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Honestly baffled by that statement.
Except of course the person wearing it. Though I am coming from a Western viewpoint, maybe Muslim women love being enclosed inside a veil, I, myself would be more sceptical.
Did I say they didn't want to wear them?
I didn't say it was wrong.
Ok, so the Quoran doesn't say a woman has to wear a veil. It's a custom in the Middle East made by men. That's a fact. When they move here they have a choice not to wear them. Now I'm sure some women like wearing them, however, I'm sure many don't for obvious reasons. What I'm saying is because of the media perception of Muslims has angered them a lot, and I'm saying that many women wear the veil as a statement of their antagonism towards this media perception.
Are you trying to suggest deeply religious people are not rational or in possession of their full mental faculties?
They might hate wearing them, wanting to wear them is a different thing altogether. I'm sure hunger strikers hate the fact that they can't eat but they go ahead with it anyway.
I don't think avoiding sex before marriage or belief in God are irrational in the same sense that the wearing the burqa is. Unlike the latter they do not directly, visibly and unnecessarily foster separation. Imo, people do not disadvantage themselves particularly through belief in a God; anybody who covers their entire face in cloth is disadvantaging themselves and disconnecting themselves from society. The burqa makes face to face communication pointless, it's an irrational cultural object.
Did anyone watch Question Time the other night? There were a number of veiled women amongst the audience. Many of them spoke, and every single one reaffirmed several times they had wanted to wear the veil and made the decision themselves. Indeed some of them had only taken up the veil very recently. Perhaps a reaction from a society that is becoming more judgemental of Muslims by the day, I wonder?
That's the point I've been making from the beginning of this thread. There has been an increase of veil wearing and it is a cause of the increasingly bad relations between Muslims and non-Muslims these days.
There's a phrase, you don't trust what you don't know or can't see, and in western culture that holds a lot of the time.
I think that the point Aladdin is making is that it's the other way around
However, "political correctness gone mad", "it is only common sense", "Where is the respect" attitudes, from both sides of the arguement, not just one side have done much to continue this. I would go so far as to say, those you would call the "daily mail crowd" have taken this incident to their advantage, but so have the militant clerics, et al with their own agenda to promote.
It is hardly a one sided, all of a sudden event i am sure, it just seems that way.
There has always been a number women wearing the veil in this country. However there has been an increase in the last couple of years, after 9/11, after the illegal war on Iraq, after the ever increasing front page headlines in the tabloid press about Muslims this and Muslims that.
The phenomenon is not new. Before the Balkans war Muslim women in Kosovo wore mostly Western clothes. During and afer the war there was a marked increase in women wearing the veil.
When one is being targeted, or at least feels like he's being targeted, one common natural reaction is defiance.
The argument that women wear it out of choice rather than through the influence of an oppressive male may well be true in some cases, though I doubt many women would admit to wearing it under instruction after having a BBC mic. shoved under their nose.
The burqa as far as I can see is a symbol of more oppressive times and places. I find it as unsettling to see as when I hear black people referring to themselves and their peers as “nigger”.