OK, I confess: There is no exquisitely designed burqa, which is why the captive females of Afghanistan all look very much like water buffaloes. The hijab, the niqab, the chador, the burqa… These are the best known of the great variety of veils-from those that cover hair and face to those that hide even wrist and ankle-designed, some exquisitely designed, for women in the world of Islam. What was the purpose of this coy intimacy between him and his particular audience? I knew because koreh is 'read' in Hebrew. But what does ikra mean? He didn't let on. In one of his three Ramadan pronouncements, he told his public that the Koran begins with the word Ikra. There is something alarmingly narcissistic in his devil-may-care attitude to facts and in his speaking foreign words without a hint of meaning to his worldwide listeners, let alone a straight-forward translation. This is as mortifying a mistake as Obama's blunder in Cairo, where he spoke of a particularly humiliating late 18 th-century peace agreement between the emperor of Morocco and America-particularly humiliating, that is, to us.

since up to 80% of their ranks (out of as many as 200 million) live in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and India. The tradition is, as it happens, not observed by the Shi'a, who are politically very significant to the U.S. What does he really know, after all? Even less than his ignorant speechwriters, who had him assume in his first White House Ramadan greetings that tarawih, the full reading of the Koran during the month-long observance, is practiced by all Muslims. I would think that people who have thought seriously about veiling (from that chic little coverlet to the physically onerous burqa in places our soldiers are fighting precisely on behalf of actually enslaved women) would resent the president's dismissive remark-'I reject the view of some in the West.'-about this deep civilizational conflict within Islam. And I won't dare to project what the fate of both these social statements-which is what they really are-will be, let's say, in half a century. My judgment on this is that these women are, indeed, less equal, just as orthodox Jewish women who wear a sheytl (wig) are less equal.

Questioning the Veil by Marnia Lazreg