I call bullshit on anybody in North America that claims to regularly see women in full burqa (once in a rare while, maybe, but I doubt even that). Hijab, yes, which is just a head scarf (and sometimes pretty token & minimal at that) which would certainly not cause a problem eating, but full shrouding? Vanishingly rare. And, webcat, certainly not applied to children.

(And yeah, Tracy, pretty poor job intercutting pix of burqas in Pakistan in a story on hijabs in North America, kinda blew the legs off the whole point of the story.)

Another thing so many people Just Don't Seem To Get: the point TCF and others are trying to make is that these things are nuanced and situational. And occur in highly diverse circumstances. Get it?

You insist on treating a fairly open and diverse bunch of people as a monolithic block, eventually they will start acting like one. Pretty counter-productive.

All Imams do not say this or that, any more than all Christian priests, ministers, preachers, and televangelists do. All Muslims do not do this or that, any more than all Hindus do. And before you start saying that the Koran says this or that, perhaps you ought to study it a bit, it is a very complex text, possibly even more difficult of interpretation than the Bible.

AK, yeah, I've seen the public pajama thing too, still happening. (shakes head) And yeah, even very intelligent young people have common-sense deficits, so perhaps stupid isn't the right word. Though the lack of common sense in this case is pretty gaping!

Personally, as I get older, I have taken to wearing pajama bottoms around the house and to bed, at least in the winter, my aging bones take a chill a bit quicker than they used to. But not outside, no.

Oh, and fetboy, while under US-Canada tax agreements, all my bucks go to Ottawa, I still file a US return every year too, as required by law. And I still vote every time, federally anyway, though it is a bit pointless as my long-past original State is very far down the primary schedule and as about as blue as they get. I don't know enough about local issues to feel comfortable on state & municipal etc votes.

You are largely right, at least about the Arab world (it is the "fertile crescent" by the way, not Islamic Crescent, not everybody living there is Muslim, not by a long shot) but there are a lot more Islamic places in the world than that (I have lived/worked in most of the same countries as you have, and a number of other ones). Women there are about like women here: some are very into the glamor thing, others not so much. And in Muslim Africa (which is the majority of it these days) and many of the former soviet 'stans, things are rather different indeed than what you describe. Not that you are wrong, you are just extending things too far.

For example, on the polygamy thing, no, many Muslim women do not fear their husband taking up a second wife, many Saudi, Afghan, tribal Pakistani, African, etc. women might. Polygamy is pretty rare in most of the Middle East & extended Arab world in fact, indeed in the Islamic world which includes Indonesia, India, the 'stans, even Russia, Europe, & North America. And even in the tribal type societies, a quickie divorce is unlikely, given the dowry-hit the man is going to take, and the intense family pressures and consequences. (Under Sharia, on divorce, a woman's dowry reverts to her, as her personal property. Dowries tend to be big.) Divorce is rather rarer in the Middle East and other Arab countries than here, though generally it tends to, like here, work to women's disadvantage.

You are tilting towards the same error that our bigoted Muslim haters are, and painting the Islamic world as if it were monolithic, which it certainly isn't. Anybody claiming that Muslim women are forced to do this or that, had better make sure it includes Nigerian women, Somali women, Lebanese women, Turkish women, Indian women, Indonesian women, 'stan women, Moroccan women, and indeed Muslim Americans, not just Iraqi, Iranian, Pakistani, and Saudi women.

But yeah, while I was tempted by the modesty vs beauty-standards dichotomy, I too sat back and thought to myself, well, it makes a nice argument but doesn't really match what I've seen.

Trudy, thank you for injecting some facts into this so often fact-less thread. One slight, well not correction, just expansion: Abaya is the Arabic word for it, Burqu the Urdu/Pashto/Dari word, but it is pretty much the same thing, except that the Arabs tend to keep them black and the 'stanis tend to get more colourful.

Abaya use is not restricted to Saudi, it is just that Saudi is pretty much the only country where middle class and rich women wear them. I've seen them in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine & Iraq, but there they are pretty much restricted to rural or working class people. In most of these countries they are not enforced by anyone other than the family or village, and are not all that common.

But I do wish people would stop using the word "veil" to cover them all.

And especially thanks to Elie Elhadj. There you hear from an actual Muslim feminist: the people who actually get a vote on this stuff. Elie's opinion is much more important than mine or Tracy's, and much much more important than all this thread's Muslim bashers. Thank you so much for speaking up. Shookran wa' Sala'am Aleikum.