Maybe i'm getting brainworms from twitter and this isn't a real thing and there's nobody defending this, but there is no way in hell hijab is a way to show "modesty in women". I know that there is a lot of westerners who are assholes and prejudiced against muslims and a lot of leftists want to defend them, and you should defend them, but don't do it by defending backwards practices. Hijab objectifies women.
Most of the time, women who wear hijab are pressured into doing it by an external force. It could be their immediate family, their relatives or their neighborhood. This isn't a fucking trope, it's the reality of it. It is very rare to see someone who decides to wear hijab by themselves. Sometimes people who migrate to west choose to keep wearing it as a way to connect themselves back to their home, but it isn't a common reason to wear it.
I'm not saying attack hijab, because it is not your duty to criticize islam as an outsider(and probably you won't have sufficient information nor experience to do so), but when you see some assholes attacking a hijabi woman for her hijab, defend her right to wear what she wants(even if she's forced by her family to wear it), not the hijab.
nah, i was definately the jerk first lol.
I honestly don't have enough knowledge to continue with this discussion much further, I haven't really read a lot of muslim ethnographies, and most of my knowledge of muslim majority countries is related to wars - so not a lot of good cultural takes can come from that at all. Also, I still have a very hard understanding and getting to know how I feel about how the west seems to culturally change everything it touches - mostly in regards to how parts of the indigenous population in my country deny their heritage, in exchange to be assimilated into big cities. Until I can understand this better, there's no point in me saying what I think about hijabs or whatnot. My opinion is abolutely pointless regardless, but the discussion about agency is definitaly something I would love to dive to in the future - there's just so much to learn.
Anyways, my original comment still probably serves to some people in this audience, who think that a free woman is only one that shares the same liberal beliefs they do. Definately not targeted towards you, but overall people should be wary about how they view other cultures, it's super easy to fall into our ethnocentric default.
Sorry again for being so rude and thanks for your reply :)