Pride and Prejudice
Dec. 18th, 2004 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ciroccojIn U.S., 44 Percent Say Restrict Muslims.
(Pardon my judeochristiancentricism here, but) Jesus Christ. That's disturbing. More so because it's not terribly surprising. I wonder what the poll would've said in Canada. Something tells me it would have been a bit better, but not as much as we smug Canadians would like to think.
And I'm once more uncomfortably reminded of something I saw a few weeks ago at Wal-Mart. I'm looking through a rack of kids' winter boots, trying to find something sturdy and huge, and this veiled woman comes up and starts looking through the same rack. Women wearing the hijab are now so common they attract almost no notice in Ottawa, although when I was growing up they were rare. I can't think of anybody I knew in my high school who covered their hair, though most of us were immigrants and many were Muslim. Today I see lots of teenage girls with their hair covered, even when they're wearing skintight jeans and high heeled boots or other clothing not notable for its modesty.
Anyway, the hijab is very common, but full veiling is not. This woman was wearing a full-body all-black cloak-type thing (abaya, I think), her hair covered, her face veiled below the eyes. What I could see of her eyes and hands showed she was fairly young, which is a little unusual for a fully-covered woman in Ottawa. Then a young man walked up to her, wearing clothing that... well... long flowy shirt, down past the waist, vest that stopped at his waist, fairly loose, baggy pants, round brimless turban-hat, hair kind of long, very long shaggy beard. I swear the immediate association my mind made was "bin Laden," because he looked so much like all the pictures I've ever seen of what bin Laden and his cronies wear.
Anyway, he walks up, pushing a cart with two little girls, barely past toddler age, dressed like any other 2-4 year old girls in Ottawa. Evidently, mom and dad out with the kibbles to get their winter boots, probably caught off guard by the sudden switch from rain to heavy snow, just like Chris and I and about a thousand or so other young parents in the store that day.
So I take little notice of them - I'm wondering about Spiderman v. no-name boots and laces v. velcro - and then I hear a woman's voice saying something like, "Oh, yeah, right. I don't think so."
"What? Come on, she'll love it," a man's voice, laughing.
"Says you," giggling. "You gonna put'em on her? Bzzt! Next!"
And I look up, and it's the young couple, bantering about a pair of little pink boots. Not one word of any Middle Eastern language, or awkward English wording, or rolled R's or roughened H's or anything other than down-home Ottawa Valley accents.
And I found myself rather disturbed by my reaction to this. Beyond being thrown for a little loop because it's unusual to see full veiling, more unusual in a young woman, and my first time ever seeing it on an apparently Canadian-raised young woman, I felt rather disapproving. Like, what was wrong with this girl, that after being raised in a society where women's equality is supposedly valued, she was choosing to embrace a way of life so misogynist that it required her to hide herself from the world?
I'm used to the hijab. I used to see it as an unequivocal manifestation of misogyny, and pitied the poor women who were forced to wear it. I've since learned that for many Muslim women, it's not only a sign of religious and cultural identity; for many, it's a feminist symbol. A clear signal to the men around them that they wish to be considered persons with dignity and worth, not sex objects. Like a sign saying, "I'm not here to feed your fantasies - I'm here to be listened to and treated with respect."
I'm still a little surprised when a woman born and/or raised in North America feels she needs to don the hijab to get that - I guess part of me still thinks it's something that most of them will "get over" in a generation or two. After all, I don't cover my head and I certainly feel equal to any man out there. But still, when it's just the head covering, I take it in stride. Different strokes for different folks, and all that.
And a part of me that really embraces multiculturalism also gently chides the rest of me that even if they never do "get over it", if in some Star Trek-esque future Captain Janeway lookalikes have the option of wearing Starfleet-issue blue, gold or red headscarves, and do so, well that's fine too. Respect for tradition, respect for a positive cultural symbol of women's worth, etc.
But this was different. This woman was covered from head to toe. She couldn't have been comfortable in that. It looked like she was hiding from the world out of shame, not participating fully as a person who expected everybody to treat her with respect. And her daughters were dressed like all the other little girls around them. Would she expect them to give that up to go behind a curtain for the rest of their lives when they got older? How/why had she chosen to do so herself? What did she think of the stares she got? What did her husband think? How could they sound so completely normal, just a regular Ottawa Valley couple teasing each other about which boots their kids would/wouldn't wear, when she looked like she was wearing a Halloween costume?
Way to come up smack against the dichotomy between what I believe and what I feel. I believe, passionately, in multiculturalism, tolerance, individuality, the right to make your own choices without having to justify them to anybody. But I feel this atavistic revulsion, blind prejudice, deep-down fear of the strange and foreign and wrong.
What's up with that?
(Pardon my judeochristiancentricism here, but) Jesus Christ. That's disturbing. More so because it's not terribly surprising. I wonder what the poll would've said in Canada. Something tells me it would have been a bit better, but not as much as we smug Canadians would like to think.
And I'm once more uncomfortably reminded of something I saw a few weeks ago at Wal-Mart. I'm looking through a rack of kids' winter boots, trying to find something sturdy and huge, and this veiled woman comes up and starts looking through the same rack. Women wearing the hijab are now so common they attract almost no notice in Ottawa, although when I was growing up they were rare. I can't think of anybody I knew in my high school who covered their hair, though most of us were immigrants and many were Muslim. Today I see lots of teenage girls with their hair covered, even when they're wearing skintight jeans and high heeled boots or other clothing not notable for its modesty.
