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Demspotis -> RE: Juan Williams fired by NPR. (10/21/2010 6:12:42 PM)
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I find myself very curious to know just what Juan Williams believes to be "Muslim garb"?
There is no Muslim uniform. Muslims live in and come from many cultures, and have a lot of different styles. Pretty much everything that is worn by some Muslims is also worn by non-Muslims. A couple of examples of what I'm talking about:
(1)The nation of Albania is mostly Muslim; that nation is in Europe and shares a border with Italy. The part of NYC that I live has a lot of Italians, and a lot of Albanians. I think the biggest mosque in this area is the Albanian one. These particular Muslims dress and act just like the Italians... except that some of them are even closer to the "guido" stereotype.
(2) On the other end of a spectrum, a lot of people in the US seem to think that turbans and beards are "Muslim garb", but in fact, if you see someone here with a beard and wearing a turban, he is almost certainly a member of the Sikh religion. (I've seen a statistic that 99% of turban-wearers in the US are Sikhs, although I don't know what the source for that is. I do know at least that personally I have never seen a Muslim in the US wearing a turban, except maybe on imam on TV; but I've seen thousands of Sikhs in turbans in person.) The Sikhs are definitely not Muslims, and in fact have been fighting against extremist Muslims, particularly the ancestors of the Taliban, for hundreds of years. Partly because those Muslims tried to genocide the Sikhs, and they fought back. On top of that, the Sikhs have fought and died to defend freedom of religion of other people as well as themselves.
Mistaking a Sikh for a Muslim is sort of like mistaking an American soldier for a German soldier in WWII: the clothes may seem to be superficially similar, but the language, ethnicity, ideology and values are different.
About turbans: All "baptized" or initiated male Sikhs are required to wear turbans and to refrain from cutting or shaving hair. Some Muslims wear turbans either because it happens to be traditional clothing of their particular nation, or as a sign of high status. Turbans as a mark of high status is cultural to large parts of Asia, the Middle East and northern Africa, without regard to religion. Even in the Jewish Bible, the kings and priests of the Jewish people are said to wear turbans, so apparently they shared that custom in ancient times. It's like that in India: the old maharajahs wore turbans, as did and do the warrior castes such as the Rajputs. In modern Hinduism its customary for men to wear a turban at their wedding, even they don't wear one at any other time. Sikhs adopted the turban from Hindu Aryan tradition to show that all Sikhs were to be considered equal and respectable, no matter what their religious or caste background might have been. Thus, there use of it has nothing to do with Islam... except insofar as many Muslim cultures share the custom of seeing turbans as a mark of high social status.
Hmm... if there IS anything like an actual Muslim uniform, it would lie in the fact that, like its older brother Judaism, in Islam, men are supposed to cover their heads, and so many Muslims - in this country - wear small hats or skullcaps... in many cases, looking like an oversized yarmulke/kippah (the skullcaps worn by observant Jewish men). That being so, it would make more sense to mistake Jews and Muslims for each other, than to mistake Sikhs and Muslims for each other.
But... let's all be smart, and learn how to tell all of these groups from each other. Knowledge is much better than ignorance! One little hint for recognizing a Sikh: they all wear steel bracelets on one wrist, or occasionally both... even the ones who don't wear turbans.
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