Who knew?

Over at LGF, there's a fascinating post about how a school in Tennessee, in response to pressure from CAIR, has changed its dress code to allow a Muslim girl to wear a headscarf (hijab) to school. The school caved to CAIR's pressure believing this was a protected religious issue, but in fact it's not. Turns out the hijab is a political statement (and one, interestingly enough, that arose to protect women from rape by Palestinian gunmen):

But as Amir Taheri makes quite clear in this article from 2003, the hijab is not a religious garment at all. It’s a political statement. And that, of course, is why CAIR is so active in pushing for its legitimization. All these and other cases are based on the claim that the controversial headgear is an essential part of the Muslim faith and that attempts at banning it constitute an attack on Islam. That claim is totally false. The headgear in question has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. It is not sanctioned anywhere in the Koran, the fundamental text of Islam, or the hadith (traditions) attributed to the Prophet. This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shiite community. ... Sadr’s idea was that, by wearing the headgear, Shiite women would be clearly marked out, and thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian gunmen who at the time controlled southern Lebanon. Sadr’s neo-hijab made its first appearance in Iran in 1977 as a symbol of Islamist-Marxist opposition to the Shah’s regime. When the mullahs seized power in Tehran in 1979, the number of women wearing the hijab exploded into tens of thousands. In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that “scientific research had shown that women’s hair emitted rays that drove men insane” (sic). To protect the public, the new Islamist regime passed a law in 1982 making the hijab mandatory for females aged above six, regardless of religious faith. Violating the hijab code was made punishable by 100 lashes of the cane and six months imprisonment.