Friday, April 20, 2007 

Take one hijab or two into the sauna part two.

Remember the woman who offended the sensitivities of other members of the leisure centre in Oxford by going swimming in what the Sun called "full hijab robes"? Well, she's spoken out to the Grauniad and guess what, her story is remarkably different to that provided by the biggest selling paper in the land:

One Sunday last month I went for my afternoon swim at my local David Lloyd's fitness club wearing the Islamic-style swimsuit I have been wearing for years. The swimsuit has recently been celebrated by media outlets from Newsweek to National Geographic as an innovative way for Muslim women to become more active. As an American-Muslim woman, I have always been determined to be active without compromising my faith. I have been swimming in capital cities across the world from Rio de Janeiro to Washington DC to Kuala Lumpur, and now London. Although I get curious stares, I have never had any awkward moments when I head out for a swim.

That is, until I came to Oxford.

As I was getting ready to head home from my Sunday swim, I heard a loud voice from a man stating that he needed to speak to the manager about dress code. I picked up on it, but didn't really give it too much thought, until I heard him yelling about "that woman over there" who was wearing the "burkini", the gist of what he was saying seemingly being that it was inappropriate. What the hell is that? The burkini? I could feel a rising indignation at the man's audacity in singling me out in this way. Who had died and declared him the pool police? There were several lifeguards on duty who had seen me swimming there over the previous six months, and none had objected to the swimsuit. It's been nearly a year since I moved to Oxford, and frankly, I had had enough of the anti-Muslim rhetoric in British political life. Now that I was in the middle of it, I refused to stand on the sidelines.

I walked up to the burly, middle-aged man who had been pointing at me a minute before and asked, "Are you guys talking about me?"

He turned towards me, and waved a dismissive hand: "This has nothing to do with you."

"Are you talking about me? Because if you are, this has everything to do with me."

He then confirmed he was indeed talking about me, but not talking to me. He was talking to the manager.

By this time I was irate, and the fact that he was using his dirty shoes as a pointer while he was yelling at me didn't help the situation. "But you have just singled me out in front of everyone, and in a voice loud enough for me to hear. How can this have nothing to do with me?"

At this point he referred to me as a "silly little girl", which I found amusing, considering that I am a 32-year-old, 5ft 10in, professional senior manager for an international NGO. This man was clearly a closed-minded bigot and a sexist to boot, and there wasn't much I could do to change that.

...

Now, I realise that my swimsuit stands out a bit. And I know it's quite unusual: the week before last I lost my swimsuit and I did feel a bit awkward answering the receptionist's question - one piece or two pieces? "Well, actually, it's a five-piece," I said. The woman across the desk stared back at me in disbelief. I described it as a long wetsuit with a very short mini-dress on top. (It turned up a few days later.)

I admit, it's different. Some people might think it's overkill. But it's my choice. I choose to wear the hijab in my daily life, and it has never stopped me from being active, and this Muslim swimsuit was the perfect solution. I was so excited when I saw it for sale online.

Yet that's not how the journalist at the local newspaper in Oxford, the Oxford Mail, decided to approach the issue. Her article was titled "Row over fully dressed woman in sauna". The main interview in the article was with Ian Caldwell, the man who verbally attacked me in the lobby. There was no attempt to find out the full story. A so-called "Muslim community leader" called Taj Hargey called it "political correctness gone crazy".

At no point had the journalist contacted me. She seemed to have decided to take a similar approach to the man in the swimming pool - talking about me, not to me. As did David Lloyd's, which had backed up his story without consulting me. At no point did they bother to inform me, a paying member, that such an article was being written. I contacted the Oxford Mail, offering them my side of the story. I never heard back.

Of course, that would have destroyed the theme of the article. Nobody in Oxford would be interested in new swimming suits with hi-tech material, but a crazy Muslim woman jumping into a pool fully clothed and potentially suffocating in the sauna was much more interesting. Since when have facts been important to journalists covering stories involving Muslims?


It turns out that rather than wearing a jilbab or a chador, Manal Omar was in fact wearing a specially designed "modest" swimsuit, looking much like this one:


It's also obvious why Caldwell didn't bother providing us with what Omar said to him when he questioned her wearing the outfit in the sauna: he was too busy humiliating her and treating her like a child to listen.

Needless to say, I was shocked to find out a week later that my swimming habits had caused not only a "row", but a huge online debate. Perhaps the most daunting part of the experience was the strong reactions from those who read the article. It was the website's "most viewed article" even two weeks after the incident. The comments ranged from attacks on me (from both Muslims and non-Muslims) to full xenophobic attacks on all immigrants in Europe. At no point did any of the readers question Caldwell's version of events; nor did the majority of readers question his motivation for highlighting the issue. There was a blind acceptance that some random Muslim woman had done something, as one commentator described it, "a bit stupid". British Muslims piped up in apologetic tones, and everyone else openly attacked.

