You can still believe whatever you want, but if you act in a way that offends Egyptian sensibilities, don’t expect people there not to be outraged.
Believe me, I know what he’s talking about. I lived in Quebec for five years and in no way was I considered a true Quebecker because I was not a “Quebecois”. I was an English-speaking Jew.
Eventually we got fed up and left. Even though I actually love the city of Montreal itself.
:dubious: So just because (some) Muslims are the only ones* who happen to follow this discriminatory practice means that we have to accommodate it? That line of reasoning is going to lead you into some pretty shaky territory if you try to be consistent about it.
For instance, consider the example I gave earlier of high-caste Hindu Indians who consider it ritually polluting to have any contact with members of certain low-caste Hindu groups. And say that your French class has two Hindus in it, one from that high-caste group and the other from one of those low-caste groups.
Consequently, the high-caste student refuses to have any contact with the other Hindu student at all. He won’t look at him, won’t talk to him even when the class is doing conversation practice and everybody’s supposed to start a conversation with everybody else, won’t accept any papers or anything that the low-caste Hindu has touched, and so on and so forth.
Now, are you allowed to tell the high-caste student that we don’t allow that kind of discriminatory treatment in our society, and he has to treat the low-caste student with the same basic courtesy that he uses to the other students, or else get out of the class?
According to the reasoning you gave above, you’re not allowed to do that. Because that would be picking on Hindus, since Hindus are the only ones following this discriminatory practice. So you’re obligated to go on letting one student in your class treat another student in a highly offensive and discriminatory manner, because otherwise you’d be “picking on a specific racial or religious group”.
Basically, you’ve painted yourself and the rest of this culture into a corner here. You’re demanding that society has to accept and accommodate everything that anybody does in the name of religion, unless there’s already an existing prohibition against it on non-religious grounds.
I think that’s potentially a recipe for big trouble in a free egalitarian society. There are LOTS of discriminatory practices that various religious groups follow, many of which it’s never occurred to us to specifically prohibit, because they haven’t come up in our culture (with niqab being a classic example).
If we say that all those discriminatory practices have to be fully accepted and accommodated by our culture, then what does it even mean any more to say that we’re a free egalitarian society?
- At least, the only ones in this particular situation; I believe there are some non-Muslim groups in India that practice pardah too.
(BTW Montreal is having its annual Saint Patrick Day fete this weekend. I just got some sort of advertisement about it.)
There is no corner that the Niqab-lovers have painted themselves into yet. Your Hindu example rightly points out that allowing such a religious practice could create too much of a disturbance in class to be tolerated, or you could butt out of their cultural practices and accept that the high and low caste individuals will understand their cultural rules and organize around it.
Regardless, wearing a veil is not analogous to this Hindu example. She, judging from the articles, is quite able to talk and acquire an education. There is nobody in that class she could/would not talk with. She shows flexibility when it is necessary, and must have decided that she was not going to give in to a teacher’s arbitrary rules.
By the way, your interpretation of what the garment means is only a reflection of yourself. The fact that you see it and think about sexism and the subjugation of women has little to do with what it means to her. I don’t have a problem with it, because, like Malthus earlier in the thread, I just view it as a little variety to make life more interesting.
So, if I show up in class in an full SS uniform?
They’re perfectly entitled to not like my having Jewish friends. That’s their opinion, and I have mine.
The question at hand is whether it’s right for the government to enforce a given cultural choice.
You’re being asked to accomodate nothing except leaving people be. This practice costs you nothing. It is an imposition of no significance of any consequence on anyone. Your example of a Hindu student being deliberately disruptive IS an imposition on others and is a ridiculously inaccurate analogy. Of course such a thing would be unreasonable. A veil is not.
No, I’m not. That’s preposterous. Something that actually harmed other people or their property, or which disturbed the peace, would clearly be well beyond the boundaries of civil liberty.
Providing it has nothing to do with the offering of a commercial or public service, I see no reason to force her to do otherwise. And we all behave the same way regarding some things. I will only change in locker rooms with other men. So I allow other men to see me naked, but not women, unless it’s my wife. That means I’m treating men and women differently. I date women (well, when I was single I did) but not men. So I’m treating men and women differently. I hold doors open for women more than I do men. Don’t like it? Too bad. It’s a free country. You have the right to disagree with me.
Perhaps her attitude pisses you off. Perhaps you don’t like it. To be honest, neither do I. This isn’t about what I like, though. She’s not hurting me. She’s not hurting you. Leave her in peace.
I don’t see you crying for a ban on sunglasses - yet eye contact is just as purposeful in communication. Which is precisely why a great number of people choose to hide their eyes behind reflective sunglasses : to hide what their eyes betray, and intimidate.
And a shitload more people wear them than niqabs.
Interesting. And good news for the whole of Canada, too : no more English/French cultural divide to squabble over when everybody speaks Innu & wears the traditional Cree garb. You know, the culture of the place they live in, which they have to adopt and not demand that it change to…
You get the idea.
As others have said, the culture of the place you live in is made up of the sum of people who live there. Yourself included. No matter how foreign you look or act. If you’re there, you’re part of the culture.
If it means the culture has to make some room and eventually evolve, well, tough titties. That’s why we don’t speak bad Latin or wear wigs any more and have to wear ties (you can blame 18th century Croatian mercs for that one. Bastards.)
