Saudi police arrest model for wearing Skirt in Public.
Saudi Arabia is leading a propaganda campaign falsely accusing Qatar of supporting extremism in the Middle East, but it just arrested a young model named Khulud for taking a walk at a historic site in Najd wearing a halter and a skirt. The Saudi government insists, despite temperatures of 111 F. in the shade, that women cover themselves up in black robes.
That big black robe accompanied by a complete face veil, called a niqab, is actively forbidden in modern urban societies such as Egypt.
One of the reasons even Middle Eastern governments are afraid of the niqab is that it obscures identity. The state, as James Scott argued, wants its citizens to be transparent to it. Hence, the demand for a first and last name (that was imposed on Iran in the early 1930s by military dictator cum shah, Reza the Great). When somone is wearing a niqab you don’t know their real gender or age. Guerrillas in Algeria during its war of independence from France used to fool the police by dressing as women in niqab. You’d be surprised what you can hide in those robes.
Making women non-transparent, as Saudi Arabia routinely does, renders them second class citizens.
The extremists who kill women and children in acts of terrorism first strip them of any human identity, which is easier if they are in essence already buried under a niqab and its robes.
The extremists who traffic in and enslave women, who beat and abuse them, are in part inspired by a Saudi/Wahhabi vision of gender relations. Women are erased in public, which therefore means woman are second class citizens. They cannot move around without a male guardian.
https://www.juancole.com/2017/07/slamming-extremism-arrests.html
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