To benefit from the real competition they crave, girl basketball players at a Muslim school outside Chicago will have to assimilate. Muslim girl hoopsters at The Universal School in Bridgeview are tired of playing other Muslim-only girls teams, and want to compete against other and better non-Muslim units. But since their religion bans males from being present when any of their skin is showing, the girls want their school to see if the public and private school teams they'd like to play against will agree to keep kuffar, or "unbeliever" boys and men out of the stands and off the sidelines at any matches. The alternative is for the Muslim girl point guards and forwards of the inaptly-named Universal School to play all wrapped up in their hijabs, but that's hugely impractical.

Naturally, there's a diversity apologist ready to support the banning of non-Muslim dads from watching their daughters play basketball against the Muslim team.

Christine Bochnak, the varsity girls basketball coach at Sandburg High School in Orland Park, said complying with the ban on males could be tricky--her assistant coach, for instance, is a man--but she believes the girls from both schools could benefit from the experience. "The diversity would be good," Bochnak said. "I think it's always good when there's exposure to other cultures and ideas. It's a life lesson, and that's what we're supposed to be teaching when we're coaching basketball--teaching about life."

Lesson One: life in the United States presently bars gender or race discrimination in public events, and a variety of other settings.

I like the idea of modest dress on teen girls. In the U.S. I think styles have gone way overboard, and it's pretty evident in the T-shirts that younger girls and teens sometimes wear, in jokey costumes that are breathtaking in their sexualized tackiness, and everyday wear.

But Islam's ban on visible female skin - when men are present - reeks of hypocricy, if one considers the role of Iran's modern-day pimp-mullahs in fostering prostitution and sexual slavery. Worse is the intellectual flaccidity of the concept. As though female virtue were so fragile that the sight of a forearm is only a shade less than abject whoredom. Far from honoring the gender, such strictures demean women, conveniently contributing to a set of beliefs that condones not only genital mutilation and political and economic subjugation of Muslim women, but their "honor killings" by fathers or brothers if they become intimate with a man outside of marriage, or are merely suspected of that.

TECHNORATI TAGS: MUSLIMS, GIRLS BASKETBALL, VISIBLE SKIN, BAN MALES, UNIVERSAL SCHOOL, BRIDGEVIEW, CHICAGO