Women's eNews recently ran a fascinating article covering a panel in which a Jewish, Muslim, and Catholic woman discussed the subject of modesty. All three women have made the choice to cover their hair, choices each one of them identify as being very much their own.
They describe modesty as a personal construct, rather than a societal one.
"What is inner, that is what is dignified," Bronya Schaffer, a member of Chabad.org, a Jewish group, told Women's eNews. "It is a sense of self-respect, self-dignity and that's what gets projected. It has nothing to do with inhibition. A woman can do anything, be anything but within the context of Jewish law."
Hajer Naili, the author of the article, who also chooses to cover her hair, echoes this sentiment of intense personal choice: ". . . as a Muslim woman I simply want to follow Islamic guidance. People often assume my family imposed the scarf on me or that it means I am married. I explain that a Muslim woman who wears a veil often does so by choice and there is no link between the veil and marriage in Islam."
Naili closes by dwelling on another striking aspect of the panel - the degree to which it emphasized the commonality between the world's three major monotheisms: "As I listened to Sister Hill, Sayeed and Schaffer discuss their relation to this piece of cloth I found them sending a beautiful message of peace and co-existence among Christians, Muslims and Jews."
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