[BITList] muslim female piety

[HUGH]

Colin,

Female piety, my arse - it's an attachment to clothing allied to Wahabist fundamentalism.  People turn and stare at them in the streets here, as at a freak show, something alien, and that's an undesirable situation.  I refer to the full garb with the veil, I couldn't care less about women's head scarves.  Mostly I wonder who/what the hell is under it all and why the chap in western dress accompanying him/her is OK seeing my wife, but not me his, if, indeed, that's who's underneath it all.  A major part of my objection is that it gives encouragement to the far right in their campaign to "educate" the ineducable to a mindset ripe for further exploitation.  I know people who are convinced muslim women don't have to show their faces on a passport photo.

We see similar in other religious groups, where individuals get strange notions and try to impose them on others.  My wife's cousin has not long emerged from a dalliance with an oddball christian sect that screwed her head round to the point where normal conversation and relationship was impossible - one could never work out what made her tick.  I've still got the unreadable tracts she pressed on me on the few occasions she would deign to acknowledge we existed, all heavily annotated and underlined for my "education".  In this town here it is impossible to ignore the evidence that, in the near 200 years since its population started to be swelled by in-migration from Ireland and elsewhere in Scotland, little has changed in the religious landscape.  In the main, Catholics still marry Catholics and Protestants (a term I dislike but use for convenience) still marry Protestants.  And we still have separate schools. Not much in the way of integration here.

What is the solution to it all?  God knows.

Hugh.
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