@adam.smith First and most importantly: On what basis are you claiming that "Haddad may very well be an Islamaphobe"? What exactly has she said that leads you to make that charge? Of course she may be an Islamaphobe, also you may be a woman-hating serial abuser. Really I don't think any of us should listen to anything you have to say, because even though nothing you've stated would lead anyone to think that you have serious issues with women, your arguments are playing right into the hands of the legions of mysoginists who want to keep women oppressed.

See what I'm getting at here? Do you not believe that we should at least presume Haddad is making a good faith effort to support women, unless you have even a single piece of evidence that shows otherwise? Not to mention that it's pretty difficult to be an Islamaphobe if most of the people you're trying to help are Muslims.

Secondly, what exactly are the stereotypes that Haddad's arguments are perpetuating? She is saying that women who wear the veil are overwhelmingly doing so because they are either forced to by authority figures in their community, or because they have been brainwashed into believing that it's their duty to do so. I am genuinely unaware of any stereotypes that fit here, unless it's the idea that the major monotheistic religions tend to be focused on the leadership of males and the submission of females, which isn't so much a stereotype as a widely-acknowledged fact. Is that what you're referring to?

ankylosaur @79, I didn't get a chance to answer your question. I think militant Islamism is something to be concerned about, but the extent of the problem has been so obscured by a rhetoric of fear that it's difficult to get an accurate measure of it. I also agree with those who say the question of veiling has become something of a red herring that distracts from the real issue of radicalism, of both the Islamic and anti-Islamic kind. The women who choose to wear the veil, whether we believe they make a free choice or not, are not the problem. The problem is a climate of growing intolerance on both sides, one that somehow makes it permissible for authorities, whether religious or political, to determine what women do with their bodies. Insofar as this is an issue of personal and religious freedom, we've got to let women exercise that freedom without tut-tutting, even if we disagree with the way they are doing it.

we're talking past each other at this point.
Again, I'm not denying her good intentions. I think she's wrong and I think she's wrong in a way that can have bad consequences. Since this apparently not obvious another example: Many of the advocates for the Iraq invasion were well intentioned (cough *Dan Savage * cough). Their good intentions didn't prevent them from facilitating a disastrous policy.
I probably shouldn't have thrown the islamophobia remark in there - I think some of what she says certainly sounds rather hostile towards Islam, but my argument doesn't hinge on it, so I'm not terribly interested in arguing it.

As for stereotypes - for muslim women in the West, the idea of veiled*=unfree is a big problem. Veiled women are treated as less autonomous, less intelligent, less part of society (there are plenty of essays & studies on this out there if you actually doubt that). That's harmful, obviously, for the women, but its also harmful for the societies that have a vested interest in integrating and not alienating muslim (or any other large) minorities. It's also harmful, btw., to those women who are, in fact, non-free, because they are less likely to be exposed to the types of ideas that could help liberate them (which is also why you shouldn't ban burqas in school.)

*veiled as referring to hijab in general. "headscarfed" isn't a verb.

@96, considering that people of all cultures also make value judgments about American culture (I don't see too many Arabs refraining from doing that) even when their level of understanding of it is depressingly low, to see judging other cultures as a specifically American problem is quite disingenuous. Accusing Americans of doing to Arabic and Moslim culture what Arabs and Moslims also do to American culture is, indeed, having two weights and two measures.

Dan's assumption about Arabic women being all Muslim is not worse than assumptions by foreigners about all Americans being Christians, or baseball lovers, or big hildren. Given the number of Muslim women in Arabic countries, it's not difficult to see why the assumption would be made.

So again -- you can disagree with Dan and point out that he is wrong without making an ass of yourself (and without making generalizations about Americans as wrong as Dan's about Arabic women). But of course you're free to make an ass of yourself if you so wish.

@flang, who wrote:

Well, then we're both supporting the same conclusion, just differing on the process. You and others see a ban primarily designed to of prevent women from exercising their free will, I and others see a ban primarily designed to prevent patriarchal and oppressive cultures from keeping women "in their place."

But since we're talking about the same ban, then surely one of us must be wrong, right? I mean, one can argue that the ban is both a limitaiton on the freedom of women to choose and a means of fighting against cultural stereotypes ('women's place'), but nothing in this world is so clearly balanced at 50-50. This ban either is mostly a limitation to women's freedom, or then mostly a protection from negative social pressure. I happen to agree with #100 above: it's mostly a limitation of freedom.

Also, in the French case, the obvious political use of the issue (as Irene above has pointed out) shows that most of those who propose the ban aren't really worried about the situation of women, but simply want to score political points on growing Islamophobia in French society.

@104, you're missing most of the point: the cultural difference. Discussing Christian women's opinion about premarital sex occurs within one culture. Discussing Arabs and Muslims occurs between two cultures. It's a different situation, in which lack of familiarity leads to stereotyping and facile assumptions that may turn out to be false.

For the record, I have nothing against people who want to wait till marriage to have sex. Just as in the case of the Muslim veil, what I am against is being forced to wait (or wear the veil) even if I happen to disagree with the opinion of those trying to force me.

@amazonvera, who wrote: In the end, I think Haddad makes what is in general a fair point. I think if you added up all of the women actively forced to wear the veil, all of the women de facto forced to wear it, and all of the women who choose to wear it but do so as a response to cultural and religious pressure for or against, that number would make up the vast majority of veil-wearing women in the Muslim population.

See, here's the problem with this argument: it's an assumption being made without the necessary definitions ('when is a decision legitimate', 'what are the circumstances (rather than our stereotypical vision of what they are) in the countries in question', etc.)

Xtoph (@100 above) claims to have many years of first-hand experience with Muslims in the biggest Muslim country (I'm guessing Turkey), yet s/he makes the opposite claim to yours.

