Assume she also uses a swim cap - OK or not?
I’ll leave an authoritative answer to those who would know first-hand, but my guess is (if she is really following the religious guidance) no freaking way – it’s not just about skin per se showing:
This article – http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/fashion/05MUSLIM.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=muslim%20fashion&st=cse&scp=1 – also places probably equal weight on “not revealing curves” as on “not showing skin.”
This site sells swimwear designed for Muslim women. I doubt it would be useful on an Olympic level, though.
It all depends on what rules her country’s Olympics committee has in place. Egypt has sent a female swimmer to the Olympics since at least 1992.
Pakistan is sending a female swimmer this year.
Iran, on the other hand, is very strict about what its female athletes can wear to compete, making it very hard for any women to compete in the Olympics.
Saudi Arabia doesn’t even send women, and I’m not sure why the IOC keeps letting them play at all.
Aren’t they limited to Archery and Shooting?
So wearing a veil is not a universal requirement? Asked seriously.
I once saw a group of Muslim men and women at a water park in southern California. The men had regular swim shorts on. But the women were wearing these burka type things that were made of swimming suit material. The burka-suits were all in bright solid colors (orange, purple, etc) and consisted of long bell bottom swim pants and a long (just below the knees) swim tops with long sleeves. They also had some sock like things covering their feet. The adult women wore a head piece of the same material that covered their entire head but had an oval hole so they can see. The younger girls had a similar thing covering their head, but their whole face was exposed. The thing I found most surprising was the bright colors. I’ve been to Muslim countries and they all wore either black or white.
I think if they were competing in the Olympics, this burka-suit would really slow them down, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other reasons that prohibit Muslim women from competing.
I’ve known plenty of Muslim women who never wore face or head coverings.
There is no universal requirement – interpretations of what the relevant passages in the Koran etc. mean *exactly *vary widely and are subject to longstanding local custom. Many otherwise “observant” Muslims seem to push the limits of what’s acceptable.
See “How to Hijab” for some discussion.
It’s interesting to note that the Koran recommends modesty in dress for men as well as for women.
No not at all - the actual Qur’anic proscriptions on female dress go as far as saying they should cover their arms and breasts, it’s not even required by the Qur’an for them to cover their hair (the Qur’an says women should dress modestly and the Hadith, the sayings of the prophet, fleshes this out a bit more). The amount a woman chooses/is forced to cover up is pretty much entirely cultural.
The veil is actually an extrapolation of the veil that Mohammed had in his home to separate his wives from visitors coming to his house. Anti-veil muslims take the position that the veil was simply there for their privacy and should be by choice. It’s not just westerners who feel that the logic used to claim that if a man sees an exposed woman and desires her that it’s her fault is bullshit.
In the last 5 years at the school where I teach we’ve had a Muslim Cheerleading captain and a Muslim Dance team captain (if anyone doesn’t know, both those roles involve wearing very little and moving very energetically and sometimes suggestively in front of crowds). Both were girls I’d consider fairly devout: they both fasted for Ramadan, for one thing, in a very low key way–I only knew because I asked.
Neither dated (in fact, the one girl wasn’t allowed any out of school contact with boys, period. No hanging out in mixed groups, nothing), and both took chastity very seriously. But they didn’t see any contradiction in their school activities, and who am I to say otherwise?
Now, both these girls were from Eastern Europe (Albania and Bosnia). But they’d be quick to correct you if you suggested that meant they weren’t “real” Muslims.
Thanks for the info about the veils; I had thought the wearing of veils was a given—I didn’t know it was optional.
Thanks again.
I see headcoverings more than veils. There seems to be extensive debate on both.
“Optional vs. given” is probably not the best way to break this down. AFAICT from browsing the literature, if you follow certain schools or Islamic doctrine that have developed down the years, and if you’re in a particular geographic/ethnic area, and if you want to be viewed as orthodox, then there’s not much that’s optional about the hijab, or burkha, or various other accoutrements. If you’re an upper middle class Persian in 1978, probably just about everything is optional.
It does seem that most of the very specific prohibitions and injunctions come from the hadith. Of course, that’s often the way things shake out, especially in religions without a centralized episcopacy (no Muslim Pope around to weigh in with the last word on proper apparel). More liberal/secular types would likely tend to feel that stuff from the hadith (or Talmud, for that matter) was less crucial or authoritative than from the Scriptures themselves. Conservative/religious types would disagree.
Could they compete if it were a single-sex competition not open to the public and not televised? With female officials?
The word “Islam” covers a lot of ground and it is practiced differently in different cultures. Islam also has no central religious authority, so people are “allowed” to do pretty much anything based on what they and the religious advisers they are closest to believe. The core tenets of Islam say nothing about dress. You have as much variety of practice as you find in Christianity (compare a devout Mormon to a lapsed Catholic). Only in a handful of theocratic states is dress actually regulated. That said, I think a higher percentage of Muslims choose to practice modest dress.
Where I lived in Cameroon, Muslim girls would even participate in the traditional dances, which basically ends up being dancing in your underwear. They believed in being generally modest, but had no problem dressing according to the activity they were doing.
So yeah, I imagine plenty of Muslim women swim in regular swimsuits. I imagine some believe it is better to wear a specifically Muslim one. And others don’t like women swimming at all.
Found this on the web:
It looks like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Brunei are among the last holdouts who won’t send female athletes to the Olympics. It appears to violate the Olympics charter, so I don’t know why the IOC lets them play. I guess they have their reasons.
These suits sound very similar to the ones I linked to above.
Just to show how far it can go on the other side of the coin, in Turkey, a majority Muslim country with a secular constitution, the government recently got in trouble for wanting to allow women students at Turkish universities to cover their hair. Not requiring it, just allowing it as an option. Currently, it’s forbidden, and a woman student who covers her hair during class time can be expelled.
They do, so they can. I just saw some ladies from countries such as Azerbaidzhan, Libya and the Lebanon compete - at least one of them is bound to be Islamic.