Here's the question:

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Captive or Captivating? Here's a picture that could generate a thousand words. A reader sent this to No Comment, teed off that Reebok was glamourizing the restrictions placed on women living under extremist Islamic regimes. But a member of our staff, a Muslim who chooses to cover, disliked the ad for a different reason: she felt it was trying to turn a spiritual decision - whether or not to cover - into a "come hither" consumerist moment. And yet there were a fair number of readers who really liked the ad: finally, they said, an image of Islamic women as strong and self-confident. What do you think?

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Edited to say, I guess you can't see it from this grainy picture, but I have the actual Ms Magazine, and in the hand that's showing, she's holding black prayer beads.

[ March 09, 2002: Message edited by: Michelle ]

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she felt it was trying to turn a spiritual decision - whether or not to cover - into a "come hither" consumerist moment.

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As for appropriating and exploiting? Of course it is. It's adversitising, after all, and very well done at that. Everyone sees in it what is relevent to them - personally, politically, artistically.

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How about bare-breasted young African girls in a dusty village, chained together, wearing Reeboks?

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Cross-listed in the the Too Bizarre Not to be True Dep't and the What In Ten Thousand Hells Were They Thinking Dep't: a couple of years ago, a major shoe manufacturer (can't recall which one) actually filmed a commercial in which a running black man, wearing the shoes, was chased down by a Land Cruiser-load of white men trying to figure out how he ran so damn fast.

I would think that white or light colours would be a bit better for that though. But apparently it's not as bad as we think it is.

[ March 10, 2002: Message edited by: Michelle ]

The only thing I find odd about that picture is the Reeboks. But I think you're allowed to wear any shoes you like as a Muslim woman. Again, the women I've met who cover often wear quite fashionable clothing underneath, and wear different types of shoes depending on what they are going to be doing that day. I think as long as you are modestly covered, then you can wear whatever you like underneath.

Then again, I've heard that in strict Islamic countries you're not supposed to wear make-up if your face is showing.

Here's an article about how to dress in Iran

An interesting online clothing store for Muslim women - everything you ever wanted to know about Muslim women's clothes here.

"Actually, apparently in very hot countries like Saudi Arabia, both men and women cover up most of their bodies (except women often don't show their eyes even), and while I think the full face thing is going a bit far, apparently it's excellent protection against the heavy heat and sun."

Just a point of informatio. Islam does not require women to cover their faces. Only the hair.
This practice of covering women's face is definitely cultural, existed prior to Islam (in South East Asia) and unfortunately persisted.

You might notice that Arab Muslim women do not cover their faces. (They possibly do in Saudi Arabia, but that is a very conservative brand of Islam that is practiced there). Non Arab Muslims (such as in Iran, Afghanistan, and other societies do).

There are other varieties of covering the face or not. Touareg people live in the sub-North African desert (Sahara). They are nomadic. They are non Arab Muslims. Men do cover their faces but not women. It has been their practice before Islam.

I have a friend who taught in a Hassidic school in Outremont and the dress restrictions on the girls mirror the restrictions in their lives.

Around the corner from me there is worse still - a fundamentalist Catholic parish of the "Fraternité Pie X" started up in a break from the church by the Nazi symp Levefbre... I see the pinched faces and sorry miens of the faithful and want to stage a huge nude parade or orgy in front of them - and since they are of the majority religion it is not a question of persecuting a minority group...

Perhaps this is a cultural difference too - in Quebec and other francophone countries progressive people aren't so prompt to embrace absolute cultural relativism.

I don't think there is a person on this board who is an absolute cultural relativist - especially considering that the very idea of relativism itself does not lend itself to being universally applied. After all, as a total cultural relativist, you can't criticize people for intolerance if, say, intolerance is part of someone's culture.

I don't think anyone is going that far with cultural relativism here. They're just saying that people have the right to wear what they want, even if others feel that they are symbols of oppression.

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I don't think anyone really embraces absolute cultural relativism, lagatta. There's a difference between respecting other people's choices and making absolutely no moral judgments whatsoever in the name of "tolerance".

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I defend no culture that oppresses and suppresses any segment of society, be it women, children, untouchables etc.. What I am trying to say is crusades (verbal or otherwise) in which some Babblers seem to love to engage in are off the mark, the simplest way of dealing with issues and that they are not fruitful.

Like most Babblers, whether Western or Eastern cultures, I can go through my list of points of criticism for both. No culture is beyond criticism.

The difference between culture and religion in the context of the discussion is that for culture, we at least imply (if not recognize) that we do not understand a certain culture and we criticize. But with religion, we do have the tendancy to assume that we know all about that religion, that our information is correct and we automatically engage in criticizing.

The lush garden of Islamic heaven is far more appealing than the Christian variety.

Back to cultural relativism, I think that if one looks at editorials and viewpoints in Québec and in English-Speaking Canada one will find that progressive and left people tend to take a different approach. Perhaps it is because the Church was so oppressive here, perhaps it is the French tendency towards universalist abstraction and lois cadres.