A Brilliant Site
Well. Aren’t I stupid. How did I manage to miss this? The link is right there on Ibn Warraq’s site. I just didn’t do enough exploring. Well, I’ve done it now, so don’t you miss this one. It’s loaded with great stuff. Look at the articles page for instance. Read There’s no such thing as Voluntary Hijab!. If only I’d had that article to cite during all those arguments about the hijab last winter, with all those people who simply couldn’t see any reason at all why someone might support the ban. Seeing the reasons but still not agreeing I could have understood, but that’s not how it went. It was weird. But none of that crap on this site. Yeah!
The veil is not just another kind of clothing; opposing it is not just defending the right to freedom of clothing even though it is put forward as such. It is not something that a woman decides to put on for a change one day and to take it off the next. It is not a costume put on a young girl who is going to a costume party! Veiling young girls teaches them that they belong to an inferior sex and should be ashamed, and that they are sex objects and must limit their physical movements. By the same token, young boys are taught they belong to the ‘superior’ sex, and that girls are inferior and sex objects. An unbridgeable gap is thus created and institutionalized between the two sexes at the expense of young girls’ deprivation and young boys’ ’empowerment’.
Visit, read, wish them good luck.
Heavens above! Good Lord but it took you almost three years after 9/11 to find it! Well, better late than never! Perhaps you were too busy bashing the Rapturists, who are the proverbial vicar’s tea party compared to those ‘moderates’ of the Religion of Peace.
BUT NO NO, THE MARC MULHOLLANDS OF THE BLOGOSPHERE WILL CRY! … THE MUSLIMS MUST BE MODERATE THEY EVEN GET PUBLISHED IN ‘LE MONDE’.
See here
French original here
You could conceivably make the argument that women ‘needing’ to wear veils and cover themselves highlights the inferiority of men. After all, men don’t seem to need protecting from women’s uncontrollable sexuality.
Well I know it was stupid, that’s what I said. No need to gloat. Or to be silly, either. Does it look as if I’ve been spending all my time bashing the Rapturists? There are one or two other items on this site, after all. And as for tea party – no, I don’t think so. I think those people are seriously dangerous, and they do have representatives in high places. And they seem to get a lot less attention than Islamists – so I think they’re eminently worth bashing.
PM, I know, and people do make that argument, seriously as well as in jest. Then other people reply that the solution is to blindfold men rather than bag women.
But then they’d keep bumping into things. Oh no, much safer to prevent them going out altogether.
“You could conceivably make the argument that women ‘needing’ to wear veils and cover themselves highlights the inferiority of men.”
You could be onto something there ;-). Perhaps pocessions should also be banned to protect the weak from the temptation to steal. It seems mighty unfair however to inconvenience the victims and make them alter their behaviour, as opposed to making the perpetrators moderate theirs.
We’ve been discussing this (and the Canadian Shariah) over at urbanphoto.net. I wonder: Is it the duty or purpose of the State to liberate every person from “their” own culture’s restrictions, even if those restrictions do not appear to us to be “voluntary”? Shoudl the State be reaching in and removing the Koran from the young girl’s bedroom, or vetting the teachings of an iman? Is the site perhaps a little over-the-top?
Depends what you mean by ‘the State,’ of course, and then the removing the Koran bit is a little over the top itself. But what if for example girls are not being educated? Is that purely the business of the girls’ parents? I would say no.
And there is education in a wider sense. ‘The State’ can for example teach people that discrimination against women is not a good thing. There’s a lot of ground between sending the troops in and turning a blind eye.
You make good points, OB.
Another poster at urbanphoto had this to say:
“America is a Christian country and people who come here should respect our Christian values.”
“France is a secular country and people who come here should respect our secular values.”
What’s the difference between the two statements? Nothing. The Secularists are saying the same thing that the Religious Right is saying, they’ve just made it more palpable to the moderate-liberal politics of modern Europe.”
(Note: I personally agree with the skeptical/secularists world view (why else would I lurk here :)), but…he has a point. Discourage immigration of the “alien.”
(Thanks, Brian.)
Well, he doesn’t really have a point. He has rhetoric rather than a point. Because secularism doesn’t require belief – it simply requires bracketing supernatural beliefs in the public sphere. That’s quite another matter. (Not to mention the fact that in terms of that parallel, America is not a Christian country, it’s a secular one just as France is.)