France bans veils in public

[L'arriviste]

Like I said, only a small minority of muslim girls cover their face in public (at least in Europe, but also in most of the muslim countries). Most wear a hijab or nothing.

How do they find a parter? By there parents I assume. (this doesn't mean the parents have full control over marriage: parents choose potential marriage partners but the sun/daughter can refuse the partner -till a certain level)

As for what age they start wearing it. It depends. I don't think you'll see girls wear it before puberty. In highschool some do wear a hijab, but still mostly a minority. Basically (at least before they are married, and mostly also after) it's there own choice. I heard muslim women say they don't wear the hijab, because they don't feel they are ready for it. Don't really know what that means though...

Here are a few bits that I learned recently, by asking a lot of questions of a female colleague of mine who wears a hijab and recently had an arranged marriage. And who is a senior computer programmer.

Connection between headgarments and piety

Buffalo Solider seems to be pretty much correct in his/her synopsis above. The wearing of any sort of head covering is a choice made based on a commonly-held perception of piety. The thing that varies is the definition of "commonly".

Communities that do not already insist on the wearing of headgarments as a de facto activity consider the wearing of them as a freely-chosen expression of strong piety. Therefore wearing them in these communities equates to a corresponding level of spiritual maturity. Hence "not being ready" as Buffalo Soldier mentions above, means not yet feeling sufficiently equipped with the maturity to express one's piety to that level.

So in other communities in which headgarments are de facto, the individual need not necessarily possess a deeply-felt piety or spiritual maturity. At this point, and where there is no social obligation, one might find some cause for an argument about equality and coercion.

'Arranged' marriages and the flexibility of tradition

I have a colleague who recently embarked on an 'arranged' marriage. I use inverted commas there because I don't want to suggest that 'arranged' is the same as 'mandatory'. She could have declined the marriage at any time without loss of face to either family.

And family is the key thing here. The marriage is a union of families rather moreso than of individuals. This isn't easy to appreciate for those of us who come together for love rather than the abnegation of self required by an arranged marriage. This however is the tradition and we all know about the different ways other cultures tend to think about individuality à la Confucius.

Moreover, the same tradition also decrees a payment in the form of a 'dotation' (a dowry, if you like). However, as with everything I've heard about in these very intricate matters, an entirely modern breeze blows through the situation. This is another example of the flexibility that might not seem immediately obvious to others.

Nowadays, rather than waive the dotation, families often choose to pay over a nominal figure out of a sense of form, or else if a fuller sum is agreed by both families, that sum will be expressly used to furnish the new marital home.

 

[rhubroma]

This is what's perhaps most difficult for a Westerner to comprehend, given that individual liberty has been a cornerstone of the culture since the late XVIII century, which was itself a culmination of efforts and principles put together by the Age of Reason-Enlightenment society.

And this begot the Romanticism of the XIX century, which, for the first time in a by now industrialized society, saw the old formalities of marriages give way to more individual choice and allowing a criteria of romantic love to become decisive in how and why couples came together. I say 'more' individual choice, because marriages still were a rarity between couples from different social classes, even more so between different races and even, of course, religions (Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Jew or Muslim, etc.).

Even if today class and race and to a certain extent religious identity seems to have broken down, its still probably much more difficult for say a yacht owning WASP from Rhode Island to get hitched to a poor urbanite from Harlem (even were they to fall in love). In any case, the point is that while our cult of individual liberty is indeed much stronger than in the Muslim world, this has been the result of a cultural and social (but to a certain extent political and even religious) process that has been evolving for the past several centuries and is still incomplete.

No doubt, however, that given that the Arab cultures have till now not had an Enlightenment or a Romantic era, but have remained set socially and culturally in a more remote traditional past while modernity is taking place around them, means that they also find themselves just as uneasy in trying to live within a Western society as Westerners have in accommodating them.

