Thread by @MariekeBloos

Halima Salat @halimasalat was disinvited as a speaker on #IWD2021 by the Global Sisterhood of the Dutch @womensmarchnl.

Let's make sure she's heard anyway, this is what she had wanted to say. vrij-links.nl/h-s-barre/ik-w… via @vrijlinks

I would like to have started sharing a story about my personal struggle against the hijab, which was first published in Sisterhood magazine. After that, I would have made a few arguments to substantiate that the hijab is not a matter of free choice, and that the hijab is

definitely a patriarchal chastity check over women's bodies.

I find it wrong, in the fight for freedom and self-determination, not to listen to the first-hand experiences and reports of women faced with violence, coercion and even imprisonment, because they made their

own choice not to wear the hijab to carry. To just want to wear something different. I would like to take this second point to give examples of women in Iran, those of the White Wednesday movement and of My Stealthy Freedom, who are revolutionizing women against the headscarf

mandated by the Iranian regime.

I would have liked to share my own pain, the pain of trying to rebel against the hijab in a society where I was not allowed to. I would have loved to share fragments of stories from outside the comfort of the Netherlands, from outside the comfort

of Amsterdam. But I also wanted to put this next to the women, here, in this same city, who still know forced hijab - by the family, by the neighborhood, by the family, by the wider community.
In my opinion (I would have said) Western feminists are in fact lost. They seem to

want to achieve these very liberating goals only for Western born-and-bred women; not for other women in other countries (or here) who oppose religious misogyny. It almost seems like the message is, “Feminism to me, yes; but keep your mouth shut, because it's not really for you.”