The Veil: Notes

[purejuice]

It is, of course, the women who don’t get to fly home to New York—or indeed leave any airport without their husbands’ consent—who truly deserve international attention. And yet these are the very women our Western politicians, media outlets, and academicians barely acknowledge because, as I was constantly advised by European and American diplomats in both Egypt and also the Sudan when I visited, “We have no right to pass judgment on the customs and mores of other countries.”

Here are just a few of those customs and mores: in Turkey, a nation often cited as “moderate,” wife beating is so common that 69 percent of all female health workers polled (and almost 85 percent of all male health workers) said that violence against women was in certain instances excusable. In April, a new epidemiological study in the European Journal of Public Health revealed that one out of every five homicides in Pakistan is the result of a so-called honor killing. And in Mauritania, the age-old practice of force-feeding young girls—a life-threatening process that is intended to make them round and therefore “marriageable”—has seen a renaissance. Girls as young as five are herded into “fattening farms.” Those who resist are tortured.
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2009-Summer/full-Bachrach.html

Comments

[minniethemoocha.livejournal.com]

If we have a right to pass judgment on the Taliban, then why not on the beating and force-feeding of ordinary women and girls in Turkey and Mauritania? Asinine statement. Perhaps we'd have to pay attention to the beating, forced births, and encouraged starvation and cosmetic surgeries of ordinary women and girls of various classes in America. I tend to find Eve Ensler's work simplistic and reductionist, but I've had a few glasses of wine and don't really care about that at the moment.

[anaisdjuna.livejournal.com]

Just a quick one to get my BP on... I'm lovin' all your Veil stuff. I definitely appreciated that article. Just last night an American friend was telling me about how she was groped and harassed in her travels in Egypt. Good thing they couldn't tell she's Jewish.

[urban-homestead.livejournal.com]

Do you read Azar Nafisi? This post reminded me of her article in the Atlantic. And a point she's brought up in many interviews about "the customs and mores of other countries":

...I would like to say how much I resent people who say of the Islamic Republic that this is our culture— as if women like to be stoned to death, or as if they like to be married at the age of nine. No one thinks that American culture is about burning witches.

[tuscendi.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile we've invaded, bombed and blasted a couple of Islamic countries, destroyed bodies and homes and infrastructure, and yet never put a dent in any of this. Not to mention allowing some of it to be carried on right here in the USA.