Who is right, then, you, or Xtoph? That's an important question.

@flang, who wrote:

See what I'm getting at here? Do you not believe that we should at least presume Haddad is making a good faith effort to support women, unless you have even a single piece of evidence that shows otherwise? Not to mention that it's pretty difficult to be an Islamaphobe if most of the people you're trying to help are Muslims.

First, see adam_smith's reply to your post (@109) above, on the topic of how Haddad's good intentions may not prevent that the idea she espouses in that interview from being harmful ('the road to hell is paved with good intentions'). The main point of contention to me is this:

(a) what is wrong is not the hijab, or the burqa, or even full nudity; what is wrong is being forced to wear the hijab, the burqa, or to be fully nude;

(b) by taking steps like a ban one sends the opposite message: that what is important is to forbid certain things rather than to increase the freedom of choice of individuals. Especially when one is dealing with cultural practices that will be intertwined in a myriad of ways with all kinds of other things in the culture, with all kinds of associations that foreigners often fail to detect, focusing on the object to the detriment of the freedom of choice very much sends the wrong message.

Secondly, what exactly are the stereotypes that Haddad's arguments are perpetuating? She is saying that women who wear the veil are overwhelmingly doing so because they are either forced to by authority figures in their community, or because they have been brainwashed into believing that it's their duty to do so. I am genuinely unaware of any stereotypes that fit here, unless it's the idea that the major monotheistic religions tend to be focused on the leadership of males and the submission of females, which isn't so much a stereotype as a widely-acknowledged fact. Is that what you're referring to?

Again, adam_smith above already mentions one, the stereotype that veiled = unfree (as for frequency correlations, cf. also the stereotype that Black = bandit/criminal).

As for what you mention with respect to organized religions perpetuating gender stereotypes: that is true, but the kind of assertion you make is often taken to imply some sort of conspiracy theory (say, that in Islamic countries "men" want to oppress "women" by forcing them to wear the veil; maybe because they (= men) are bad, or enjoy oppressing, etc.) when in fact religious discourse on gender relations is usually created post facto to make sense of a pre-existing situation with causes very much independent from religion. In reality, things are much more complicated and ambiguous, given the complexity of the interconnections between all aspects of culture, not only those with gender ramifications. Oversimplifying this is an invitation to choosing a simplistic solution that will probably not solve the problem (e.g., banning specific headgear) but only make it worse (make otherwise intelligent Islamic women actually turn against feminism because it's too Western and doesn't understand their culture).

@ 113, I don't think Xtoph's firsthand experience in one country is indicative of a whole lot in that country, let alone the Muslim world, and I don't even know what's meant by "biggest," so I couldn't speak to anything Xtoph has said in anything but very general terms. That being said, I don't see any reason after reading what he (I'm assuming?) has to see that makes it mutually exclusive from what I'm saying. I think it's totally possible to visit the "largest" Muslim country (again, whatever that means, be it largest geographical size of a majority Muslim nation, largest Muslim population, Muslim community most demographically dominant?) and encounter an unanticipated concept of choice and an awful lot of veiled women, even the majority that you meet or the majority within that community, who discuss their mode of covering as a matter of choice and still have them not be representative of the majority of veiled Muslim women. We're talking about 1.5 billion women, many (not unlikely most, though again, that's only what I think) of whom live in a place where not wearing a veil can be anywhere from lethal to illegal to seriously culturally frowned upon, up to and including subversively or overtly reducing marital, job, and educational prospects.

But I do think that, if we're comparing viewpoints based on personal experience, you're omitting Haddad's point of view as an actual woman from the Arab world, even from a relatively diverse Arab country where the Muslim population takes a relatively liberal stance on the veil.

@113 - unbeknownst to many, the biggest Muslim country - by a large margin - is Indonesia (followed by Pakistan and Bangladesh). That also makes sense with the rest of what @100 is saying.
Indonesia is probably the best example of women veiling voluntarily in a majority muslim country - the Islam practiced there is for the most part pretty moderate, it's not politically radical and societal norms are, generally speaking, not oppressive.

@116, Indonesia has the largest single Muslim population, if that's what you mean. And when many districts have standing Sharia courts, sometimes supported by military regimes, and some (many?) schools don't allow female students to attend without head covering, it's hard to say that the women there all have free choice to wear or not wear a veil despite the fact that the government at a national level technically allows diverse religious belief to a restricted set of faiths.

@ 115, 101, 116

as adam.smith says, the country with the world's largest population of muslims (also the largest muslim majority country geographically if it matters) is indonesia. and i haven't simply lived there; i am an anthropologist, i am fluent in the local languages where i work (and the national language), and i've conducted a whole lot of research there, including into religious issues and women's rights. (and for that matter, gay rights--one of my best friends in indonesia is that country's most prominent gay activist, who also happens to be an anthropologist.)

indonesia certainly isn't the same, culturally, as the middle east, but neither is it quite as moderate in its religious temperance as stereotype might suggest. there have been more terrorist attacks by islamist extremists in indonesia than in any other peacetime/non-occupied nation i know of offhand, for instance. in some parts of the country, women who do not veil do risk serious consequences; in most, it is much more varied. in both sorts of regions, more women's rights activists--intelligent, informed people--are concerned with protecting women's right to choose the veil than are worried about regulations or social pressure requiring them to.

according to both arab women's rights activists and anthropologists who work in the middle east, the situation is not too different there. that is, while many such people support the right to choose not to veil, and none of them condones violence against women who don't, the notion that no one actually makes a genuine choice to veil is laughable. (in fact one of the reasons many activists want to repeal laws requiring veiling is in order not to trivialize women's choice to veil.) at the risk of overgeneralizing in regard to a very big subject, this is true in large part because the action of veiling is not technically *about* men; it is about the woman, and *her* control over her own self-presentation. it is fundamentally an assertion of dignity and of honor. of course it can be far more complicated and fraught than that, and many of us may not like the thought of dress being one of the things a woman uses to define herself, but really, is it ever not, anywhere?

