqab and/or burqa are necessary to protect her from leering men and offer the wearer freedom from pressure about her looks. I salute the person who would cover themselves from head to foot merely to avoid having to wear cosmetics, because of course there are culture police patrolling the western cities, waiting to punish women seen without cosmetics or wearing dresses that extend past the knee. But Ms. Ridley might want to ponder one point: the burqa protects the wearer from unwanted attention from men, but most of us believe that a woman wearing a miniskirt and skimpy top (may their tribe increase!) has that right already. We beleive that when a woman says no, it means no and that she does not need to make herself indistinguishable from the rest to be safe.
Also, the idea that Islam offers women so much freedom and protection flies in the face of the fact that most muslim men beleive that women must be forced to cover up for the protection of men, because women are inherently impure and tempt "pure" men. Perhaps the Prophet meant the burqa as protection for women from the rapacious men of a pre-Islamic society where women has no status at all, but over time any such meaning has been subverted. That is why the religous police of the Taliban and Saudi Arabia use violence and intimidation to force the women of their societies to hide behind the veil.
Ms. Ridley and all other apologists for conservative Islam should remember that women in Europe have the freedom to wear their veils and the debate about the veils is just that, a debate; in conservative Islamic societies, womn have no choice in the matter - they shroud themselves from head to foot or risk the visible parts being disfigured or cut-off. That's the respect they have for women's freedom.

Finally, I have one last question for any supporter of the veil for women (not that I expect them to be reading this in droves, so its mostly a rhetorical gesture): if the burqa is so good, if it offers the wearer so much freedom, if it is such a sign of high respect by Society, why don't all the men wear it too?