This is why it is so interesting to see how the internet and the social networks, and the forces of globalization, have become powerful weapons against those traditions which have also, till now, been partly responsible in keeping the Arab societies form living within liberal and democratic states. I say till now, because we are seeing in this very moment the beginnings of some change from Syria to the Maghreb. It also explains why the more conservative and reactionary religious and political elements within the Arab world, have put up such a desperate and ferocious fight to hold onto their power and resist such a historical inertia.

 

[Buffalo Soldier]

Thank you L'ariviste. Learned a lot of your post.

Same with rhubroma, a nuanced opinion.
But I have problems with this:

No doubt, however, that given that the Arab cultures have till now not had an Enlightenment or a Romantic era.

This is simply not true.
Enlightenment is something typical European, you can't expect other cultures to follow a same pattern. But if you want to seek this pattern, Arab cultures had this much earlier than European...

 

[Semper Fidelis]

Thank you L'ariviste. Learned a lot of your post.

Same with rhubroma, a nuanced opinion.
But I have problems with this:

This is simply not true.
Enlightenment is something typical European, you can't expect other cultures to follow a same pattern. But if you want to seek this pattern, Arab cultures had this much earlier than European...

Watch out Buffalo Soldier Rhubroma is sensitive to who what where and when an enlightenment can happen. He thinks only certain individuals and certain groups are entitled to that enlightenment in the current days.

 

[Le breton]

Thank you L'ariviste. Learned a lot of your post.

Same with rhubroma, a nuanced opinion.
But I have problems with this:

This is simply not true.
Enlightenment is something typical European, you can't expect other cultures to follow a same pattern. But if you want to seek this pattern, Arab cultures had this much earlier than European...

Isn't this last sentence debatable? European culture has had its highs and lows, but don't you think the roots if the Enlightenment go back to the Greeks? In other words before the brightest period of the islamic civilization?

 

[L'arriviste]

Isn't this last sentence debatable? European culture has had its highs and lows, but don't you think the roots if the Enlightenment go back to the Greeks? In other words before the brightest period of the islamic civilization?

+1 for highs and lows. That's exactly how these purple patches in human development tend to go. Some folks who like their glass half full even say we're on the slide back down from one of the highs right now.

Specifically on Arab culture, I may be painting with rather a broad brush here, but I would say that with the Ummayad/Abbasid scission, the "enlightenment" of which Rhu speaks may have been more nuanced toward the Ummayad end of the spectrum. However, this may be flawed in that orthodox histories tend to paint the Ummayads as the good guys, so I couldn't vouch for the accuracy of that.

 

[rhubroma]

Thank you L'ariviste. Learned a lot of your post.

Same with rhubroma, a nuanced opinion.
But I have problems with this:

This is simply not true.
Enlightenment is something typical European, you can't expect other cultures to follow a same pattern. But if you want to seek this pattern, Arab cultures had this much earlier than European...

Agreed, and I don't. And I'm well aware of the Arab “Renaissance” of the Middle Ages, but that golden age seems to have been left within such a remote period and the Arabs have since then decidedly regressed culturally in this sense. Mine was simply to point out that if the West has done away with certain traditions, become a so called liberal and so called democratic society, then it's because it made a historical course that, as you say, was European. No more, no less.

The Arabs have not made the same course, for a myriad of reasons that a place such as this forum is certainly not the spot to get into, though this doesn't mean that the course that the West made isn't possible in an Arab society.

I think what's important here is that, in this age of globalization, any society chooses a course to make that is most conducive to peaceful coexistence. And right now the West has no lessons to impart within the Arab world that's for sure.

Instinctively, apart from having been educated in the European Humanistic tradition, I prefer reason to religion and freedom of expression and democracy to tyranny and the regime state. It seems, at least, that in this historical moment in North Africa and elsewhere within the Arab world, that many feel likewise. If that is indeed the case, then this is only a welcomed change from what has existed before in the region in my opinion, also because, for once, the West isn't the primary drive toward that change, but it is coming form within the Arab world itself.

 

[Buffalo Soldier]

OK, true that. I just find 'enlightenment' a difficult term to use, because it points to a very specific process, that's only applicable on that specific age and location.

