Dear Sisters, Meet Maria Sharapova

Dear Sisters,

Today I am emailing you the product of freedom: beauty, athleticism and a glimpse of some of what a woman can be.

In case you have not been reading the news Maria Sharapova just won the Wimbledon finals. This is the story of a father who took a chance that his ten-year-old daughter from Siberia can be great. Thanks to the opportunities offered by the free world Maria Sharapova is what no practicing, veiled, Muslim woman can ever be.

I am emailing you these photographs not to make you feel bad nor to make you envious nor to make you feel that I love you any less. I am writing to you so you may take inspiration from this and one day when you are independent I hope you will choose freedom. I hope you will choose yourself and I hope you will choose liberty not just for your sake but for the sake of your brother and for the sake of millions of sisters.

My heart trembles as I write these words to you. I am afraid you may think, “Bhai, likes Gori Ladkis” I am afraid you will think, “Bhai, doesn’t love us for who we are”. I am afraid you will think, “Bhai wants us to drop out of medical school and become tennis stars” It breaks my heart but I am afraid you will think, “Bhai, doesn’t respect our religion”.

My beloved sisters, despite the lump in my throat I can say this without fear, the veil is not Islamic it is criminal. Let me remind you that your mother did not wear a veil until our father threatened her with divorce. We live in a culture where parents think of their daughters as “Imanath” and a burden to be fed and kept honorable until the “rightful owner” of their daughters comes along to marry them even if that Imanath is just six years old.

I look around me and I see a lot of Muslim women choose the veil over beauty and Islam over freedom. I don’t know why they do it but I can only say this, modesty is not putting a scarf around your head and chastity is not equivalent to putting a cloak over your body. Modesty means little when underneath those veils dwell bomb jackets and a seething heart of hate. What is immoral is a woman who spurns love and freedom for the security of a wardrobe without regard to what lies beneath the veils.

Why must you choose yourself for my sake? Your brother and his brethren in the Islamic world live on the kindness and beauty of the women around them. If you hide from our eyes and leave us only to gaze upon the frothing mouths of bearded men can you blame us if we then wish to end our lives as martyrs?

When I walk the streets of the free world I find reasons to live. Last month I helped a college girl carry her grocery bags to her apartment. Last Sunday I ran into an elderly woman who held onto my arm while I escorted her to the pharmacy. They call acts as these acts of Chivalry but such acts make me feel like I have a purpose, like I made a difference, like I am loved and good and virtuous. Chivalry is not a word understood by those who grow up in lands where half the population is walled up or veiled.

Everyday I walk out into the world with the hope that today I will find someone I will fall in love with. I walk the streets with the feeling that I will see someone beautiful. Sometimes I see someone who wears a size too small under the mistaken impression that hip hugging spandex will banish body fat. I smile and marvel at their innocence and the hope that they carry within. Sometimes I see someone who wears cloths that defy the weather. It is as if they are saying “I am warmed from the fire within”. In all cases I think the best them.

Sometimes, however I come across someone different, someone with a black lace top and beige skirt, with silver sport shoes. I compliment her and tell her how my day was brightened by the attention she paid to her appearance and she tells me that she bought the shoes from Barcelona. Sometimes we part and at other times we have coffee and on rare occasions I meet someone where a compliment leads to something more.

There are times when a veiled woman refuses to sit next to me in a bus simply because I am a man. There are times when I enter “woman’s section” of an Islamic household and they scurry like scared rabbits for safety as if I was a disease. They hide their faces as if the sight of a woman will drive me insane. They avoid my gaze as if eye contact would provoke me to molest them in public. They shirk from me as if I was a threat to social order and tremble in my presence and as if I was a rapist who had just broken out of prison.

Whether a woman adorns herself or not the mere sight of her inspires us men to song and poetry and dreams of glory. It inspires us to invent and to buy and sell, to sail across the seas and fly to the moon and back. The sight of women is the engine of modern civilizations. Show the appreciative ladies and gentlemen of the free world what you are we will bare our souls in return. Discard the veil, embrace life and know that you can be anything and everything you want to be but in the free world you cannot be a slave.