The Qur'an enjoins "modesty" for Muslim women so that they can be distinguished from non-Muslim women (who, in the Medina of Muhammad's time, would have probably been slaves, and thus subject to the sexual whims of their masters, and the master's friends).

"Modesty" has been interpreted in a variety of ways by scholars and Muslim communities. There has always been a confusion between clothing as a "sign", which can be perfectly arbitrary (a sash that says, "I'm a chaste Muslim woman" on an otherwise naked female) and clothing as a way to hide any manifestation of a woman's physical presence, which the scholars and community *hoped* would prevent sexual signaling and sexual disorder. That strategy fails because humans (male or female) always find a way to present a sexual self even in the most self-abnegating clothing. Put a woman in a burqa and she can flirt with her shoes, her walk, her nail polish. Put a girl in a school uniform and she'll roll up her sleeves, hike the skirt, and experiment with makeup. If you try to extinguish the signalling with ever more restrictive rules, people will find a way around the rules.

That said -- the commentators focussing on the issue of hijab are missing the point. The hijab, for that Pakistani, symbolized a commitment to behaving as a proper, modest Pakistani Muslim female in all contexts, inside the home or out of it. Not only did Aqsa reject the hijab, she LEFT THE FAMILY HOME. That, I think, was something that her family felt it could not ignore. If she was sleeping outside the home, she was possibly, even probably, engaging in sex. The family's honor was being destroyed and the men were being humiliated in front of their peers. The obsession with hijab on the part of the Western media is distorting our understanding of what were "probably" the reasons for this honor killing.

I say "probably" because we know so little of the Parvez family history, the family dynamics, that we may be missing some crucial facts that would explain the father's actions as something other than generic honor killing.

The author assumes that if you don't bathe, you aren't clean. Um, there are OTHER ways of cleaning yourself. I've lived overseas and cleaned myself with a basin of water and a coconut husk. Europeans who didn't bathe would nevertheless make daily use of a pitcher of water, a basin, and a linen hand towel. That's an efficient use of water and doesn't require a separate room for bathing.

Bathing was seen as luxurious and self-indulgent because it usually meant going to public baths (which were also often used as houses of assignation). Or it required ownership of a tub, and servants to heat and carry water. The self-denying or efficient used a minimum of water in a basin.

See the Wikipedia article on washstand -- which is still biased by the delusion that you aren't clean unless you've submerged the whole body.

Hrithik Roshan. Watch him in Dhoom 2 and sigh for him forever after. (The movie is tacky but he's great.)

The print newspaper is dead, long live the online media.

People are reading more than ever, but as words on screen. Not necessarily books as usually defined, but reading. That's where I read my book reviews: at Salon, at the online NY Times, at the online NY Review of Books, at Arts and Letters Daily, at 3 Quarks Daily, and several dozen other blogs. Mailing lists. Usenet newsgroups. It's like drinking from a firehose. There's no dearth of reviewing.

Oh, and ebooks? They're coming. From libraries, from online stores, and as free public domain ebooks from several sites, which I won't name, lest I be thought a shill. Intensely satisfying to read a review online, read a sample chapter online, and buy and download the ebook. All within half an hour.

What problem?

Iranian-American Islamic scholar Reza Aslan! Brains, looks, character ... what more could you want?