My difficulty is that I am very wary about the extent to which women are obliged by an overtly misogynist culture to conform to male demands. After all, why not just a headscarf ? To my mind the difference is in the level of the woman's ownershop of her body and her own image. keep to the Fen Causeway
we have rules about clothing, that are just as illogical. try taking off your clothes in the champs elysee on a hot day...
when i visited afghanistan in '73, i bought a full-on burka, the top-to-toe one with the little grid to peer out of.
wearing it for a day was fascinating, everyone should try it just once.
but then i always liked those 'invisible man' shows! bandages wrapped around....nada!
personally, i think people should be free to attire themselves as they wish, including going nude if that's their fancy.
sometimes i think it would be horrid if europe went islamic, even moderately, they're so serious, but i suspect it could happen, for the simple reason that they don't fry their brains with alcohol, lol.
soberly they advance, fun-killers like all over-religious types.
but when i contemplate the drunken behaviour of young brits at home and abroad, it's no mystery that an equally extreme counter-force should appear.
i'd much rather my kid was an over-serious muslim, than end up blotto in an ibizan gutter.
how's that for a profound, equal-opportunity stupid and bigoted un-PC comment?
i'm sure there are plenty of amusing muslims too, i just never saw too many smiles on their faces, when i saw their faces at all. great dignity, great pride, (especially the afghans), great nobility, but almost sinister, the seriousness.
i wonder if i was raised a muslim, i would feel like westerners deserved to have people in their midst from the middle east dressed like caspar the ghost, freaking them out with the sheer anonymous weirdness of it, aaagh the muzzies are coming, payback time for all the shit we did to them.
silly to be paranoid though, che sara, sara. i'm sure there'll be a good side, it won't be the first time muslims educate us in europe after all. hopefully the secular/christian cultural pushback will make the more hyper-orthodox muslims modulate their bloodthirsty patriarchal control freakery side extremist practices, and if possible exalt us with the more delightful, creative side of islam, sufism.
zero was a great gift, so the mathematicians say... maybe we have more to learn from them than we think.
we've already figured out our pensions are Doomed if they don't come in and do our shitwork, like working in the poisoned, CAP-funded tobacco fields around here, fr'example.
I am confused about this stuff, i won't pretend not to be. so i'm letting out the different imps in my head out to play... secular society is safer in most ways.
wow, i swear i just felt a pretty big earth tremor. down boy! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
The point about you wearing a burka is that was voluntary, not a life sentence of social invisibility and societal inconsequence. Women in afghanistan are not allowed to work and old widows may actually starve to death if their family are not able to help. That's the implication of the burka. You can wear one (although nowadays you'd be killed if discovered, transvestism is a capital crime) but it is not freighted in the same way.
Islam used to be an intelligent religion, 8-900 years ago their civilisation was far in advance of ours. Their preservation of greek (and indian)maths and philosophy and their extentions of it gave us a step advance once we were able to tap into it. But then, under the stress of the Crusades and Mongol invasions, the Caliph of Baghdad issued decrees that placed religious proscriptions on intellectual endeavour and islam has since degenerated into the veneration of the rote and even occasionally the stupid.
I have a friend who keeps telling me about his visits to Thailand and how all the people are happy and how their viewpoint is so different from ours. So advanced and so much at peace with their lot. I keep gently suggesting that this might be a superficial reading given how so many very oppressive political systems thrive in these regions which suggests that venal humanity is able to sink below cultural prefereneces anywhere they get an opportunity. But he still tells me that Buddhism would prevent all the bad stuff that happens. Fine, but I think the bad ape will still win. keep to the Fen Causeway
Re: Europe ( / ) I'm pretty sure there's a happy and reasonable medium between absolute abstention and total 24/7 alcohol fuelled mayhem.
i agree.
Helen:
I think the bad ape will still win.
i wish i could be surer you're wrong, but luckily there are still people who are shining examples of selfless courage, so i can't agree with that, (yet!)
:=) ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
