I guess that is why Hillary covered her head at the Sultan Hasan Mosque in Egypt. It irked me that the men were not covering their head (including Obama)according to Islamic customs. So why does a Woman of Hillary's stature do it?

Hillary was almost close to becoming President. Would she have covered her head standing next to Saudi Arabia's king? (And then I did some research on the iron lady of Britain - Margaret Thatcher who also covered her head standing next to the Saudi King.)

Why does an educated woman have to do this?

Ms A, i think your Zola quote points to a fundamental aspect of your world view.

"Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest." -- Émile Zola

By contrast, many of your critics here (starting with me) would reject the mythology of "civilisations" and the concept of civilisational perfection/progress that you both quote and promote. In other words -- particularly in light of your verbal aggression and haunting of discussions related to Islam -- your assumptions strike me as similar to cognate mythologies of religious, ethnic and national identity.

True belief is dangerous in every form, not just the theistic varieties.

not one. That was an unfortunate typo.

"None of you show even a hint of concern about children being indoctrinated into superstition and conformity. As long as it isn't explicitly legal compulsion you seem happy to wash your hands of it."

How would you handle the problem that you perceive here? What is your resolution?

"Yet I suspect that if this were white conservative Christians in America doing the exact same thing in comparable circumstances, your supposed passion for nuance and individual interpretations would prove fleeting."

If you're referring to indoctrination, then attending church, liturgy, reading of the Bible, feeling patriotic about their nation all qualify. Just as Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu children are being indoctrinated by their parents in similar ways with combinations of culture and religion. What is your proposed alternative to this widely practiced occurence? Or, as you like to continually state, am I not comprehending the issue? If not, please lay it out for me.

Kristinab, I must say I find your writing rather... alluring, but I am curious as to why you think that the cultural responsibility to both purity and sexy are "burdens"?

Wouldn't women knowing that they have responsibilities feel empowered?

It would seem that meeting that responsibilities of purity and sexy would be easy to meet, and women could have fun meeting those responsibilities.

I think the problem is more a matter of mind frame, in that a lot of women think they can't be sexy or pure, or can't be both at the same time, when in fact they actually control the standards that predicate both. If you want to be sexy and pure, simply dictate what is sexy and pure, and proclaim yourself as meeting that eidetic, and then in the next voice proclaim that you don't give a fuck what other people think of you.

If you like and enjoy sex, and know how to practice and enjoy safe sex, then you are by definition both sexy and pure.

Thank you for your thoughtful posts. I'd like to point out, though, that Jewish scholars tend to refer to the Hebrew Bible, not the 'Old Testament' cause we only have that one. We do refer to 'written' Torah (the Five Books), the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) and the Oral Torah, Mishnah, Gemarah and following commentaries. As you probably know, Jewish reading of scripture is interpretive in several ways--one of them is the grammarian approach, which Arab Jewish scholars like Ibn Ezra and Ibn Tibon learned from Muslim scholars (other ways are much wilder, much more associative). The point for us--for you too, yes?--is that revealed text is always inflected through the human reader and, therefore, always revealing new things.

For all of us: it would be useful to distinguish religion and ethnicity. These categories overlap, of course: people from a specific ethnos may, in the main, practice a particular religion as part of their heritage, but most large religions, like the Abrahamic one, include people of many ethnicities and also welcome converts from any ethnic background. This is relevant to our discussion. Interpretations of commandments to dress modestly, for example, have very different interpretations in different ethnic and cultural contexts. Islam, for example, doesn't mandate a burka--that's an ethnic folkway (and as such, is religiously dispensible).

If i remember correctly, you brought up the fact that muslim women might be wearing a headscarf because they feared going to hell, or that god got the grammar wrong in the quran. hence my interest in explaining the context for the quranic passages on the hijab.

The pressure for women of various abrahamic faiths to dress conservatively and act as the guardians of purity is, in some circumstances, probably profound even in the absence of legal compulsion.

but the pressure on women to dress non-conservatively, or fashionably, or beyond their means, in los angeles in new york city, for example, which are, for the most part, secular, is also inarguably profound.

my point here? in an overtly patriarchal society, any overtly patriarchal society, women are conditioned to dress and groom themselves in order to please men. i have a hard time understanding how pressure (not compulsion) to engage in dressing modestly is inherently more oppressive than pressure (not compulsion) to engage in dressing provocatively/fashionably/et cetera.

every exposed inch of western woman living in the west, for example, is vulnerable to being manipulated in order to conform to standards of beauty: nails manicured, hair dyed and sprayed, skin tanned, stomach flat, muscles toned, breasts full but perky, etc. given the choice between being pressured to look like this until into my forties, and being pressured to dress modestly, i'm frankly not sure which one is worse.

and i'm not sure how one could possibly argue that the intense pressure experienced by american women to conform to an impossible standard of beauty is any less oppressive than the conjectured social pressure placed on muslim women to dress conservatively. particularly since american women are not only pressured to look attractive, but are simultaneously blamed if they are sexually harassed, date-raped, or assaulted.

both circumstances--reverence of "purity" and reverence of a woman's socially constructed sexuality (as imagined in the western standard of beauty) are pretty non-ideal.