There is a veil: prick up the ears!

Monday evening while cooking, I am listening SkyTg24: the main news is about the suicide of a Moroccan woman in Rome, she first killed her children as they slept. Her husband was wounded by the same wife, he went to the hospital (leaving the kids at home alone with her?), saying that he had been assaulted in the street, and then admitting he was lying “to protect his wife.” A third daughter is still serious suffering after a long surgery. The investigation has just begun; we will understand later as it is consumed this family drama.

While listening, the anchorwoman says “and now a comment from a neighbor that does prick up our ears: the woman, always dressed in Western clothes, recently wore the veil”.

Today I read on Corriere della Sera: “She was changed, she wore the veil.”

Now, there is no doubt that a woman who gets to kill their children (if she did it) and then commits suicide is a very ill subject, to the point of forcing the most powerful instincts of survival, the protection of children. What shocks me is the deeply superficial, misogynist and Islamophobic point of view, which transcends any given reality that everyone who reads and listens to a possible misleading and discriminatory interpretation. Muslim women, it has been told ad nauseam, wear the veil because it is a symbol of their identity, wear it since the first period, but sometimes they do it even as children, by imitation or because in some countries it requires the school uniform (Afghanistan , for example). The veil has been and is seen in the West as a symbol of the oppression of women; which is in many aspects indubitable and evident (the oppression) not for the veil, as the lack of access of girls to education, the failure to pay the female farmers in most rural areas, early marriages, women offered as a bargaining chip in disputes relating to land and livestock, the restricted of their personal freedom.

A long list of horrible things, then, that with the veil but they have nothing to do. What I really repelled by the superficiality with which it is in such delicate times for relations between the Islamic world and the West, where many men and women in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Nigeria risk their lives because of fundamentalism, we can make a so superficial and irresponsible use of words.

Perhaps a woman, who has been born Muslim and lived in Italy for a long time, back in his home country and decided for whatever reason after that to wearing the veil, can it be a sign of psychological disease? Or rather, or maybe she was ill for some time and had no one with whom to share a grief and sought comfort in his religion? And what we readers should think once “pricked ears,” complained to the police everyone wears a headscarf? Believe that behind every mother veiled there is a mentally ill person?

To understand what is going on in the clash between the two worlds will take many years, the complexity of cultures, world politics, the inextricable chessboard from those are behind the Islamic fanaticism, ignorance persevering that powers it. Who has the duty to write and talk about the record should pass around a hand on her/his heart before powering unnecessary and damaging fires.