shiv wrote:I think it is high time some consensus is reached on who is "Islamist".
As an example I will quote the Bengaluru Muslim nurse who leaves home in a niqab (total 400% cover burqa- face also covered - only eyes seen) gets on the bus, reaches hospital in that costume and then changes to the nursing uniform - which in most hospitals has changed to a unisex trousers and shirt, works during the day, dons her niqab in the evening and goes back home.
For my Indian American cousin, absent from India for 20 years the women in niqabs on the street is a worrying sign of imminent takeover by islamists. For me it is nothing of the sort. The Muslim area where the niqab clad woman lives even has a BJP corporator. Islamism in this instance is a perception and my perception differs from that of my cousin.
A lot of noise is made in this mealy mouthed world about "freedom". In a video I have linked earlier the BBC reporter talks of how Muslim women are not allowed their traditional dress in the workplace- ergo China is "not free" unlike my Unkil Amreeka where everyone is free. On the other hand you have France making rules about who should wear what, a USA that has social restriction on the headgear that can be worn although there is no formal ban AFAIK.
Using the burqa/niqab as a sign of Islamism is a strawman because there is a vast difference between dress code and soosai bummer. France takes the attitude that dress code = possible soosai. India takes the attitude that dress code does not necessarily mean soosai bummer. "Who is right, India or France?" is a different issue. India has a different take from other countries. The idea that Indians can have a different view is not often accepted easily by a lot of Indians - especially if one is conditioned to automatically accepting views that are commonplace in Europe or Amreeka. Many educated Indians mistake an Indian viewpoint as one that has not been exposed to the wide world and needs correction and "eye opening" by travelling. Indian means blinkered. Western means "aware" and worldly wise.
Not trying to do an equal equal - but it is necessary to pisko here. An old brahmin uncle of a friend of mine was in town recently. He is a retired doc from Florida, Amreeka. He is now 73 and has written a book in Kannada which he came to release in Bangalore the town of his birth. I saw the man some months ago on the street near his house. He was without a shirt, wearing a dhoti - his forehead adorned with vibhuti , sacred thread across his chest, barefoot - walking to the house of a neighbor who keeps cows - to feed the cows. His appearance made me smile because it was a throwback to perhaps the 1920s or so. With modern girls in tank-tops and boys in jeans - this man was an anachronism. But he was merely living out what he could not do for 45 years in America. I am certain that the US has no restriction on wearing a dhoti and going about shirtless covered in holy ash. But few Hindoos have the guts to go that way on the street in the US because there is a social restriction on doing that and one has to break social codes to be that way.
Freedom in India pays as little attention to the half-naked Brahmin as it pays to the niqab clad woman or the jeans and tank-top clad teenager. Personal dress preferences are not made into a huge issue. With Islamism being confused with dress code by stupid westerners - it is no surprise that people cannot differentiate between a Sikh and an Ayatollah. And this from a sophisticated "worldly wise" nation.
Someone said a billion plus Muslims are not stupid. Darn right they are not stupid. They too visit the US, France, KSA and India. And they observe and understand attitudes. While we are busy not underestimating the Chinese, how about not underestimating India?
Shiv,
I've seen the same thing happen in India about three years ago - I first noticed it at a very middle class yoga studio in Bangalore. I noticed Muslim girls who are clearly related to each other walking together, but dressed along the entire spectrum from niqab to jeans.
However I think that says more about India than it does about Islamism.
In any case Islamists know that outside their homes and little ghetto pockets they have no hope of *enforcing* 'Islamic dress', gender segregation and all the rest in truly public areas. It is a different story in Muslim majority areas. It was different even in Kashmir, when at their height women wearing jeans faced attacks from fellow Kashmiris like that disturbing Asiya Andrabi woman.
If Westerners think about veiling in a certain way, its because they have learned that those are the ways in which they are spoken of in Muslim-majority societies.
Women's dress, along with gender segregation was and still is a *central* arena of battle from Turkey to Iran to Egypt to the Gulf to Malaysia. Secular governments tried to force women to take it off, and Islamist movements then Islamist governments try to force them to wear them. People have killed over the issue, and continue to die on the issue.
Of course what is lost in all of this is the freedom of
choice. But then again, we are not talking about democratic societies. A few Western countries like France have imported the Ataturk and Pahlavi response to veiling from the Middle East (i.e. banning it), but that really isn't the response most countries have adopted.
In the Sunni Arab world (with exceptions like Lebanon and Damascus) women's dress has become much more conservative over the last 35 years, although we might already seeing a shifting trend. Peasant women who wore bright robes and didn't fuss too much about their hair are now in black bags with every lock tucked away. Urban women are under a great deal of scrutiny. I'm starting to see a lot of daring rebellion and subversion in places like the Gulf by local women
has posted a comment on the thread....about eunuch raping...