about why would someone choose to veil, there are too many reasons to go into here. there are good books and papers and even a few news reports about it. i know lots of women who veil at work or when they are with certain people they don't want to talk with, and take off the veil when they feel like going to nightclubs. wearing a veil also frees many women to be extremely sexually aggressive, while giving them a safety net to slam on the brakes whenever they choose to, and know that if the man then continues to hassle them, he can get into serious trouble.

to return to the original post: this isn't an issue of whether *some* women are coerced into veiling, or whether it is often repressive--of course it can be. what haddad asserted was that veiling is *necessarily* and simply repressive of women, and that *no* woman would ever choose to veil, or if she did, she was unconsciously engaging in self-flagellation. the reporter was absolutely correct to challenge that--and no doubt, perplexed at haddad's response, since he has been educated and taken to task by so many other serious muslim women regarding the stereotypical misrepresentation of veiling so common in the west, where it is literally used as an excuse to invade other countries 'for the good of their oppressed women'. (this was a prevalent argument not only for bush's invasion of afghanistan, but for many wars before that--it was a favorite refrain of colonial powers a century ago, verbatim.)

Indonesia is both the country with the largest muslim population and the largest country with a predominantly muslim population. When people speak of "largest muslim country" they generally mean one of the two.
Note how I qualified each of my statements with terms like "generally" and "mostly". Indonesia is huge and extremely diverse. And yes, there are corners where religious extremists have more power and I'm sure there are places and context in which women are pressure or even force to wear a headscarf.
And yes, the situation in Aceh - the only place with a military regime - is deplorable, but again - Aceh makes up 2% of the population and a tiny, tiny bit of the landmass of the country.

So clearly I'd be wrong to say that all women wearing headscarf in Indonesia are completely free and unopressed. But that's not what I was saying. My point was that Indonesia is a good place to go to find many, many counter-examples to Haddad's claim.

A woman wears a veil because her religion/culture considers her public face immodest. But of course, there is no equal proscription against a man presenting his face publicly.

The global oppression of women in Muslim cultures - from forced burkas to lack of voting rights, not being allowed to drive, etc - is arguably the biggest human rights violation in the world today. Those who come to a free country and continue to wear the veil give cover to the extremists to allow the men to claim that women in Muslim countries voluntarily accept their role as second class citizens.

Haddad and Savage - keep calling out bigotry when you see it, especially when it is so obvious.

I'm with the zillion other people above who think that Dan has a really weird interpretation of this exchange.

And yes, Dan, you're terrific, but god, you do blunder about so when you get into women's studies land. I know your heart is in the right place. But...

Religious women who 'choose' to wear a hijab or burqa or niqab are doing so because of the commandment of Islam that women and men should dress modestly. But what exactly is immodest about a woman's or a girl's hair and neck that is not immodest about a man's or boy's? .

If 'the veil' is such a good and pious thing for Muslim women, why don't Muslim men veil themselves as well?

"I'm talking also about women, because many women have patriarchal values."

Probably the truest comment. Nobody keeps a woman down like other women.

I don't think it matters if a group of women wear the veil out of fashion or duty, if Haddad is 100% correct. Instead of all the concession to the fringes, I'd rather have the strong opinion of someone like Joumana Haddad because it inspires real thought and discussion.

@119, but it's not the only district with Sharia courts, remotely the only district with schools the require covering for female students, or even marginally the only district with local communities where orthodox or conservative Islam is the norm and choosing not to cover is socially unacceptable and/or severely limiting in terms of life prospects.

The government of Indonesia at a national level does not directly enforce Sharia law, though it's been a close, close call many times. That does make it on a federal, political level more moderate than many other Muslim dominated nations. It does not make the communities or religious adherents within the country moderate. They are by and large very conservative when it comes to theology and happy to locally and/or socially enforce Sharia law on Muslim people, particularly women.

@amazonvera, who wrote:

I think it's totally possible to visit the "largest" Muslim country (again, whatever that means, be it largest geographical size of a majority Muslim nation, largest Muslim population, Muslim community most demographically dominant?) and encounter an unanticipated concept of choice and an awful lot of veiled women, even the majority that you meet or the majority within that community, who discuss their mode of covering as a matter of choice and still have them not be representative of the majority of veiled Muslim women.

It appears this would have to be a classical example of a non-sequitur, amazonvera.

I think what you are really trying to get at here is what I called the concept of 'legitimate choice'. In short, you deny that (most) women in Indonesia and (most) women in other Islamic countries can legitimately choose to wear the veil, even if they think that that's what they're doing. Is that the jist of your argument, or am I missing something?

I'd say that this kind of thinking is fraught with danger -- the danger of missing reality because the aspects of it that we don't like can be ascribed to some delegitimizing circumstance ('oppressive social norms', etc.).

I'm not saying that social norms don't (or can't) oppress women, men, and undecideds. Of course it can. But in the absence of clear criteria for deciding what one is dealing with, the claim that a certain situation is 'clearly' the result of social oppression and that the putative victims 'clearly' cannot make legitimate choices is only an opinion, and a dangerous one, especially if one doesn't have long, first-hand experience with the people in question (and sometimes even then, if one isn't one of those people).

Here's one criterion, to begin with: let these women talk. If they say they'd rather not wear the veil; if they say they feel oppressed by it; then give them your full support. If they don't say this, or if they say the opposite, it may be that they are expressing a legitimate choice, and it may be that they aren't. If you have good criteria to decide which is which, then apply them. If you don't -- if your criteria are just gut feelings -- then better not make assumptions.

