No matter how much changes, it all stays the same. Women remain the pivot around which the Orientalist imagination develops, from its Christian origins in the medieval to the supposedly open-minded liberalism of today. The judgment changes, from too sexual to not sufficiently sexual, but the judge and the judged don't want to swap. The self-righteousness, the masked and unveiled candor, the casual commentary which reveals the depths of obsession around sexuality, the woman and modernity: Ultimately, it seems, the measure of the modern -- for the Muslim -- is the tightness of the clothes (or the degree of their absence.) This happened in Lebanon, as analysts attempted to use "whose women are hotter?" to explain which side would win (talk about genetic teleology) to Iran and the "better-looking women support Mousavi" -- all the way to now, in East Turkestan.
You will laugh, cry, or stop in sudden surprise when you read this, an otherwise positive portrayal of Muslim women and the leadership roles they have bravely and courageously taken on against Chinese government policies and police (at MSNBC no less):
The mosque was eventually opened when the crowd swelled and there was a threat of unrest, police said.
Most Muslim Uighurs practice a moderate form of Sunni Islam or follow the mystical Sufism tradition. The women often work and lead an active social life outside the home. Many wear brightly colored head scarves but the custom is not strongly enforced. Young Uighur women often wear jeans, form-fitting tops and dresses.
This is how Wikipedia defines a paragraph: "a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea."
So... "most Muslim Uighurs" are "moderate" or "mystical," which means (subtext) they are not radical or fundamentalist or dangerous. They are, in other words, not too Muslim. That's because women work and have active social lives, as if only mystical or moderate Muslim women work or have social lives. They are also moderate because they wear headscarves here and there, but really because they wear tight clothes. There's your self-contained idea = you are moderate if you wear certain types of clothes. This is the same logic that led Sarkozy to call for a ban on the burqa.
This then applies from the instance of women to describe the whole people, since Muslims are (here's tautology for you) a people contained within a definition of religiosity. So, because the Uighur women are "moderate," and we determine that from their dress, they're okay, Heaven forbid they dress differently. They wouldn't be fully human. Sometimes, it seems, the idea of civilization vs. savagery is not so far away. It has just found a far fancier -- and, we must admit, better looking -- medium. But you know who else dressed just like Westerners, and wasn't quite the mystic or moderate? Her, for one.
Clothes make the Muslimah: So what's the difference between that, and defining the worth (that is, Muslim-ness) of a woman in the external measure of her hijab? It seems woman is the battlefield. The right Muslim woman, as determined by either extreme, is judged far, far too often on the clothes she does or does not wear. Who empowered who to make that call? Anyway, by that measure, if you combine the two, you make everyone happy (or just write a really conceptually confused book.)
If you ask my parents, Ayatollah Beheshti was widely considered to be more "modern," rational, and "palatable to leftists" because, no joke, he wore a particularly snazzy 'aba and wore his cloak on one shoulder.
Posted by: Hasan Bidar | 11 July 2009 at 07:48 PM