However, Muslims wanting women to cover their heads is not primarily to make them profess to be Muslim, any more than a requirement that women in the USA cover their breasts is a way to make them profess to be Christian. The justification offered for the covering-up is (alongside Divine command) a secular one: “nature itself teaches that men are distracted by female hair and skin”. This does not rest solely on the Quran for its authority: we Westerners ourselves agree with the germ of it in principle, even if we think the Islamic means to this end is a hyper-sensitive use of sledgehammer to crack nut. (Whatever “disrespect” women suffer by going “too uncovered” in public is trivial compared to the actual wrong they suffer being punished, whether legally or extra-legally, for contravening the rule.

So let me ask you this.

Suppose for the moment that China (still nominally a Communist country) passes a new law requiring all men and women of whatever race, religion, etc. to spend 10 minutes in the morning praying to the current General Secretary of the Communist Party as a deity.

Would a Muslim who travels to China and is forced to pray to Hu Jintao consider that submission intolerable to his religion?

Would a Christian?

Would a pop star who believes nothing?

We’re still talking about equal treatment across the board, so it’s lacking the discriminatory injustice. But how do we account for the actual belief portion of such a law?

-TS

Briefly: The offensive of dhimmitude and its rules is not so much that they are strict, but that they are unequally applied, and used to single out non-Muslims in a Muslim-dominated society. Thus the jirzya tax, the ban on dhimmi carrying arms, and so forth.

However, the requirement that all adult or teenage women wear head coverings in public – however unnecessarily strict – is not such a badge of religious caste. All women are required to wear them, in a strict Muslim society.

One might then reply that the head covering rule discriminates among men and women. However, Muslim men have a duty that is also onerous, but unique to them – they must grow beards. (I’m speaking of the strict versions, of course). Now, again, this may seem unnecessarily onerous and therefore unjustifiable. But it is not a way of discriminating against non-Muslims (unless, perhaps, non-Muslims had some bedrock religious or conscientious objection to wearing a head covering or a beard – AFAIK, none do).

Likewise, we tolerate some distinctions among genders that we would never tolerate among religions or races – segregated toilets, for example. A male could probably get away with preferring a male doctor if he had to strip naked: he would not get away with insisting on a Christian or Nordic doctor.

A lot of societies have rules that seem to me silly and unduly burdensome, but as long as these rules are applied equally across the population, they don’t involve the same injustice that discriminatory laws do – apartheid, Jim Crow, China’s rural/ urban internal passports, or the dhimmi restrictions.