Word: veil
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Does living with a linguistic veil and a heightened interest in detail involve more fictionalizing than processing events at home? Doesn’t retrospection add ambiguity, even to conversations that didn’t have a language barrier? Aren’t we in the habit of corralling observations into metaphors, even when we aren’t trying to discover the rhythm of a foreign place? Don’t we simplify un-mined personalities of even the people we know until they’re stock characters for our unwritten autobiographies...
...modern politics, there are few trustier weapons than Muslim women's clothes. The Saudis and the mullahs in Iran have used them for decades, passing laws on women's head coverings to underscore male rulers' piety and power. George W. Bush knew the symbolic potency of the veil, too, citing the discrimination of American 'women of cover' during post 9/11 tensions. Now two Presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama, have taken up the veil, framing it as a topic in radically different ways. Sarkozy used Muslim dress as a nationalistic prop, seeing it as a threat to France's eternal...
Trying to rescue Muslim women is a French tradition dating back to the colonization of Algeria in the 1830s. Saving Algeria's veiled population was central to France's mission civilisatrice to bring the Enlightenment to Arabs. For French colonialists, the veiled Algerian woman was both a sign of resistance to French attempts to shape their society, and a rallying cry to redouble their civilizing efforts. "The Arabs elude us," fretted one general in the 1840s, "because they conceal their women from our gaze." In her brilliant 2007 book The Politics of the Veil, historian Joan Wallach Scott writes that...
...many, Sherbini has become a convenient martyr, an easy, emotional means to an end - or a distraction from Egypt's domestic woes. "The Islamists in Egypt have already [begun] using this as a card to mobilize for the veil - not for the right of women to wear whatever they want, but in defense of the veil," Hossam el-Hamalawy, an Egyptian journalist and author of the popular blog Arabawy.org, tells TIME...
...leaders of Indonesian Islamic political parties first gained inspiration from the Iranian revolution in 1979, Indonesia today is hardly in danger of hardening into a theocracy willing to gun down unarmed protesters. True, Shari'a-based initiatives have proliferated on a local level, and more Indonesian women wear the veil today than three decades ago. But on a national level, Islamic parties fared poorly in April's legislative polls, winning nine percentage points fewer than they did in 2004. In this month's presidential race, attempts by third-place finisher Kalla to court an Islamic vote backfired...