Islam, as a religion on the whole, is not extremely complicated. One of the things that personally attracted me the most to the faith was its simplicity in its most basic tenets. Worship one God, pray, fast, give charity and, if possible, visit the holy sites of the religion once in a lifetime. This is not something of an overly complicated system, rather it is a religion that appeals to man's senses and requires nothing extreme, nor does it ask one to believe in complicated doctrines and philosophies. Naturally, we as humans have found a way to mess things up.

The rights (and obligations) of women are always a very hot topic in Islam and with those who examine the way Islam treats women as opposed to say Christianity or the "West" in general. To those who defend it, Islam gives women a variety of rights that were not given to her in pre-Islamic times. Aside from that, the focus in Islam on respecting women and on their highly held place in terms of being a mother (as one hadith puts it, "heaven lies at the feet of your mother") and the rights that a wife has over her husband. It is very true that despite the vast cultural abuses heaped upon women in certain parts of the world, and we cannot say enough that these are cultural and not religious in nature, Islam in its intentions does give women various rights and is protective of them. Those who attack the treatment Islam gives women point out the fact that although some of these rights and obligations were indeed a step up from the pre-Islamic time period, that hardly holds true today where equality in the West has trumped the way women are relegated to a secondary role in the household Islamically and that Islam remains, in spite of the best efforts of many apologists (myself included), a patriarchal religion.

Central to this whole debate I am now painting is the issue of veiling in Islam, or as it is called in Arabic the hijab. It is, to say the least, one of the most divisive issues in the Muslim world today. More than anything else, more than a beard or a kufi or a shalwar-khameez, the hijab is the most noticeable sign of Islam in the public sphere. It is used for various reasons: some women wear it because they believe that the Qur'an (and thus God Himself) commands that it be the case, and they do cite Qur'an for this as well as hadith. Some women wear it because it is a clear political message to the rulers of their various states that they are siding with Islamist forces. Some wear it, and this is especially true in the United States, because it serves as community identification: it says, "I am a Muslim woman." Some wear it because family or friends pressure them into it. I have met, during the several years that I have been Muslim, women who wear the hijab for all of the above reasons. Many of the Muslim women I have talked with who do not wear the hijab belong to one of two schools: those who say that they know they should wear it, but for some reason or another do not, and those who feel that it is not necessary at all.

The stance of Muslim men on the issue is much more simple: the vast majority of Muslims in the West believe that it is something fard, or obligatory, on women much as prayer is obligatory on Muslims in general. The belief is that a woman is not being a good Muslim if she does not veil. This does not mean covering the face, niqab as it is called; most men will simply say that it is enough to cover the hair. In Islamic Society meetings at Rutgers University where I attended as an undergraduate, one speaker went so far as to say, "No man really wants to marry a woman who does not wear hijab." Often, brothers were very particular as to whom they saw as "decent" sisters or not, although I do not wish for the reader to infer that they were disrespectful to those who did not wear a head covering. It was, to say the least, the main issue in many of the meetings. When I was a Catholic, we used to joke about this older priest in our parish. No matter what the topic of the gospel readings for the day, somehow he managed to bring the homily (which is a sort of khutba for those who do not know) around to the topic of abortion. This is how I feel with so many of the lectures I have attended as a Muslim, especially when women were in the audience: eventually the topic would turn to hijab, and how many of the problems of the Muslim world could be solved if only women would don the hijab (I kid you not, one speaker said this).

Why I bring this up is simple: it highlights the main fault that Muslims in the 21st century have. We are so concerned with an issue such as this that we ignore the more ongoing plights of the Muslim world. I cannot tell you how many Muslim women have stopped going to meetings because they feel that they are being talked down to just because they feel that the hijab should be something ordinary. As my friend put it once, "why should I go to a meeting where a speaker tells us that 'there is no way to tell the difference between a woman who does not wear hijab and a common whore' and sit there feeling all of the eyes in the room descend upon me?" Perhaps this is something that is much more of an issue in America. Another friend of mine from Pakistan told me that his first real encounter with younger women (college age) who wore hijab was when he came to the United States. This was also the only place that he felt it was being forced as an issue.

Perhaps I would not be so upset about this if I did not feel that there were several, much more pressing issues facing the Muslim world right now. One is, for example, the fact that we have failed to establish any sort of political presence in the United States despite having a population at least on part with those of the Jewish faith. Those of us who support Pakistan have also fallen woefully behind the rabidly Hindu pro-Indian lobby, which is getting more and more successful at branding Pakistan a terrorist entity. Some of the brightest Muslim women I have met were from Pakistan and they did not wear the hijab; should we bar them from taking an active place in the Muslim community because of this? If a Palestinian girl who does not wear hijab wants to speak at a rally against the Occupation, should we cast her aside? As Muslims we have made this issue of such paramount importance that we neglect to talk about the more pressing issues that will eventually decide whether we can recover from the blow that men like Osama bin Laden dealt us on 11th September.