Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyConstanze
Doubt that it will work or even be practical, as the recent riots have shown, the people who hid their faces were the ones who committed crimes.
Things may be very different in the UK, or not. You won't know until someone gives it a serious go.
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Now the UK doesn't tend to have very extreme weather conditions, there is no real need to hide your face, especially the eyes, not part of the culture, now you come into a culture, why try to do your best to stick out and make yourself as uninviting as possible?
Because people don't wear cultures like masks, they internalize them.
I'm sure you wouldn't want people more or less forcing you to go around without clothing that you feel to be integral to your decency and dignity. And cultural pressures can be as much force as anything else, forcing the people in question to either retreat into their own communities and maintain voluntary segregation, or to abandon their decency and dignity to conform to the expectations of a host culture. There are widely divergent standards in this regard, and it stands to reason that one should be very up front about any expectation that such things be changed when living in a country, as people do make their home there, after all. Introducing the expectation afterwards is a recipe for resentment and a loss of interest in assimilating or integrating or even coexisting gainfully, which neither party benefits from.
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Deliberately hiding all your features without any real reason for it, why should I have to put up with it?
Why should I not be allowed to do it?
Am I assumed to be a criminal, that I need to be identified?
It is better to err on the side of more freedom, and we must recognize that freedom has implications that aren't always ideal or to our liking. This is like how freedom of speech is most imporant when protecting the right to say unpopular things: the normative does not require rights or protections.
Also, how much of myself must I share with people in order to placate them? With people who are looking to pressure- or even legislate- me into sharing what I may want to keep to myself? With the full and certain knowledge that this will only impart a false sense of knowing something about me, while breeding hidden resentment at being subjected to force? Must I disclose that I am heterosexual when sitting down next to someone on the bus? How about when entering the rest room? Would covering up some eczema be acceptable? How about a hat?
Or, as regards comfort, I'm very uncomfortable around people wearing furs, and offended by diamond rings, both things with an arguably solid basis beyond mere familiarity. Can I reasonably expect people to ditch their expensive furs for my benefit? How about the wedding rings by which they show their support for civil wars in Africa, exploitation, oppression and child labor, can I expect those to be kept shamefully hidden in a purse so as to not impinge on my sensibilities to the effect that these are things the support of which is unbefitting our civilization?
If not, then it's indeed down to familiarity, and immigrants will always be unfamiliar.
We either accept potential discomfort associated with that unfamiliarity, or stop accepting immigrants.
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As a woman I do see it as the expression of religious extremists who like to treat women as cattle or property, and that does rub me the wrong way.
And in a lot of cases, you're right.
I also know a lot of cases to the contrary.
Besides which I've done an analysis of the practical side of the issue as evidenced in our own past in another thread (the one on doms that feel guilty about being one, as I recall), and while the motivation is likely to be oppression (one might more accurately use the term 'domestication', which is a more subtle but also more pervasive force in the West), there is also some potential gain for the women in question, so it should be left to them to break with tradition if they're up to it, not us (if it's a power thing- i.e. oppression- then it's well established that one cannot liberate frum such things, as that just exchanges one master for another, but one can encourage it and support movements to that effect in various ways).
Women's liberation is coming to the Middle East, bit by bit. It's not a battle we can fight for them, much as we might like to. It's something they must do for themselves, and are doing right now. We can't force it, and trying to do so among the minorities will only cause a backlash, at best.
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Now said women use mideval garb, while at the same time yapping away on modern mobile phones - how does that work?
Quite well, or so I gather.
Women still tend to cover their torso in the West, and even the ones that don't need the support of a bra are required to cover their breasts, while men are free to flaunt their pectorals. It may seem a little absurd, but I do believe we might want to clean up our own inequalities and prejudices (e.g. about nudity) before we start trying to sort out other people's issues, even if they become our neighbours.
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Again, in the UK you hardly find such icy temperatures that you need to protect your face, or such hot desert winds that the skin would suffer.
I'm pretty sure you still find the seasonal flu, the common cold, and so forth. A lot of people in Japan have used filter masks to prevent spreading disease to others. I think that's very thoughtful. Similarly, eye infections are incredibly contagious, and a veil discourages touching the eyes (which is usually a bad idea anyway, even when healthy).
These aren't the reasons people wear it, but they're advantages to people doing so, and may well have played a part in how those things came to be part of their culture to begin with (in general, things start out with functional ideas, then degenerate from there; cf. biblical verses on house mold, or dietary prescriptions, or kosher laws).
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We go to an Arabic country, we play by their rules and respect their customs (i.e. no low cut tops, no short skirts, etc) so why can't we expect the same here? Baffles me, I always thought tolerance is something that goes both ways.
Tolerance is something in our culture. It may not be part of theirs. And incidentally, it's courtesy, not tolerance, that applies. Tolerance is accepting the stuff they wear, even if it makes us uncomfortable. Courtesy on their part would be ditching the stuff that makes us uncomfortable. As always, there's a tradeoff involved, and I've observed that women do not seem to appreciate feeling naked and exposed around strangers, so it seems like a fairly huge leap to show courtesy at the expense of feeling that way. Far more than the level of sacrifice for courtesy generally expected.
More to the point, it is only our value if we espouse it regardless of what others espouse. When I'm courteous to some random douchebag I run into at the mall, it's not a question of who they are or how they act; it's a question of who I am, and how I choose to act. This is kind of vis a vis the notion of moral high ground, though that's beside the point, I think.
I don't mind if people choose monoculturalism. I prefer a reasonably homogenous community around myself, as well, but recognize that any sizeable land mass will have a lot of people and a lot of diversity, and that society is what we call that superstructure in which people of different preferences and backgrounds try to coexist despite differences and divergent opinions of appropriate dress, speech, values, behavior and so forth.
I know a lot of people in Norway think LGBT people should not be allowed to kiss in public. It either makes them uncomfortable, disgusted or both. I could care less about guys kissing in public, and (being endowed with the easily amused Y-chromosome) rather appreciate gals doing so. My mother in law is offended by both.
I would enjoy it if smoking in public were banned. It bothers me when people do it, and offends when they do it up close. My mother in law does it habitually, and considers it a right to be allowed to do so. And I happen to agree with her to a point: so long as she's not doing it close enough to inflict a small but unneccesary risk, and can be civil about requests to stop (whether stopping or not), I figure the public sphere calls for some leeway. Lubrication to let incompatible people be compatible enough to coexist and make common use of the shared benefits of having a society.
While I'm probably less comfortable with the niqâb than you are, I'm all in favor of letting them wear one. I do not see that it is necessary for me to seek to restrict their freedom. And I can't really see any substantial difference between any attempt at denying them free choice of headwear and any attempts at denying people in same-sex relationships the free choice to express their affection in public in a manner that is analogous to what straight people are allowed to do.
I believe you've supported that right for LGBT people. I suspect you've observed firsthand the level of homophobia that is common in men. So turn your own question around: why should straight men be made uncomfortable on their own turf by gay men? The answer, I think, is blatantly obvious. It is less obvious that it carries over to the niqâb issue, but I think you can see how it does by pausing to compare and contrast the two issues and the underlying logic of it. I'm not overly enthusiastic about the conclusion, as I also find the niqâb uncomfortable (unlike the hijâb, which I hardly notice), but I do think it's an inescapably correct conclusion, at least as regards comfort.
Either way, I do think it merits considering the matter carefully to be sure, whatever conclusion you arrive at.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Multiculturalism, Melting Pot, or Hybrid - 
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