I do, and it’s a perfect example. The French and English didn’t come to Canada in order to be part of a First Nations culture, they came as conquerors and colonizers. And in doing so, they drove the First Nations off their land, almost wiped them out, and marginalized them.
If the Cree knew what was going to happen to them when the French and English came to their land, don’t you think they would have objected?
:mad: Rick, I should let you know that that post strikes me as being at least on the borderline of deliberate malicious misquotation. What my sentence actually said was:
Please don’t do something like this again.
And here, IMO, is where your entire argument gets shipwrecked on the rock of arbitrary subjective judgement. Your reasoning is based on the fact that YOU PERSONALLY don’t happen to feel that a female student refusing to allow male students to see her face qualifies as an imposition on others, whereas a Hindu student refusing to interact with a lower-caste fellow-student would.
But that’s just your personal feeling about it. If male students in a class with a niqabi have a different personal feeling about it—if they think that her hiding her face from them alone does constitute an unfair imposition—I don’t see why their opinion shouldn’t be just as valid as yours. (We’ve already had some male posters in this thread, such as chappachula, agreeing that they would be offended by such a discriminatory practice if they were on the receiving end of it.)
You have now admitted that you think it’s all right for an egalitarian society to prohibit a religious practice that constitutes an unfair imposition on others. And you agree that such an unfair imposition doesn’t necessarily have to be something that’s already actually illegal (like bodily harm or theft of property), but could also be something legal that we simply consider unacceptably unfair (like the Hindu student in my example refusing to interact with a fellow-student).
Then we’re fundamentally on the same page. Our only real point of disagreement is where to draw the line determining what kind of actions genuinely constitute an unfair imposition on others. And so far, that just boils down to a difference of subjective personal opinion. So I think we’re done here.
And for that reason, among others, teachers are entitled to require their students not to wear sunglasses in class. (Unless the student has some sort of medical requirement for them, of course.)
So the sunglasses analogy is of no merit whatsoever in arguing that a teacher shouldn’t be allowed to require students not to wear niqab.
With the added modifier, your claim is still false, so too bad. Deleting the modifier had no effect on how false it was.
As you have described your thepretical scenario, my opinion is frankly the only one a reasonable and fair person could possibly hold. Wearing a veil is not disruptive. Actively being an asshole is. If you don’t like my opinion, well, it’s a free country, as I’ve said.
Now, if you want to sit there and say wearing a veil’s disruptive, again, you’re free to do so. And I’m free to say that I think that opinion is asinine, and that I think most people who claim to hold it aren’t admitting their real opinion. Nobody seems to be able to adequately explain what’s so horrible, what ruins their day, about some woman wearing a veil on her face.
Are they even scarier if you put it in italics?
Tell you what; explain to me why wearing a veil’s a big disruption, without using any argument that boils down to “because other people don’t like it.”
There’s no right in Canada to not have your feelings hurt. You have an expectation that the government will protect your person, your property, and uphold the peace, but the government’s job isn’t to guard you from opinions you don’t like. I don’t want the government legislating what I can’t and can’t do based on the whining of some crying little nancy boys.
To use an interesting counterexample, should the Canadian government now prohibit pictures of Mohammed? After all, it deeply offends Canadians who are Muslims - far more, I’m guessing, than any sane person would be “offended” by a niqab. So why not prohibit such things? I say that’s an awful idea. If I want to publish a book called Rick’s Big Book Of Pictures of Mohammed Fellating Sheep, I should be allowed to do so.
If someone doesn’t like it, they shouldn’t read it.
Why don’t you start a new thread some time on what its like to be a non “Quebecois” in Quebec. If you do, please send me a private message to alert me.
There are quite a few English speaking Quebeckers on this board, and none that I’m aware of have complained about their situation in the province. That despite some horrendous stories that come up now and then with regard to forcing immigrant children to go to French speaking schools and businesses forced to display themselves in French. That sort of thing does not happen in the ROC.
Have things improved or are anglophone Quebeckers complacent?
I thought this niqab story relevant to my impression that Quebec society is quite willing to compromise individual liberties for the sake of cultural preservation.
Never mind, I ought not to post without my morning coffee.
Well, they did. Not that it did them any good. The point I was trying to make is that you can’t stop cultural shifts from happening right along population ones. Not that it’s a bad thing, either : my life would be significantly less pleasurable without pizzas and kebab takeaways.
And it’s not like Muslim immigrants have the intention of selling us Western natives smallpox Persian rugs, so I think Canada’s safe on the genocide & conquest front. When the Muslim community manages to pass a bill requiring everyone to wear a veil, come back to me.
Fair point and fair cop, guv.
Ah, a matter of choice. So, if I don’t want to talk to woman wearing a mask in a class do I have to? What if everyone said they wouldn’t talk to her unless she took off the mask? I think it would be better if no one talked to her to ensure that she remains as anonymous as she wants to be. Wouldn’t want to take a chance that some male relative getting pissed if her mask slipped at the wrong moment, would we?
No, you shouldn’t have to. It might affect your mark if talking to your project partner’s part of the course, but I wasn’t forced to make friends with everyone I went to school with. If someone wants to be intolerant and ignorant, they have a right to be intolerant and ignorant.
So, if I’m wearing my SS uniform and the jewish guy won’t talk to me, then he is the intolerant and ignorant one?
By the time they do that, though, it’ll be too late.
What do you think a reasonable person would think?