If she'd looked around a bit further, she would have found at least some support and questioning about the Sun article and the motives behind it, but even I fell into the trap of describing her apparent actions as "bizarre", because I didn't question the very basis of the report: that a woman had seemingly bathed in traditional robes when she had in fact been wearing something entirely different.

Similarly, Omar wasn't making a statement by wearing her suit, as Taj Hargey argued, but was forced into making one in order to set the record straight once her behaviour was questioned, purely because she was exercising her right to wear something that some would find strange but which was perfectly acceptable until someone decided to make a point about it.

None of us come well out of this. The journalists involved at all levels, who only heard what they wanted to and wrote the story regardless of its news-worthiness and the agendas behind it, those of us who commented who went along with the woman acting bizarrely and not perfectly rationally, and the others who'll jump at any excuse to bash a community and a religion as a whole because of the actions of one person. At times you easily forget that there is an actual person at the bottom of all this.

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Wednesday, March 14, 2007 

Scum-watch: Take one hijab or two into the sauna?

Via BlairWatch, here's today's obligatory Sun-story on the foibles of members of "our Muslim community", as the Dear Leader referred to them:

A MUSLIM woman in full hijab robes was allowed to swelter in a SAUNA because worried staff did not want to offend her.

She then jumped into the sports centre’s swimming pool to cool off while still wearing the black top-to-toe Islamic dress.


Straight off, the basic ignorance of the whole article is more than apparent. The hijab is not a robe: the hijab is a headscarf, nothing more, and in Islamic scholarship, as Wikipedia states, has a wider meaning of modesty, etc. Surely the sub-editor could have sorted this out in seconds?

Due to this misunderstanding, it's difficult to work out exactly what she was wearing. I'm assuming it was either a jilbab or a chador.

After ten minutes in the sauna and ten minutes in the pool the mystery woman changed out of her wet hijab into a dry one in the changing rooms and left alone.

Yesterday members of the David Lloyd Leisure centre in Oxford said they were baffled by the women’s actions.


A woman then acts rather bizarrely for an incredibly short time, and just happens to be wearing religious dress. Huge news story. Oh, wait, don't tell me, this is actually a case of POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD:

Club member Ian Caldwell, 46, was sitting in the sauna when the fully-dressed woman walked in.

He said: “I pointed out that it was a sauna and asked her if it was appropriate. All the other women in there were all in bathing costumes.

“When I saw her in the pool later, she was still wearing the Islamic outfit.

“The pool attendant said she was allowed to wear this due to her religious customs. It was just political correctness gone completely barmy. I told the manager that it was my custom to attend saunas naked, as they do in Sweden, and said I trusted he would find that equally acceptable.

“But to be serious, this is a question of hygiene, not religious rights.”


It seems odd that Caldwell doesn't explain what the woman's response was to his questioning of her clothing, and it also appears that the pool attendant just let her get on with it rather than bothering to ask her why she was acting in that way. She doesn't appear to have been hurting anyone, and arguably, bringing up the whole question of hygiene when everything suggests that she changed into a clean robe when she arrived and then back into the clothes she wore beforehand is just as politically correct. The whole article is leaping to conclusions: that staff didn't interrupt her because they were worried about "offending" her etc, when they might have just been following the usual British way of letting weirdos and the more eccentric among us get on with it.

Then we have Taj Hargey, who appeared seemingly out of nowhere to previously criticise the MCB on the also widely criticised Panorama programme, and who also offered to fund the school which was taken to court after a 12-year-old girl was banned from wearing the niqab (it has to be said I fully support the school in that case) mouthing off:

“How can you swim properly if you wear a hijab?”

Err, pretty easily I would have thought if it was tied up correctly. Does Hargey not realise that olympic swimmers themselves tend to cover their hair for rather obvious reasons? Surely the whole point of this is that it would be a lot more difficult to swim in a robe, is it not?

“Wearing a veil is nothing to do with Islam, it is a cultural tradition.

It's true that this is an on-going debate within the Muslim community, and that a good few would disagree with Hargey, so we'll let him get away with this. It's his next statement I have more of a problem with:

“They think this is their way of making a statement, but this is the worst possible statement. They are shooting themselves in the foot.”

Personally, if I wanted to make a statement the last thing I would do is wear a robe while in a sauna. That's not making a statement, it's being pretty daft. As is making a big deal out of the bizarre actions of one woman. If the Sun truly wanted to be fair, it would have perhaps also got a quote from someone who doesn't have such similar views to that of the approved Murdoch line. Instead, we've got another article to add the Muslim baiting pile that have appeared in the Scum of late.

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