Instead, go to the places where these women live, talk to them, get to know them, and try to spread your own feminist ideas among them. If they are indeed 'oppressed' by cultural norms and stereotypes, that seems to me the best way to actually counter that -- by going there, talking to them, and trying to make them see the existence of other possibilities.

I'm sure Haddad would support that (I imagine this is part of what she does?); and I'm sure it's better to actually interact with them, because then one gets to see first-hand how intertwined all kinds of impressions and stereotypes are (many people, including women, in Islamic countries would probably find it awfully hard to separate feminism and women's-rights-as-humans-rights from the religious antagonism between Christianity and Islam, or the cultural and political antagonism between the West and Islam; to many people there, feminism -- like McDonald's burgers -- is just 'yet another American/Western thing they're jamming down our throats').

I'm deeply against oversimplifications. Those who oversimplify situations are almost invariably guaranteeing that whatever solutions they propose simply won't work.

@ Mr Horton, who wrote:

Those who come to a free country and continue to wear the veil give cover to the extremists to allow the men to claim that women in Muslim countries voluntarily accept their role as second class citizens.

I suppose you also think that the American flag is only a symbol of napalm killings in Vietnam, or of increased global warming; and that anyone who likes this flag is thereby supporting these things?

I'm sorry -- oversimplification is not the way to fight against prejudice. Oversimplification is not the way to improve the situation of women in Islamic countries. Oversimplification is not the way to change society. Oversimplification does not lead to anything new -- oversimplification ('men are X', 'women are Y') is the very basis of currently powerful ideologies and social stereotypes.

Please don't oversimplify. Please, Mr Horton, don't tell these women that you know their 'obvious' situation better than they themselves do. Listen to them first. All of them.

How is it a non-sequitur to point out that all of the Muslim individuals that one person encounters in their time in one country, even one containing the largest Muslim community in the world, are not necessarily representative of the majority of global Muslim people? That's pure mathematical and anthropological unlikelihood, no more and no less.

I have no desire to spread feminism as I understand it as a woman from the west to cultures vastly different from mine. I don't see how that would be terribly useful or meaningful to them. Why do you?

I absolutely believe that women can choose to wear the veil. Not in countries or communities, however, where it's not legally permissible to go uncovered, whether that's enforced at the national or local level, nor in communities where a woman's ability to obtain an education or have a family or become gainfully employed or not be openly shunned in her community depends on her wearing the veil. Withholding basic rights, freedom, happiness, etc. from a person in order to extract a certain response from them is quite literally coercion. Some Muslim women don't face either legal enforcement or forcible coercion and still make that choice. No doubt. I know several. A great many do face those issues, though, and it's impossible to behave as though that doesn't restrict their freedom of choice. Would I guess (hence "I think," not "I'm sure" or "I know") that most Muslim women face one of the two, considering how prevalent both practices are within Muslim dominated countries and communities? I would guess that. Do I know that? No. Given the number of women in the global Muslim community and the subtlety of the problem in many places, it's going to be nearly impossible to generate a meaningful metric.

I don't, however, extrapolate that to situations where a woman's choice to veil is a response to patriarchy (which is what you seem to be asking if I'm interpreting that correctly) because Muslim-dominated countries are far from the only patriarchal countries in the world and, as women, none of us live in a vacuum. I just don't see how that's a workable definition of choice versus force. I do think it's still meaningful to point out how choice is impacted, but not to behave as though it doesn't exist where patriarchy is present.

@debug, who wrote:

Instead of all the concession to the fringes, I'd rather have the strong opinion of someone like Joumana Haddad because it inspires real thought and discussion.

Actually, I agree entirely with that. I disagree with Ms Haddad's overgeneralization, but I also think her claim is true for many, many individual Muslim women. That both things can be true simultaneously is an interesting idea, and here I am thinking about it and discussing it with others only because of her. Indeed, thanks to Ms Haddad -- and also to Ms Mullins, the interviewer, for exactly the same reason. :-)

Probably the truest comment. Nobody keeps a woman down like other women.

Well, that's a two-edged sword. It's not clearly the case that 'patriarchal' women contribute more to the current situation of gender relations than 'patriarchal' men--at first sight, it would seem to me that it is simply expressed in different contexts and different environments. It's just that the role of 'patriarchal' men is much more often discussed (and stereotyped) than the role of 'patriarchal' women, so when the latter are discussed, their impact seems stronger -- but this may mostly be the effect of surprise or unexpectedness. It may very well be that, if such effects are factored out, then the impact of 'patriarchal' women may appear as important as, or even less important than, the impact of 'patriarchal' men.

Assuming, of course, that one can indeed disentangle the roles of these two groups of 'patriarchal' people. :-)

@127
"I absolutely believe that women can choose to wear the veil. Not in countries or communities, however, where it's not legally permissible to go uncovered, whether that's enforced at the national or local level, nor in communities where a woman's ability to obtain an education or have a family or become gainfully employed or not be openly shunned in her community depends on her wearing the veil. "

I have no idea what we're arguing about then. That's the exact same thing I've been saying from the beginning. If our only difference is whether we think those conditions apply to ~30% or to ~60% of Indonesian women, I don't think that's worth arguing in the absence of specific definitions and data. In either case that means tens of millions with free choice.
If you think those conditions apply to >90% of Indonesian women I don't think you know what you're talking about.

@amazonvera, who wrote:

How is it a non-sequitur to point out that all of the Muslim individuals that one person encounters in their time in one country, even one containing the largest Muslim community in the world, are not necessarily representative of the majority of global Muslim people?

