Summary: To Melanie Elturk, Haute Hijab CEO, wearing Islamic swimsuit is not “enslavement”
Melanie Elturk, the CEO of Haute Hijab, an online retailer for modest fashion, published the following OpEd piece on Elle Magazine website.
“As a Muslim woman who chooses to wear the hijab and owns a burkini, it seems to me that this kind of rhetoric [about Muslim women wear in the West] is also a form of social control.
Enslavement of women also includes telling women they must take their clothes off. Just as women have the right to wear next to nothing, so, too, do women of all backgrounds have the right to wear more clothing― whether that means they cover up at at the beach or wear a hijab over their hair.
As Hanna Yusuf pointed out in The Guardian, “If pressure to wear the hijab is seen as oppression, and rightly so, why is social pressure or legal pressure to not wear it excused as female emancipation?” She adds, “This pseudo-feminist argument… goes against the feminist values it claims to defend.””
Follow the piece on Elle website