Letters to the Editor
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and while I'm at it....
I should probably mention that the beauty standard Muslim women are aspiring to is "blonde and white", although they themselves rarely have white skin. Hence throughout the Islamic crescent you find a flourishing trade in skin lightening creams like Fair and Lovely, some of which contain bleaching chemicals which seriously damage the skin. I could go on and on, but I think I've made my point.
Somebody was explaining to me how women who wear the hijab are liberated from sexist Western beauty standards.....geeeee....where'd they go? It's all so quiet now.....
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To tina schrier
"Muslim women live in constant fear of being dumped for a younger and prettier women, or even of being replaced while still married by a younger wife. Believe me, they are VERY obsessed with their appearance. Then there's the fact that they don't work, and pass a lot of time attending social events. Then there's the whole ideal of femininity they are trying to live up to. It's wonderful package, isn't it?"
Thanks for summing up the lives of roughly 500 million people, who live in every continent of the planet, and come from innumerable ethnic and cultural backgrounds, so cleanly and concisely.
What was it I read about becoming educated before shooting one's mouth off?
Sheesh, indeed.
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One more for tina schrier
It keeps getting better and better. Are you actually reading what you post?!
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Anonymous...
while it's true I don't know each one of the 500 million personally, I have been in 12 of these countries, and this pretty much sums up the experience of the middle class housewife, be she Arab, Turkish, Pakistani, or Malaysian. Of course it's unfortunate to have to speak in generalities and you can find exceptions to the type I described. But it's overwhemingly the case. Some other posters mentioned women who wear tight fitting short sleeved clothes that show off everything, but then they have the hijab on over it. That's another example of what I'm talking about.
The point I'm making is that Western feminists are dreaming if they think that wearing a head covering has freed women in the Muslim world from having a feminine ideal in terms of appearance that they have to live up to. It has NOT. I think that really needs saying, because Tracy's whole argument is based on this frankly misinformed and rather stupid assumption.
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I don't care
I don't care about this, I don't care about tribal neck rings, lip plates or jumping off rattan towers or body scarring or facial tattoos, vision quests, suicide bombers, honor killings or any of the other 3 million quaint neolithic and medieval horseshit happenings people insist on. Trade your 9 year daughter for a goat? Fine. Oh she's a sex slave? That's two goats and a dowry. Knock your stone aged selves out.
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@Tina
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.
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Hijab is just a symbol
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.