Well, because there is an unexpressed assumption in the original wording (that you circumvent with 'necessarily' here): namely, that said choice meetings could not be representative. They very well could. Assuming Xtoph is a good anthropologist (one of those who know how to select representative members of the society s/he's studying), s/he should have paid attention to that. Assuming s/he didn't is what I called a 'non-sequitur' -- but maybe 'contains a hidden assumption' would be a better description.

I don't see how that would be terribly useful or meaningful to them. Why do you?
Because my experience with people tells me that the best way to let them understand a different culture is by allowing them to see this culture through the eyes of a person they've met and built a relationship with. Rather than reading texts or talking to experts that can always be nonchalantly dismissed as "sold to Western imperalist interests", personal relations tend to have more impact at the individual level. (A friend of mine, a professional linguist and anthropologist, first came to Brazil -- my native country -- from her native Italy to do exactly that: raise consciousness among poor Brazilian women by entering into contact with them. She later on became interested in indigenous peoples and the politics around their current situation, but she still has many interesting stories about her experience as a 'feminist consciousness-raiser in the favellas' -- e.g., stories about how the consciousness-raising went both ways.)

I'm not suggesting, by the way, that this is what you, personally, should do. We are all free to do with our lives what we want. But I do think this would be a better method for really influencing hearts and minds in a different culture than simply pontificating from across the ocean about practices and beliefs outside of their contexts. (Not because I think it's impossible to judge other cultures -- I'm not at all a cultural relativist -- but because I think those who do pontificate about practices and beliefs outside of context will make many obvious mistakes and misinterpretations -- obvious to the people who live in these cultures --, so that the natives will simply laugh at them and see them as mere cultural imperialists, no matter how pure the intentions of the armchair commenters or how good some of their arguments may actually be.)

I absolutely believe that women can choose to wear the veil.

Agreed.

Not in countries or communities, however, where it's not legally permissible to go uncovered, whether that's enforced at the national or local level,

Again, agreed. (Well, if you want to nit-pick, it's imaginable that some women in these areas might freely agree with the local laws, but it would be an anthropologist's nightmare to actually find compelling evidence that this is the case, i.e., that their agreement is truly free.)

Anyway, I think we'd both agree that, regardless of whether or not there are some almost-impossible-to-detect women who freely agree with these laws, the laws themselves are unfair (since they, like the ban, destroy the possibility of choice).

nor in communities where a woman's ability to obtain an education or have a family or become gainfully employed or not be openly shunned in her community depends on her wearing the veil.

Again, I agree. Though here we have to deal with the problem of degree (different areas have different degrees of intensity on how much they want women to adhere to specific dress codes -- just as they may have different degrees of intensity on how much they want the locals to adhere to any traditional Muslim practice), so that not all areas which would fall within the scope of your comment are equally bad, or can be solved in the same way (given how in some places wearing the veil may be more strongly associated with modesty and propriety, in another area it may be dependent on the need to show oneself a 'real' Muslim, and in another area it may express desire to not yield to Western cultural influence -- the underlying causes will call for different solutions).

Withholding basic rights, freedom, happiness, etc. from a person in order to extract a certain response from them is quite literally coercion.
There, even though I agree, I see we have problems, because I agree with what I mean by 'basic rights', 'freedom', 'happiness', etc. whereas it may well be that you have different definitions for them. And even if our definitions are the same, what a veiled Muslim woman might think about 'basic rights', 'freedom', 'happiness' etc. is again something else.

So your claim here, even though it sounds good and is quite easy (even for me) to agree with, is actually so dependent on what exactly your terms mean that it can be used to justify being against pretty much anything. I can imagine religious extremists using it -- the exact same words -- to justify being against feminism, for instance.

Some Muslim women don't face either legal enforcement or forcible coercion and still make that choice. No doubt. I know several.

I agree. So do I. So do many of us.

A great many do face those issues, though, and it's impossible to behave as though that doesn't restrict their freedom of choice.

Again, I agree -- I'll even go as far as saying that there is nobody in this comment thread that disagrees with that.

The problem, to me, is that it's the forcing that people should fight against (given a good criterion for deciding when people are not being forced, i.e., when choices can legitimately be made), whereas many people want just to fight the objects that are forced -- hijabs and veils and burqas. That, I think, is simply missing the point, fighting the wrong enemy, attacking the wrong thing. Hence my stance against the ban.

Would I guess (hence "I think," not "I'm sure" or "I know") that most Muslim women face one of the two, considering how prevalent both practices are within Muslim dominated countries and communities? I would guess that.

I would guess that, too -- though I would be ready to take this guess back if more evidence showed that it's not the case (which is imaginable).

But this doesn't change the nature of the problem to me. The point is not how many women are being forced to wear the veil, but that they are being forced to wear the veil. So what I would be against -- no matter how many or how few women are affected by it, or in what places -- is the forcing, the obligatoriness, the absence of choice. Even if only one Muslim woman was being forced to wear the veil, that would be sufficient for me to be against it. Against the forcing, that is -- not against the veil.

Given the number of women in the global Muslim community and the subtlety of the problem in many places, it's going to be nearly impossible to generate a meaningful metric.
That depends on the question you're trying to answer, or the problem you're trying to solve. To me, the question is whether or not people should be forced to wear (or not to wear) the veil. As long as this is not the case, then I am happy in allowing as many women in a given place -- even all of them -- to choose the veil.

An easy case is when the law prohibits unveiled women. One then makes the case against that law (since the local population may very well support it) by seeing how it actually affects women, and what they think about it, and getting the process of changing the law going.

A more difficult case is when it's about "social restrictions": people avoiding unveiled women, or thinking ill of them. Then you have something similar to 'judging people by the clothes they wear' in Western society, which is darn complicated to change. But there are things you can do about it (say, the SlutWalks) -- again if you find a sufficiently strong base of local women (and men -- why not?) who agree with your viewpoint.