Popular statements like 'the arab still need their enlightenment' are very euro-centric: we did the good thing several centuries ago, now the rest of the world still has to follow our example. This is a different age and place we're talking about, it's not as simple as 'follow our example'

 

[pugdog]

I haven't read all the posts on this subject, so excuse me if I'm repeating things. As I understand it, the niqab has nothing to do with tradition, but was a 19th century invention by a particular sect. Curiously, the only voices I have heard, hidden behind the niqab, have been young French girls who seem to find it interesting to project their faith in this way.

It is very important to remember the struggle the French had to free themselves of the control of the Church. The law of 1905 separating the State from religion is fundamental to the notions of the French republic.

My view of the niqab and the burkha? We are apes, and use our faces for communication. Subconsciously we are continuously assessing the other person by minute signals of the face. So hiding the face is not only insulting, but unnerving since a major source of information is blocked off. In short, I hate anything that covers the face as it seems extremely aggressive.

 

[rhubroma]

Isn't this last sentence debatable? European culture has had its highs and lows, but don't you think the roots if the Enlightenment go back to the Greeks? In other words before the brightest period of the islamic civilization?

Now this is an interesting question, which goes a bit off topic, but I think worth saying a word about.

Actually the roots of European, and hence Western, Enlightenment, do not stem directly from the ancient Greeks themselves, but from the rediscovery of classical antiquity (its knowledge and arts) on the part of Renaissance humanists and artists.

And, ironically, it was indeed the Arab world that partially, if indirectly, contributed to the spark. When Europe was going through its so called "dark" period, when the light of classical antiquity was decidedly spent and the continent was a whirl of germanic tribes mixing in with the remnants of Roman Latinaity (preserved mostly in the ecclesiastical confines of the Roman Catholic Church) and thus in turmoil while looking for new identities: the Arab Caliphates were at their maximum expansion and cultural refinement. It was their open minded intellectuals who thought it culturally valid to preserve the knowledge and writings of men like Plato, while the West had all but forgotten the Classical Greek in which the great philosopher's works were originally written.

During this Arab Golden Age, men like Avicenna and subsequently Averroes laid the basis of a Muslim philosophy that melded the best thoughts of Plato and Aristotle with the teachings of the Prophet, to produce something intellectually that would subsequently condition Western thought from Thomas Aquinas to Erasmus of Rotterdam, whereas the arabic mathematicians would invent a numerical system and zero through which all forms of higher calculations became possible. The old Roman numerals were dismally inadequate for this, which is why a Pisan mathematician, Fibonacci, of the later Middle Ages brought the Arab numerals over and this altered the West dramatically, including allowing the Tuscans with the them to lay the basis for the calculations of modern banking and financing. (Pisa, not incidentally, went on to become one of Europe's great mathematical and science learning centers at its university, where Galileo held a cathedra.)

Then again during the Renaissance period, displaced luminaries from the former Byzantine state (like Cardinals Besarion and Trebizond), which had definitively fallen when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, arriving in Italy and the West brought with them their knowledge of Classical Greek philosophy to Western humanists, which they had been passed on through the Arab culture, and set up the first complete humanistic libraries of the period: such as Cardinal Besarion's famous Greek and Latin library in Venice. Not surprisingly, also in Venice during the period, did Aldus Manutius open the first Greek press in Europe: all of this, again, made indirectly possible by the Arabs. (Ironically the fall of Byzantium became a contributing reason that led the European commercialists to seek new trade routes by sea to the orient and its luxury goods and spices, and thus to the first colonial period and so called Age of Discovery, which paved the way to the rise of new Western states such as America.)

These make for good reasons, in light of today's globalization especially, to always remember that knowledge, and therefore enlightenment, are a collaborative human effort and not the spontaneous manifestations of a superior culture or race. Of course, this isn't to diminish the Western achievements, either of classical antiquity or the early modern period, just one must recognize the role that Arab culture and consciousness contributed to preserving ancient Greek thought, which then ironically became one of the basis for renewal and change in European society during the Early Modern period that led to its expanded horizons and that ultimately begot Enlightenment, scientific thought, democracy: in short the West that began the globalized world we live in today.