Anyway, the hijab is very common, but full veiling is not. This woman was wearing a full-body all-black cloak-type thing (abaya, I think), her hair covered, her face veiled below the eyes. What I could see of her eyes and hands showed she was fairly young, which is a little unusual for a fully-covered woman in Ottawa. Then a young man walked up to her, wearing clothing that... well... long flowy shirt, down past the waist, vest that stopped at his waist, fairly loose, baggy pants, round brimless turban-hat, hair kind of long, very long shaggy beard. I swear the immediate association my mind made was "bin Laden," because he looked so much like all the pictures I've ever seen of what bin Laden and his cronies wear.
Anyway, he walks up, pushing a cart with two little girls, barely past toddler age, dressed like any other 2-4 year old girls in Ottawa. Evidently, mom and dad out with the kibbles to get their winter boots, probably caught off guard by the sudden switch from rain to heavy snow, just like Chris and I and about a thousand or so other young parents in the store that day.
So I take little notice of them - I'm wondering about Spiderman v. no-name boots and laces v. velcro - and then I hear a woman's voice saying something like, "Oh, yeah, right. I don't think so."
"What? Come on, she'll love it," a man's voice, laughing.
"Says you," giggling. "You gonna put'em on her? Bzzt! Next!"
And I look up, and it's the young couple, bantering about a pair of little pink boots. Not one word of any Middle Eastern language, or awkward English wording, or rolled R's or roughened H's or anything other than down-home Ottawa Valley accents.
And I found myself rather disturbed by my reaction to this. Beyond being thrown for a little loop because it's unusual to see full veiling, more unusual in a young woman, and my first time ever seeing it on an apparently Canadian-raised young woman, I felt rather disapproving. Like, what was wrong with this girl, that after being raised in a society where women's equality is supposedly valued, she was choosing to embrace a way of life so misogynist that it required her to hide herself from the world?
I'm used to the hijab. I used to see it as an unequivocal manifestation of misogyny, and pitied the poor women who were forced to wear it. I've since learned that for many Muslim women, it's not only a sign of religious and cultural identity; for many, it's a feminist symbol. A clear signal to the men around them that they wish to be considered persons with dignity and worth, not sex objects. Like a sign saying, "I'm not here to feed your fantasies - I'm here to be listened to and treated with respect."
I'm still a little surprised when a woman born and/or raised in North America feels she needs to don the hijab to get that - I guess part of me still thinks it's something that most of them will "get over" in a generation or two. After all, I don't cover my head and I certainly feel equal to any man out there. But still, when it's just the head covering, I take it in stride. Different strokes for different folks, and all that.
And a part of me that really embraces multiculturalism also gently chides the rest of me that even if they never do "get over it", if in some Star Trek-esque future Captain Janeway lookalikes have the option of wearing Starfleet-issue blue, gold or red headscarves, and do so, well that's fine too. Respect for tradition, respect for a positive cultural symbol of women's worth, etc.
But this was different. This woman was covered from head to toe. She couldn't have been comfortable in that. It looked like she was hiding from the world out of shame, not participating fully as a person who expected everybody to treat her with respect. And her daughters were dressed like all the other little girls around them. Would she expect them to give that up to go behind a curtain for the rest of their lives when they got older? How/why had she chosen to do so herself? What did she think of the stares she got? What did her husband think? How could they sound so completely normal, just a regular Ottawa Valley couple teasing each other about which boots their kids would/wouldn't wear, when she looked like she was wearing a Halloween costume?
Way to come up smack against the dichotomy between what I believe and what I feel. I believe, passionately, in multiculturalism, tolerance, individuality, the right to make your own choices without having to justify them to anybody. But I feel this atavistic revulsion, blind prejudice, deep-down fear of the strange and foreign and wrong.
What's up with that?
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-18 08:06 pm (UTC)And even the abaya or whatever--that doesn't even bother me. So you cover your arms and legs and hair. That's followed in any number of cultures. But the veiling? Like that?
One, she was definitely of Saudi heritage. To the best of my knowledge--and this has been backed up by some of the Middle-Eastern Muslims I know--only Saudi women cover up like that. In Saudi Arabia, they HAVE to, and if you see a woman veiled to the eyes in the US or Canada or wherever, she's almost certainly Saudi.
I share your disturbance. I try to be as open and affirming as humanly possible, but I cannot see how that can truly be a positive thing, to be covered like that. To cover your face and your mouth is to make yourself a non-person, really.
One of the most refreshing things I've heard in the past semester is from Ziad, a guy in one of my classes who was born and raised Muslim in Morocco. He said that when he sees a woman veiled and covered like that, he feels offended, because what it says to him is that HE is too much of an animal to control himself were he to see this woman's face. (His wife, who I've only seen once, is absolutely stunning, and doesn't cover up at all.) Like most of us, he understands the feminist reasoning behind the hijab, but I have to agree that full-out veiling is really quite...absurd.
::sigh:: I'm afraid to click on that link. Have we really become so horrible?
no subject
Date: 2004-12-18 08:07 pm (UTC)Yeah, it's no fun to run smack into one's cultural assumptions, and have to suddenly re-evaluate one's beliefs. But that fact that you then examine your prejudices and assumptions? DOn't just shrug it off, and go blithely on your way?
You Rock.
Statistics isn't my thing
Date: 2004-12-18 09:23 pm (UTC)And bully for you for examining your cultural perceptions rather than ignoring or running from them. I can only humbly hope that I might do as well.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-18 11:10 pm (UTC)Like mine? ::grin:: Do I actually *have* one? Because if I do, I'm obviously not noticing it.
And yes, you rock for taking note of your cultural perceptions. That's something they teach us to do in nursing school - since cultural awareness plays such a huge part in health care.
And I need your snail-mail address. : )
no subject
Date: 2004-12-21 06:37 pm (UTC)