The Inner Mullah May 31, 2005 Jill An interesting op/ed about one woman’s internalization of “Mullah-thought” after spending months living in Pakistan. A female Pakistani reporter responds. Read both. They’re intriguing, and frustrating. Any thoughts?
Interesting articles (I’ve just found your site btw. and am enjoying it thoroughly). I think Durrani is correct when she says it is trying to challenge culture that is so difficult. If it had been men jogging along in lycra running shorts, a singlet and with Nike shoes protesting their right to errr… wear lycra, they’d have been scorned as well. There is de-sexualising dress for both men and women in Muslim cultures, the problem is where women’s desexualising dress limits their autonomy which it does in many parts of the world, but doesn’t in others.
I wonder why articles about women and Islam have to so exclusively focus on dress. People from different societies “read in” their own culturally based assumptions into other people’s behavior, so it’s kind of stupid, or at least not very likely to be too accurate, for a Western journalist to spend a month in Pakistan and then psychoanalyze the women’s dress conventions there. I monitor a discussion list of progressive Muslims and the stupid discussion over what women should wear just keeps rearing its ugly head. If we want women to be free we should just leave it up to them and stop assigning nefarious motivations to every blasted thing they do.