{"id":1350,"date":"2005-12-30T17:21:46","date_gmt":"2005-12-30T16:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2005\/12\/30\/hijab_not_tunisian_enough"},"modified":"2025-10-11T11:19:00","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T10:19:00","slug":"hijab_not_tunisian_enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2005\/12\/30\/hijab_not_tunisian_enough","title":{"rendered":"Hijab not Tunisian enough?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.islamophobia-watch.com\/islamophobia-watch\/2005\/12\/30\/tunisian-official-criticizes-muslim-attire.html\">Islamophobia Watch<\/a>, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/world\/africa\/articles\/2005\/12\/29\/tunisian_official_criticizes_muslim_attire\/?rss_id=Boston.com+%2F+News\">Boston Globe reports<\/a> that the Tunisian &quot;religious affairs minister&quot;, Aboubaker Akhzouri, has claimed that the <em>hijab<\/em> worn by religious Muslim women does not &quot;fit in with the North African country&#39;s cultural heritage&quot;.  He also opposes long beards and &quot;Muslim tunics like those worn in Persian Gulf states&quot; and has been quoted as calling it &quot;regrettable that we don&#39;t respect our specificity&quot;, whatever that means.  He recommends a &quot;traditional&quot; local Islamic tunic known as the <em>jebbah<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>It&#39;s worth asking what exactly does count as &quot;specific&quot; to Tunisia, given that you can find pictures in any tourist guide book of local women wearing <em>hijab<\/em>.  In fact, until the late French colonial period, <em>hijab<\/em> and <em>niqab<\/em> were common there as in other North African countries.  It&#39;s certainly regrettable that the <em>Boston Globe<\/em> report does not mention that Tunisia is a dictatorship (specifically, the one of the last remaining African-style pseudo-democracies) and that the rights and advancements the report mentions have not been available to religious Muslim women who wear the headscarf.  That&#39;s not my definition of freedom, particularly in a Muslim country. (It&#39;s no wonder al-Akhzouri thinks it is fading away given the hostile of the country&#39;s secret police to religious dress and practice.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via Islamophobia Watch, the Boston Globe reports that the Tunisian &quot;religious affairs minister&quot;, Aboubaker Akhzouri, has claimed that the hijab worn by religious Muslim women does not &quot;fit in with the North African country&#39;s&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-lM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42651,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350\/revisions\/42651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}