... 18 years after militant leaders sentenced her to death after she refused to wear a burqa in public .... “They took her to their madrasa, the Al Jihad madrasa, in Sarrai Kala village,” said Dawlat Khan Zadran, the provincial police chief in Paktika. “She was shot 25 times. We don’t know why she was killed.”
I am a woman. And, I am furious.
"We don't know why she was killed..."
Asses! Ugly-souled haters of womenkind.
The origins of purdah and hijab are historically murky. Some historical commentators argue that within Islam, the practice of veiling, hijab:
The term hijab in Arabic literally means “a screen or curtain” and is used in the Qur'an to refer to a partition. The Qur'an tells the male believers (Muslims) to talk to the wives of the Prophet Muhammad behind a hijab....
According to at least three authors (Karen Armstrong, Reza Aslan and Leila Ahmed), the stipulations of the hijab were originally meant only for Muhammad's wives, and were intended to maintain their inviolability. This was because Muhammad conducted all religious and civic affairs in the mosque adjacent to his home:
People were constantly coming in and out of this compound at all hours of the day. When delegations from other tribes came to speak with Prophet Muhammad, they would set up their tents for days at a time inside the open courtyard, just a few feet away from the apartments in which Prophet Muhammad's wives slept. And new emigrants who arrived in Yatrib would often stay within the mosque's walls until they could find suitable homes.
It is argued that during his lifetime only the wives of Muhammad were permitted to don the hijab owing to their very public status. "Aslan suggests that Muslim women started to wear the hijab to emulate Prophet Muhammad's wives, who are revered as 'Mothers of the Believers' in Islam."
The veiling of women predated Islam, however, and may have been restricted to the upper class women of Judaism and Christianity and Islam, the three Abrahamic religions. But the practice dated back even to ancient Assyria with its definitive laws regarding veiling:
Women slaves and unchaste women were distinctly forbidden to veil and suffered harsh penalties if they did so. Veiling was, thus, a marker of rank and exclusive lifestyle, subtley illustrating upper-class women’s privilege over women in lower class ranks in the Assyrian community.
One must assume that within ancient Assyrian society an unveiled woman could be subjected to sexual harassment and rape and assault. A bit barbaric.
One would like to think that humanity has advanced but centuries and 18 years and 25 bullets later, one wonders.