. I just don't see how that's a workable definition of choice versus force. I do think it's still meaningful to point out how choice is impacted, but not to behave as though it doesn't exist where patriarchy is present.

Maybe we misunderstand each other, amazonvera -- I don't think I tried to make the opposed point. What I am interested in, at this point, is that people -- especially those who work on the theory of sociology (specifically, for gender relations, but other cases are also interesting) -- start talking about how to define conditions for reasonable and sufficient freedom.

True, we're never really free, and if Americans are in average much more 'feminist' than Arabs or Muslims in average, it's also because of their (the Americans') different culture and social conditioning.

But if political and personal freedom, even if imperfect, is to have any meaning at all -- so that we can meaningfully talk about "more" or "less" free countries, cultures, or places -- then it is necessary to define this "imperfect, but acceptable" level of freedom, the conditions under which choices -- though always influenced by the environment -- are sufficiently free to deserve to be called 'legitimate'.

Then we know what it is that we're fighting for. Then the fight is not simply 'we Americans know better than you Muslims', but something deeper than that.

@Xtoph, who wrote:

(in fact one of the reasons many [Muslim women's rights] activists want to repeal laws requiring veiling is in order not to trivialize women's choice to veil.)

A very, very interesting claim, Xtoph -- I actually would love if you could give us links to supporting evidence for it, because it is precisely the stereotype-breaking kind of situation that I think is necessary for American activists to realize that they really, really need to know the local culture before making broad, facile generalizations about it. I would love to cite this in other discussions.

@Xtoph, who wrote:

at the risk of overgeneralizing in regard to a very big subject, this is true in large part because the action of veiling is not technically *about* men; it is about the woman, and *her* control over her own self-presentation. it is fundamentally an assertion of dignity and of honor.

Another interesting claim from your post full of interesting claims, Xtoph -- I almost feel like reprinting it here verbatim. But this particular point made me feel curious. I assume you say "technically" because in actual practice what 'men' want 'women' to do can often enough have quite a lot of influence on veil choice (I'm thinking of the Iranian mores police who fines or even arrests women who don't show proper modesty). Is this enough to invalidate choices, at least in many circumstances? Feminist literature is full of claims about situations in which something that is supposedly 'about the woman' is actually more about some ideal of womanhood that is actually detrimentary to most real-life women ('princess' stereotypes, for instance). Can't the self-presentation, 'dignity and honor' thing fall within the range of this kind of, say, 'social self-delusion'?

(I notice that what you said about the use of the veil in female sexual aggressiveness tends to show that this is a nuanced thing. But I'd be interested in your opinion.)

Also, in general: from you own professional/personal experience, what do you think Muslim women's rights activists should do in their respective countries? And what is a legitimate role for women's rights activists in Western countries who want to support their comrades in Muslim countries? Again, just curious about your opinion.

@Xtoph, who wrote:

this isn't an issue of whether *some* women are coerced into veiling, or whether it is often repressive--of course it can be. what haddad asserted was that veiling is *necessarily* and simply repressive of women, and that *no* woman would ever choose to veil, or if she did, she was unconsciously engaging in self-flagellation. the reporter was absolutely correct to challenge that--and no doubt, perplexed at haddad's response, since he has been educated and taken to task by so many other serious muslim women regarding the stereotypical misrepresentation of veiling so common in the west, where it is literally used as an excuse to invade other countries 'for the good of their oppressed women'. (this was a prevalent argument not only for bush's invasion of afghanistan, but for many wars before that--it was a favorite refrain of colonial powers a century ago, verbatim.)

Again a thought-provoking paragraph. I would again thank you if you could provide a link to a text by, say, some 19th-century colonial power using this argument to justify the invasion of a Muslim country or area -- against, just for my own personal files, for use in future instances of this discussion in other fora.

Ankylosaur @126 - Merely waving an American flag does not automatically invoke Napalm bombing any more than someone identifying as Muslim invokes terrorist sympathies. But we are not talking about a person identifying as Muslim in general. We are talking about a specific act of females veiling their faces.

So what does the veil mean? I do not ask that rhetorically.

The veil isn't a fashion accessory, like a Yankees hat. It is a religious/political statement, is it not? Doesn't the veil, at a minimum, represent the view that the female public face is immodest? But her husband/brother's naked face is just fine? Does the veil have some other use that I am missing? Don't we, as those who espouse secular-liberal values, have a conscience and a role in pointing out the inherent mysogyny in the act of veiling?

Tim - as Xtoph says above, there's a ton of writing on the veil if you actually care. Veils have a multitude of different meanings for different women wearing them, they include (among others):
- teenage rebellion
- a statement against an authoritarian government
- a symbol of religious pride or a statement in favor of religious freedom
- a symbol of ethnic allegiance to a minority that perceives itself as under attack.
- a shield against being stared at in a way that makes you uncomfortable
- as well as a number of reasons involving more twisted/problematic views on the role of women.

Jewish women don't wear yarmulkes and people don't go all crazy about that, even though its origins are in the special role attributed to men and their bond with god.
What matters is the current practice - and women are considered equal in conservative and reform Judaism - and I don't think anyone would accuse a Jewish man wearing a Yarmulke of contributing to the oppression of women - even some strains of orthodox judaism certainly have rather medieval views on the role of women.

Tim Horton @134, consider women who wear bikini tops on the beach in summer. Following your logic, could you not say the following?

Doesn't the bikini top, at a minimum, represent the view that the female chest is immodest? But her husband/brother's naked chest is just fine? Does the bikini top have some other use that I am missing? Don't we, as those who espouse secular-liberal values, have a conscience and a role in pointing out the inherent mysogyny in the act of wearing bikini tops?

