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Qaradawi: Bearded men and veiled women should live it up and go to the beach, a top Muslim preacher [Qaradawi] said Sunday, urging Muslims to instill fun and joy in their lives besides being religious….
“But besides the psychological benefits of outdoor recreational activities, Qaradawi said going to the beach and praying the daily prayers allows Muslims to prove to the world that being religious does not conflict with leading a fun life.”
Related to my previous post, a teen Muslimah ventures into the realm of media criticism and expresses a complaint about the lack of certain images of hijabis on the web:
Why doesn’t there seem to be action hijabis on google?! Why do all hijabis have to be posing? I’ve been googling hijabi w/hijab flying in the wind since forever. But there’s nothing! Or a hijabi running or jumping or cleaning or playing or eating…
Women’s sports clubs have become widely popular in Saudi Arabia as a culture of women’s fitness has taken hold. But the Saudi government now says it will close all of the unlicensed private operations down, leaving only expensive clubs in medical facilities.
Blogger Saudiwoman, who was misquoted and misidentified by the Arab News hacks in the article linked above, writes about this new development (I’ve edited one sentence in this quote for grammar and clarity.)
Women only sports clubs have been popping up everywhere and their fees are now within reach of the average woman. They offer aerobic classes, self-defense and even salsa dancing. However they have no legal licensing umbrella because according to the government all forms of exercise are for men only. So the owners of these clubs get a license for a salon or a child activity center and then expand from there. Ultra conservatives are dead against these establishments because they believe that they lead Saudi women to sin through the influence of and interaction with unsavory feminists, and sometimes they even go so far as to claim lesbians work there and frequent the clubs (according to the muttawa sexually repressed wild imagination). Moreover they believe that exercise goes against femininity and that it is an exclusively manly domain.
“Exercise goes against femininity” – yeah, sure. Exercise is important to overall mental health and helps stave off or improve control over mental illness. Such ‘ultra-conservatives’ must consider madness and poor mental health to be expressions of “normal” feminity, since they are more likely to be present among the women in their families who, no doubt, are prohibited from exercise.