He asked the man, not her. That tells you everything about Islam
Here is what my husband answered.⤵️
A comment came in yesterday, under my post about Krisztina.
Completely expected.
I want to use it to show a pattern everyone needs to understand.
I had shared a post Krisztina put up, with a photo of herself in a vest, tight black pants and boots, a cross around her neck and the afternoon sun in her hair, on her way out for a Saturday night with her husband, to enjoy life and be glad for the freedom.
Under the post, a man asked me, as you can read in the screenshot, why I accept that my wife shows off her body like that, instead of covering up like a devout Muslim.
I have cut out his name and picture, because this isn't about him. He rarely writes kindly, but I actually think he meant it seriously, and maybe even kindly, the way you mean it when you have grown up inside an order, Islam, and never seen it from the outside.
First, notice WHO he is writing to.
He isn't writing to her. He is writing to me. He asks the MAN why the man ALLOWS it, and in that one small choice of address lies everything I have been trying to point at for years when I say "architecture" and "not people."
The woman is not the one you speak WITH. She is the one you speak ABOUT, over her head, man to man, because in that order her body is not first and foremost her own. It is the place where the honor of the man and the family is kept, and that is why it has to be wrapped up, guarded and kept away from other people's eyes.
And I want to say this very clearly, so it can't be misunderstood: it is Islam I am talking about.
Not Muslims as people. Not the woman who freely chooses to wear a headscarf for her God. I have no quarrel with her.
I am talking about the order that is written down and binding, where covering up is a duty, a demand that costs you to turn away from, where honor lives in her and the accounting is settled by him.
And then the crucial part, the part this whole comment is really proof of.
That order does NOT stay within its own ranks.
Krisztina is not Muslim. She wears a cross around her neck, she has NEVER promised that law anything, and still she is measured by it, in her own country, under her own picture, and I am asked to enforce it on her.
This is not a man telling us how he and his own have chosen to live. It is a man telling us how MY wife ought to live.
That is the difference between a FAITH and a DEMAND.
A faith binds the one who believes. A demand binds EVERYONE who comes within reach, and a rule about how a woman should look doesn't ask what the woman herself believes. It just looks at her. Where that rule becomes strong enough, in a street, in a schoolyard, in a neighborhood, the covered woman becomes the norm, and the uncovered one becomes the woman who has something to explain - no matter who she is, where she comes from, and what her parents taught her.
So this isn't about Muslim women alone. It is about ALL women who live somewhere that order gets to set the standard.
Your daughter too!
That is what is new, and that is what is old.
Because we have been here before. We know this thought from our own history, and it took the West more than a thousand years, with Christianity's claim that Woman is made in God's image exactly as he is, to arrive at something as simple as the idea that a woman belongs to herself. That is not a given. It is an inheritance, and it was paid for dearly, most of all by the women themselves.
Now the old order is knocking again - and asking to have her back.
Read that sentence again.
And let me go on, because here is something we men MUST understand, and I'll say it the way it is.
Women can NOT defend their own freedom. Not alone. Not against an order carried by men who are willing to use force to enforce it. This isn't about courage. Look at the women in Iran who take off the headscarf and sing and walk in the streets, who have more courage than most of us will ever need, and then look at how the order still stands, because the men around them still hold it up. And it killed 30,000 in January alone this year, to enforce its Law.
A woman's freedom has ALWAYS existed ONLY where men have wanted it and been ready to stand for it. That is how it came to be here, and that is how it disappears again, the day we stop.
That is why the question was put to me and not to her.
He knows perfectly well who decides. The order he speaks from works ONLY if men say yes to being its guardians, and it can ONLY be stopped by men who say no.
There is ONLY us to stand in between.
So here is my answer to him.
I don't accept anything, because there is nothing for me to accept.
Her body is not mine to cover, and my honor does not lie in her clothes or inside her.
It lies in whether I can stand upright next to a free woman without becoming afraid of her, and a masculinity that needs to hide her away in order to bear itself is not strong.
It is shriveled and so fragile that it asks her to carry the weight.
I can't arrange other people's countries, and I don't interfere with what a human being freely chooses for themselves, anywhere in the world. But I want the same freedom for the woman in Tehran and Kabul as I want for my own wife.
And here, with us - THAT FREEDOM IS NOT UP FOR NEGOTIATION.
And that's that.
My problem has never been whether women wear a little or a lot of clothing, or whether they dress for pleasure or for God.
My problem is the men, and the order, who think that the decision is theirs.
Anyone who raises that demand toward the women I love - my wife, my mother, my sisters, my nieces, my friends - meets me first, and that conversation - or whatever it turns into - I never get tired of.
On the contrary. I rise up in it. Until it lies down.
She is not mine to give away.
And that is why she is not yours to demand.
❤️🔥🪽
Good Sunday, friends ☀️
...
Oh yes, and one more thing.
Notice the sentence in the middle, the one about the extramarital affairs, "like the one you're involved in."
It is not random. It is part of a pattern we have seen repeated from profile to profile for a long time now, where stories are made up about Krisztina's modesty and about our marriage.
None of it is true, and I'm not going to get into it. There is nothing to address. It is just lies, made to start rumors.
But notice how it connects to everything else.
When a man's honor lives in his wife, she is the one you go after if you want to hit him, and when modesty lives in the fabric, the uncovered woman is by definition the dishonorable one. Then you don't need to know anything about her. You have seen a picture, and the rumor writes the rest by itself.
It is the oldest weapon that order has.
That is how women have always been silenced and men have always been made to keep them at home, because in a culture of honor the rumor is the punishment, and it only works on those who believe their honor lives there.
Ours doesn't. That is why it doesn't work.
😉