It should be clear by now that it is not the act of veiling that's misogynistic, but, as ankylosaur has pointed out several times, the act of forcing to veil. Women have won the right to go topless in Ontario, New York, and D.C., for example, and yet they can still choose to wear tops, even on the hottest of days, without being thought of as brainwashed or unable to make a free choice. Sure, it's unfair that most women don't feel comfortable sunbathing topless, that they have to be concerned about leers or disapproving looks if they do. But not too many people who espouse secular-liberal values feel they should have "a conscience and a role in pointing out the inherent misogyny" in the act of wearing a bikini top. Most of those people think it's up to a woman to decide what she chooses to wear.

Again, it's not the women choosing to wear veils who are contributing to misogyny. It's the religious and political leaders who insist women should not choose -- that they are not capable of choosing and should have their choices made for them -- who should be your target.

Jesus christ on a cracker, ankylosaur, I don't know why you're asking me "why we're arguing" about this when I have never at any point contradicted, retracted, or changed any of my statements and you're the one who has initiated the "argument," if you want to call it that, made grossly inaccurate assumptions about my opinions from incomprehensible misinterpretations of what I've said, and felt the need to condescendingly explain to me things that you have no reason to believe that I don't understand. I think that your guess about why "we" are "arguing" is going to be, by definition, better than mine.

On the only points where I do see that we have disagreement, one being essentially about how science works, interacting with a tiny minority of a population that is in and of itself a minority (and a culturally specific one at that) of a larger global population is not representative of the experiences, feelings, opinions, or beliefs of said global population, even when said interactions are conducted by a professional (though one who is still inherently viewing these interactions through the lens of their own foreign normative context) and when care has been exercised to find a data sample that is relatively representative of the individual sub-community being studied. It's not impossible that their experiences, beliefs, opinions, etc. could turn out to be in line with the global community at large, but that tiny, tiny data sample can not possibly be construed to indicate that. At all. Further more, I don't get the impression that Xtoph is trying to imply that his experiences are representative of the Global Muslim Woman at large but rather that he's been exposed to the fact that some veiled Muslim women approach this issue in ways that many Westerners don't anticipate.

As for why I have no desire to go to Muslim women in vastly different cultures from my own and explain to them my particular, culturally specific brand of feminism, I have no reason to believe that it's useful to them and every reason to believe that it's more valuable for me to listen to their far less represented ideas at face value. Something you seem to be failing to do to the original subject of this thread in favor of other western commenters who speak from outside that experience.

@Mr Horton, who wrote:

The veil isn't a fashion accessory, like a Yankees hat. It is a religious/political statement, is it not? Doesn't the veil, at a minimum, represent the view that the female public face is immodest? But her husband/brother's naked face is just fine? Does the veil have some other use that I am missing? Don't we, as those who espouse secular-liberal values, have a conscience and a role in pointing out the inherent mysogyny in the act of veiling?

I won't repeat adam_smith's quite apt comment on this topic, Mr Horton. I'll simply add: the veil can mean what they're saying (just like Western clothes can mean a phobia of nudity), if that's what the person wearing the veil (or those around her, or the society, or) mean by it. But no -- of course this is not the only thing that the veil can mean.

This is the fallacy of assuming that the meaning is in the thing, not in the use that is made of the thing. That the word "pet" has to mean 'domestic animal that I like', instead of 'fart' (as it does in French) or 'cap' (as it does in Dutch).

To speak frankly, I wished human beings were as simple as they'd have to be for your assumption to be correct. Alas, they're not.

Which is why my analogy stands. Thinking that the veil necessarily stands for "considering women's face immodest, but not men's faces" and never anything else, is EXACTLY THE SAME as thinking the American flag necessarily stands for napalm killings and global warming, and nothing else.

If someone from a different culture told you s/he knows what the American flag 'truly means' better than you Americans, how would you react? Wouldn't you at least want this person to make a compelling case, with lots of arguments? Otherwise, what's the difference between this and cultural arrogance?

@137 - it looks like you're conflating me with ankylosaur (and we're neither the same nor do we necessarily agree - e.g. I'm with you on the fact that anthropologist don't necessarily work or even strive to work with representative samples).

I'm the one wondering why we're arguing, I didn't make any assumptions about you, and our argument (and our first/only direct exchange) began with your reply in 117 to my 116 - which is clearly phrased as disagreement - so it's an argument you started and I still don't quite understand what it's about.

Amazonvera, since I'm not into crackers, I guess I'll put my Jesus on a toast (where, I've been told, he's repeatedly been sighted) and send him right back at ya.

The argument I think we're having is that you claim Ms Haddad was right, whereas I think she's wrong. All the other 'arguments' from you and from me are merely expansions on why it is that she is basically right (you) or basically wrong (me). True, you started the argument by talking to other people, and I jumped in midway -- but I suppose this is the normal dynamics of a comments thread.

I'm not in this to make you change your statements, amazonvera. I'm simply elaborating on the first idea I put in this thread -- namely, that Ms Haddad is not right in her overgeneralization; further yet, that believing in that overgeneralization leads to people making the wrong decisions about how to help solve the problem of Muslim women who are forced to wear (or not to wear) the veil. If you disagree, despite all I and others have written, fine.

I don't think we disagree about science either. The basic contention, as I see it, is that you point out that Xtoph may be wrong in his conclusions due to a non-representative sample, whereas I point out that he may also be right, in case his sample selection was well done (that is something I would expect from a good anthropologist). Of course, Xtoph, like anyone, like any scientist, could be wrong. Or s/he could be right. Unless s/he goes into further details about his/her research methods, I don't see how either you or I could solve this.

