Word: burkas
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...seen from the point of view of individual rights: If women want to wear this cloak, they have a perfect right to do so, even in eyes of those Americans who are most hostile to foreign ways of living. It matters not whether these women wear the burka in public or in private, because their “rights” are the same. However, public space in the French scheme of things is not just a non-private and therefore public space by virtue of default. It’s a universalist space where citizens interact. From a French...
Well, in my head, I know that Muslim women should everywhere be allowed to wear the burka. Of course, some will surely do so because they are victims of unpleasant patriarchalism. But then again, in Western culture also, many fathers drive their daughters to distraction and many domineering men drive uncertain women to drink and despair, but we’ve learned to live with many such injustices and inequalities...
...head and in my heart, full as it is with the memories of a French childhood, I do so dislike the burka that outlawing it in France seems to me to be more or less acceptable, even if that should not be the case in the United States. It has no place in French life and history, and outlawing the burka might well have been one of the very few items of public policy on which Robespierre and Marie-Antoinette, or Joan of Arc and the Marquis de Sade, would have readily agreed...
Wanting to wear the burka seems to me to be a self-inflicted wound that I just can’t accept. In this symbolic matter, the French tradition seems to me to be for France, at least, the more plausible alternative: for France, and eventually, for all women everywhere...
Conclusion? Is it, as David Hume put it so pithily, that “reason is and for ever should be the slave of the passions?” Yes, surely so. But then again, if that is indeed the case, if this rejection of the burka makes passionate sense for me, how will other passions work out for devout Muslims of both sexes, wherever they...