Miss Nigeria, Shatu Garko.
By Our Reporter
United States-based Nigerian social commentator, Farooq Kperogi, has condemned moves by the Kano State Islamic Board also known as Hisbah police to arrest Shatu Garko for participating in the Miss Nigeria pageant.
Shatu Garko is the first woman donning hijab to win the Miss Nigeria crown since the inception of the beauty pageant.
Recall that few days ago, BBC Pidgin reported that Hisbah commandant, Haruna Ibn-Sina, said Garko’s parents will be invited to answer questions on their daughter’s actions.
Hisbah also stated that the young lady’s participation in a beauty pageant was against Islam and her action might serve as an inspiration for other ladies to act the same way.
Reacting in his column on Saturday, Kperogi condemned the stance of Hisbah, describing it as hypocrisy.
He wrote, “It’s obvious that the cowardly, retarded rubes that constitute Hisbah in Kano regain their moral machismo only when they confront certain kinds of people.
“The witless and sanctimonious mob of theocratic thugs called Hisbah whose anti-prostitution commander was caught pants down at a Kano hotel in an adulterous amour with a married woman in February this year, whose moral antenna shuts down when the children of the elites violate Sharia codes, whose irritating primitivism is an enduring source of embarrassment for all reasonable Muslims, has chosen to bully Shato Garko, the hijab-wearing, Kano-born winner of the Miss Nigeria Beauty Pageant.
“When the daughter of the Emir of Kano got married to Muhammadu Buhari’s son, Sharia protocols and Islamic sartorial norms were not only openly and wantonly breached, we also saw videos of the scions of the upper crust of Northern Muslim elites loudly repeating and dancing to sexually explicit lyrics of notoriously raunchy pop songs. But the rabid, holier-than-thou Hisbah gawks who pounce on poor or politically unconnected women at the slightest opportunity looked away.
*It’s obvious that the cowardly, retarded rubes that constitute Hisbah in Kano regain their moral machismo only when they confront certain kinds of people. Sadly, they have a large admiration society in Northern Nigeria where the misogynistic bullying of successful, high-flying Muslim women is a favorite pastime.
“In fact, a three-term governor and serving senator from Yobe State (who introduced Sharia in his state!) was recently caught almost literally pants down—and with irrefutable videographic corroboration, too— in a threesome with two women who are not his wives in a cheap, grubby brothel. There was no outrage from the self-anointed moral police. On the contrary, most of them defended the senator’s right to privacy, and cautioned against exposing a fellow Muslim to ridicule. Between being unclad in a hijab and engaging in adultery—and being impenitent about it when caught, as the senator was—which is worthier of moral outrage?
“The self-proclaimed male moral police who are fixated with what Muslim women wear and don’t wear won’t admit that if they, too, are judged by the standards and requirements of the religion they purport to defend they’d all come up short. All of us would. Most of them don’t lower their gaze when they encounter women (which is precisely why they pervertedly proclaim the ‘nakedness’ of clothed women and assume them to be ‘sex workers’), they patronise banks that traffic in riba, have pre- and extra-marital sexual liaisons, etc. Why do they think their own transgressions are more tolerable and more defensible than a Muslim woman’s choice to not wear a hijab?
“This is not a repudiation of the dress code prescribed for women in Islam. It’s just an admission of the fact that we’re all imperfect beings. We all have strengths in some areas and weaknesses in others. It’s unfair to estimate people’s entire worth by just one weakness.”