I do get the impression that Xtoph is making (and quite strongly) the point that Westerners are often simplistic and wrong in their assumption that the veil is always (or even mostly) non-legitimately chosen (if chosen at all) by Muslim women. S/he has said so at least twice, mentioned colleagues who work in other Muslim countries, and strongly criticized oppinions to the contrary. S/he claimed Ms Haddad was "absolutely wrong" and praised the reporter who questioned her. You relativize this a little, but re-reading his/her two posts, I think they are markedly critical of Ms Haddad and similar positions. I agree s/he doesn't make claims about the Global Muslim Woman, but I'd argue that this is because no such thing actually exists, despite overgeneralizations like Ms Haddad's.

I have no reason to believe that it's useful to them and every reason to believe that it's more valuable for me to listen to their far less represented ideas at face value.

Well, a few sentences ago you were talking about the problem of considering minorities as representative of Great Global Women, right?

But all in all, it's of course good to listen to all voices. By all means do. And among them, please consider the voices that say that the symbolism of the veil is not simply oppressive, and that far more women may freely choose it than seems the case at first (Western) sight. As far as I can tell, such views are not that well represented in Western discourse about Muslim countries; I more often hear the kind of overgeneralization that Ms Haddad makes, which, as Xtoph pointed out, is not even new: it was already used in previous centuries, even before feminism started influencing Western culture.

In a nutshell: overgeneralizing about the situation of Muslim women with respect to the veil tends to alienate those Muslim women whose situation with respect to the veil is not as described in the overgeneralization, and helps convince these women that the West is simply being culturally arrogant rather than truly concerned with their human rights.

@adam_smith, who wrote:

I'm with you on the fact that anthropologist don't necessarily work or even strive to work with representative samples

I'd claim that even those anthropologists who don't strive to work with representative samples know that they should (and can be criticized by those who do for precisely this reason). That's at least what I hear from the anthropologists I know.

But anyway, since amazonvera's criticism was directed at Xtoph's claim, shouldn't we ask Xtoph him/herself to comment on that? S/he is the one who knows whether or not s/he did strive for representativeness, after all, regardless of any of our assumptions.

If you think my argument is that Ms. Haddad is right, you're significantly reading impaired since I've said the opposite multiple times, at least twice in plain terms and very short sentences.

I don't think Xtoph is wrong in what s/he's saying. I think you're wrong in extrapolating what s/he's saying to mean something it doesn't and then imagining that that's contradictory or mutually exclusive to something that I'm saying.

I don't believe that any individual woman I'd listen to would be representative of anyone but herself and the fact that such viewpoints as hers exist within her community. How does that make her point of view less valuable, and what does that have to do with anything?

Your continued insistence to "educate" people without beginning to understand what they're saying in simple terms or considering what they already seem to know is getting increasingly ludicrous.

@141
yeah - that's simply not true for the US, though may well be in other places (I'm a more science-y social scientist, so trust me, I often wish that were the case).

Anthropologists here often see themselves as working at the intersection between humanities and social sciences. Many would reject the concept of representativeness itself. Many would reject the notion of generalizing anything they say beyond the immediate group they're studying.

@143, so am I -- I am actively fighting for more rigor in my own field (linguistics), and in an environment were 'facts' are mentioned as important by anthropologists, even beyond the old physical anthropology paradigm. (I'm thinking of South Americanists like Bill Balée, Peter Rivière, or Mike Hekenberger).

The situation you mention reminds me of the influence of postmodernism and the whole deconstructionist movement in the humanities -- a movement with great points to make as well as overenthusiastic followers who would have raised the eyebrows of their favorite authors like Foucault or Derrida.

@amazonvera, OK, let's see if I can defuse the mounting tension. You indeed said that Ms Haddad was making a "fair point", but that she was "wrong" if she wanted to overgeneralize. Then we started getting involved in the question of whether or not the majority of women were free or not to choose the veil, a question which we can't solve without the proper definitions and actual numbers (is it 30%, is it 60%, says adam_smith), so it's basically personal opinion.

Other than that, we disagreed on whether or not people should have first-hand experience with the cultures they're judging or trying to understand (with respect to the question of the human rights of women), and whether or not the best course of action to help would be to actually go there. You said no, and preferred to listen to opinions. I said people should do as they please, and hoped you'd listen to all opinions (not only Ms Haddad's), and further reported seeing much more of the veil=unfree stereotype than its opposite in Western debates.

Other than that, it seems our disagreement is (maybe?) about how to tell when outside influences ('patriarchal' or otherwise) do make it impossible to talk about legitimate choice, though we both agree that there can be legitimate choice even in the presence of said influences.

Would you say this is a fair assessment?

Re-reading what I wrote, it would seem some of my reactions were more suited to what other commenters had written than to what you had written. For this confusion, I do apologize.

I don't believe that any individual woman I'd listen to would be representative of anyone but herself and the fact that such viewpoints as hers exist within her community.

Let's both agree with that.

I live in Metro Detroit (read = "near-ish to Dearborn") and went to school with a lot of Arab-American women who wore the hijab. Half the hijabis I know wore tight pants too.

It's not about modesty or sexuality (trust me, some really, really nice asses, and I'm not even really into that), it's about flagging in group or out group. It's a passive way of saying, "hey, if you're not Muslim, don't bother trying to ask me out, it's not gonna happen," amongst other messages.

It's not a particularly accurate assessment, ankylosaur (where in the world did I say we should go anywhere?), but it's probably the best we're going to do here.

OK -- such is life, amazonvera.

My intention was not to be belligerant. This is a discussion I've had in a number of other situations, both online and in the real world; and my reactions were more closely aimed at people other than you. Again, my apologies. B-ismi-llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīmi.