As it happens, CNN has a piece on Muslim women, especially teenaged girls, who choose to wear the hijab or veil. As one woman explains, the “purpose behind wearing the hijab” was “so that a man should know [a woman] for her mind, not her body.” This is a distinctly modern and feminist spin, but it is not really true–or, at least, it is far from the whole truth. The hijab also has much to do with the sense of women as property that is exchanged in marital contracts. Again, my point is not to denigrate Islam, but to insist that the conversation about Islam, its place in the world today, and its future as a modern faith, should be carried forth on the basis of an empirical and not ideological view of what Islam teaches. Yet it seems as though the only views of Islam available these days are (for or against) highly ideological ones.