Full Purdah is Not Enough

A woman should not show BOTH of her eyes through her veil. This may encourage her to use eye make up. Two made up eyes peering out of the black veil is just too much to take.

A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye....

Sheikh Habadan, an ultra-conservative cleric who is said to have wide influence among religious Saudis, was answering questions on the Muslim satellite channel al-Majd.

I would like to know, just what was Habadan doing on the Television?!?!? The projection of his image is clearly, unequivocally prohibited in the holy texts. No kidding.

The Sheikh must die. AIEEEEEEEEE!!!!

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God wants you to sacrifice your depth perception to save the pervy dudes from thinking Bad Thoughts... yeah...

There's actually a discussion in the talmud that implies that at some point in the past there were Jewish women who covered up everything but one eye and then put makeup around that eye. (IIRC this is discussed in Mesechat Shabbat. If anyone wants I can try to track down the full reference). Probably not a good idea to let Habadan hear about this. He might decide the only solution is to not let them have any eyes showing...

Actually, what encourages her to use eye makeup is the veil. Nowhere among the non-Muslim teenagers I know do I see the variety in fabric and clothing construction that I do among the Muslim girls who are told to cover up. The boys, with no such regulation, have all adopted standard U.S. jeans and t-shirt attire.

You see the same effect in kids at schools with uniforms. Anything that isn't dictated varies widely between kids as they use it to differentiate themselves from one another.

I'm reminded of something I read some time ago. I paraphrase: 'At first the women were not covered and men would spend time thinking of them. Now that they are covered it is all we can do to not think of them'.

Men sometimes think about women and sex. That is the way it is and how it will always be. Keeping women away and isolated so all a man can experience of them is a set of eyes leaves a lot to the overactive male imagination. What a man imagines he could see if she were not covered is far more idealized and attractive than what he would really see.

Experience tells me that if you want to limit the amount of time men think about women and sex the best thing you could do is to have the women wear no clothes at all. Without the overactive imagination, hype and the softening aspects of clothing most women fail to come up to the supermodel ideal. After a time surrounded by nude women it gets to be old hat.