Boreal

Clothing as a Harbinger of Things to Come

Get That Man A Niqab!

Threats against Charlie Hebdo

Since its publication of a cartoon of Tariq Ramadan, death threats have come flooding in. In its latest edition the satirical weekly shows the theologian’s pants distorted by a huge erection and proclaiming: "I am the 6th pillar of Islam."

Asked about the drawing, Riss (the cartoonist) argued, on Europe 1, that Tariq Ramadan presented himself as "an Islamic scholar", which is why the drawing refers to the "6th pillar of Islam (...), jihad".

The five pillars of Islam are the foundation of the Islamic way of life: the profession of faith, prayer, zakat (alms), fasting during the month of Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime by those who have the means.

Jihad is considered the sixth pillar of Islam by a minority within Sunnism although it does not have official status.

Let Point, (my translation), November 7, 2017

Tariq Ramadan is the eminent salafist scholar and Oxford University professor and lecturer on everything Islamic who was accused of raping young females who sought his counsel. You may also remember him as the man who exhorted believing women living in the West to “invade” the public space dressed in traditional Islamic garbs as a way of promoting everywhere a religion that hates them!

It was Tariq Ramadan's mother, Wafa al-Banna, the daughter of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who instructed her son in the salafist theology which guides the actions of Islamic State and which her son would see propagated worldwide, assisted by the non-threatening example of females on parade to conceal the encroachment on the secular of an intolerant, misogynous and brutal ideology.

What a believing woman wears in public is often indicative of the radicalism of her faith with the hijab and the shayla representing the mildest form, the niqab and the burqua the most intense. This generalization does not apply to countries like Afghanistan where what a woman wears may have nothing to do with the depth of her religious convictions but simply a way of surviving another day.