It depends. The neighborhood where the Indian veggie restaurant I mentioned above is located is maybe a couple of miles from my house, and is probably the largest concentration of South Asian businesses for 700 miles around; South Asian families come from all over the Midwest to stock up on groceries, etc. (We took a visiting Indian friend from Dubai there for lunch, and he commented it was the largest concentration he’d seen anywhere but at home or in India.)
So you see tons of families out for a Sunday stroll or doing their grocery shopping. Including lots of middle-aged moms and little old ladies in saris, etc. - not eveningwear. And you see LOTS of ribs, lower backs, and bellies - the bellies usually at least partly covered by the aforementioned dupatta, but still with a fair amount of skin showing.
And yes, Western women’s formal and/or evening wear shows more skin in some places than I, at least, am comfortable with; for one thing, practically all formal dresses (and about 99% of wedding dresses) these days seem to be either strapless or dowdy as hell. I am a curvy person and need more infrastructure than a strapless dress will allow for, but I’m not ready for a Mother of the Bride dress just yet - which is why I ended up having my wedding dress custom-made. Next time I need to dress up, I might just buy another sari and wear the damn thing as-is!
Yes, my grandmother might wear a short skirt (or at least she did before the knee replacement surgery; now she’s self-conscious about the scars). My mom wears shorts and Birkenstocks and tank tops all the time. But neither would never wear anything that showed her ribs while out grocery shopping. Conversely, I bet the average Mom-aged first-generation Indian lady would not be caught dead on Devon Avenue in shorts.
What’s my point? I guess it’s just perpetually interesting to me that what is considered highly indecent in one culture might be seen as the norm in another culture, one which the first culture normally considers to be much more socially conservative.
Did you mean the pallu? (The free end of the sari.) Dupattas are worn over the shalvar qamiz, a garment which invariably covers up the tummy, and the dupatta is draped over the shoulders and bosom, not lower.
I’m definitely with you on that. Interesting, and occasionally amusing in this world where all different cultures are jumbled together in the same space at the same time, watching people work themselves into a tizzy over these sartorial discrepancies across cultures, when just a small amount of “clue” about the concept of cultural relativism is all that’s lacking.
That isn’t what Johanna implied at all. She said that there was no place (other than these particular exceptions) where women couldn’t go around with their heads uncovered. She didn’t say that non-Muslim women weren’t obliged to follow any Muslim mores at all while visiting Muslim countries.
I said what was quoted above in answer to the question would foreign women visitors be “harassed” or “stoned” if they removed a headscarf. That just does not happen, and I stand by what I said. I’m at a loss as to what Magiver’s point could be.
Like Kyla said, there are ways that Saudi and Iran get foreign visitors to comply with the dress codes. It isn’t just anything goes, of course. But these do not include “harassing” let alone “stoning.” It was especially the word “stoning” that bothered me. I just hope the OP said that out of hyperbole and never seriously imagined that it would actually happen.
Saudi especially, while they give atrociously harsh treatment to Muslims and to their guest workers from the global South, tend to be very solicitous of white, Anglo people. Instead of stoning, any incident involving a non-Muslim American or British national would be handled with kid gloves and hushed up as much as possible.
I heard an anecdote about an American who worked in Saudi for the usual high salary+zero income tax. Then this American converted to Islam. When his bosses found out he was now a Muslim, it was like he’d lowered himself to their level, and they cut his pay in half. Full pay was reinstated only when the American embassy got involved. This story sounds entirely plausible to me, given the Saudi attitude that other Muslims are their slaves all the while they’re very deferential toward white Anglo/Americans. The very last thing the Saudi official mentality would ever want to do would be to piss off their white masters. They do minimize culture clashes by keeping American personnel in their own compounds segregated away from Muslims, where YES the women are free to drive around in tank tops or whatever, as long as they stay in their walled-off white-collar ghetto.
I recently did a big-ass research project on human trafficking in the Philippines. Because there are so many Filipino overseas workers (roughly 10% of the country’s population), we looked a lot at labor trafficking. Saudi Arabia came up a lot. A lot of the domestic workers in Saudi are Muslim Filipinas from Mindanao and you hear a lot of stories (by its nature, human trafficking research tends to focus on anecdotes, since hard numbers are extremely difficult to come by) about how surprised they are they were treated so abominably by fellow Muslims.
Tangentially related, so many Filipino workers got arrested by the Saudi morality police - the large majority for doing things that would be perfectly acceptable in a sane country, like wearing a crucifix necklace in public - that Gloria Macapagal Arroyo went to Saudi Arabia in person to ask the king to show leniency and release them. He graciously agreed to do so. :rolleyes:
That isn’t what Johanna implied at all. She said that there was no place (other than these particular exceptions) where women couldn’t go around with their heads uncovered. She didn’t say that non-Muslim women weren’t obliged to follow any Muslim mores at all while visiting Muslim countries.