mtweb

When I lived in our village in Larkana as a child in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the women in my family never left our home. The shopkeepers would come to us, as would the rest of the world. When I reached the age of puberty, my mother asked me to wear a burqa. Suddenly the world looked gray. I felt hot and uncomfortable breathing under the confines of the cloth. My father took one look at me and said, "My daughter does not have to wear the veil." My mother decided that if I was not to wear the all-enveloping burqa, she too would not wear one. So a departure from tradition took place.

THere is a famous saying of the Holy Prophet that "the best veil is the veil in the eyes." That means that men should be God-fearing and look at women with respect.

The West must be ready to acknowledge the residual damage of colonialism and its support for dictatorships during the Cold War. The West, and especially the United States of America, must be ready to revisit the rippling impact of the so-called global war on terror, which is perceived by perhaps hundreds of millions of Muslims as a "global war on Islam." Many Muslims fear that the Islamic faith is under attack and Muslims are under siege. They believe that the conflict in Iraq is part of a much broader (and nefarious) Western agenda. Before the problem can be solved, we need to recognize that it exists.