A woman's dress or the lack of it

It seems now that women's dress is taking up too much attention, maybe even more than it deserves. The debate on whether a woman should dress conservativly or not has become an issue on its own, rooting itself within religious debates. As much as the stigma around the mohajabat in the so called liberal circles is arrising, another rising extreme, condemns women who do not cover themselves in a tent. The case of the Sudanese Journalist
Lobna al-Hussein is one example of the extent of extremism regarding the control of what women should wear or not. When did it cease being a woman's personal choice and had become another form of authorities' control? Why is a woman's dress stirring all these debates and social division? Why is it that when a girl decides to wear the veil her conservative friends start cheering and when she takes it off the other side of her friend's circle start congratulating her?

In an article in the shorook newspaper Niveen Mosaad raises a very intersting point. Which is why Marwa el Sherbeeny has been called the martyr of hijab while Lobna al-Hussein has been condemned by religious people. The similarity between the two cases is striking. Both women have received been harshly treated, in once case leading to death, because of the way they were dressed. It is strange how over the years the issues regarding the veil and its ban and the veil and its neccesity are growing more and more.

The women have become deprived of their choices. Is it the man's way to dominate in these patriarchial societies because he knows no other way? Or does it go back to what the dress entails i.e. what religious beliefs and cultural beliefs that the woman has and how these difference in belief have caused this social division.

Of course the there are many dimennsions to the problem that at times it ceases to be about the woman wear and more about the connotations that it entails, which touch upon social and political issues.
But it never stops to baffle me how something as simple as what a woman chooses to wear can cause all these tensions.
We live in a mad world indeed.