If there is one image in Western Art that represents this humanistic tradition as it came to guide the course of Western thought and culture from the early modern period forward, then it would have to be Raphael's famous School of Athens in the Renaissance papal apartments at the Vatican. This is where our "rebirth" really begins, but it was one for which we owe a considerable debt to that splendor that was once the medieval Arab Caliphates.

Unfortunately, I'm incapable of posting Raphael's image.

PS: Not coincidentaly, among the mostly all star line-up of ancient Greek philospher's in Raphael's work, is the turbined medieval Averroes, which is telling. All this makes more dramatic the decadence of Arab society of the last several centuries, in light of the open mindedness it once had during the medieval period, when, as it has often been cited, the Ummayad Caliph of Còrdoba, Al-Hakam II, could dine and hold cultured and intellectual debates with a Roman Catholic cardinal and a Jewish Rabbi together at his palace.

 

[Merckx index]

The Arabs have not made the same course, for a myriad of reasons that a place such as this forum is certainly not the spot to get into

Then you do get into them, and I’m appreciative of that.

My view of the niqab and the burkha? We are apes, and use our faces for communication. Subconsciously we are continuously assessing the other person by minute signals of the face. So hiding the face is not only insulting, but unnerving since a major source of information is blocked off. In short, I hate anything that covers the face as it seems extremely aggressive.

Very well put. It’s actually akin to not talking, in some ways worse.

I also wonder about safety aspects. The niqab, particularly, prevents peripheral vision, which is vital in large urban centers, or really, anywhere.

If there is one image in Western Art that represents this humanistic tradition as it came to guide the course of Western thought and culture from the early modern period forward, then it would have to be Raphael's famous School of Athens in the Renaissance papal apartments at the Vatican.

Isn’t that the one where Plato points up--to the heavens, to reason, to the ideal--while Aristotle points down--to the earth, to empiricism, to observation, to induction? I always loved that contrast.

 

[rhubroma]

Then you do get into them, and I’m appreciative of that.

Very well put. It’s actually akin to not talking, in some ways worse.

I also wonder about safety aspects. The niqab, particularly, prevents peripheral vision, which is vital in large urban centers, or really, anywhere.

Isn’t that the one where Plato points up--to the heavens, to reason, to the ideal--while Aristotle points down--to the earth, to empiricism, to observation, to induction? I always loved that contrast.

My interest was purely on intellectual heritage. My thoughts on the contemporary Arab world are secondary to this.

For the record, I once, many years ago, worked as a deck hand on private yacht (just because I wanted to sail around the Mediterranean without any money for a season). In any case there were some Arab clients we took to Sardinia, who had come from London if I remember correctly. Some Saudi sheik's grandson or something or other. His young wife was only allowed to be accompanied to the beach by the female staff and even when on deck no men could be around. She also wore a niqab.

All of which I found to be utterly stupid, apart from the offensiveness of being treated like an inferior.

However, the fact remains that the West has made a much stronger impact on their world, at least till now, then they have, generally speaking, on ours. The issue here is to, I think, allow the Arabs to regain some of that consciousness that they once had during the Omayyad dynasty from within. How this is to be done, I wouldn't know, just that it must be arrived at by them. Reactionary laws and bombers, in other words, to force them to comply, won't do the trick.

If the protests we have seen from Persia (non-Arab, though Muslim) to the Maghreb are any indication, then this is already taking place. Certainly it will be a long process, but it is one that the West's governments should be concentrating all their diplomatic, and economic, efforts in the region to at least not be a hindrance to the Arab springtime, if not to actually help foster it. I don't have much confidence, however, in the governments of the West. Perhaps it is the young Arabs themselves who thus offer us more optimism.

PS: Correct on the Raphael fresco and I agree with you.

 

[Boeing]

veils are hot