caryoscelus:~#

There are a lot of people who consider it their moral duty to answer “no” to such question, because surely any negative feelings would be a sign of intolerance and islamophobia. And they are right about that, of course (depends on islamophobia definition, to be precise). The argument shouldn’t be about application of these words, but rather: “is it bad?”

“Intolerance” is a word that is often being assumed to have negative connotations, but it shouldn’t be. “Lactose intolerance” might be bad, but not in moral sense, “intolerance to evil” seems to be rather good thing. So instead of blindly thinking “that’s intolerance, intolerance is bad, hence that is bad”, we should inspect each case of intolerance separately.

And as you might’ve guessed, you shouldn’t have a knee-jerk reaction to “islamophobia” either. If someone is blindly hating anything relating to islam, that’s one thing (which i wouldn’t discuss in this post), but if the object of negative emotions is one specific thing, tagging it as islamophobia just to dismiss it makes little sense. So, done with words, lets dig into the source of negative itself.

There are a few aspects to it. Negative reaction towards people hiding themselves, empathy towards being hot, gender-based segregation, the coercion perceivably involved.

Reaction towards hiding and empathy are both pretty natural, but the same can be said about many negative feelings: towards fat and ugly people, people with disabilities, people with strange tastes in clothing or behaviour, etc etc. There is a reason why we tend to not judge people by their appearance, so maybe the same can be said about niqab and such?

Well, not quite. We still have gender-dividing aspect and coercion. Here we come to the central issue. If those women would all be wearing such garments unwillingly, it will be all quite simple. Whoever forces them is “the bad guy” and should be stopped. “Everyone is free to wear what they want”. But.. there is a little problem with such straightforward approach. Some of women may very convincingly claim they are hiding on their own accord. So saying “everyone is free…” would seem to justify their right to wear niqab.

And yet, how can we ever judge whether such self-isolating, androphobic action is voluntary? Does a person who was raised in a culture where that is the only option, have capability to make a different decision? Aren’t their actions predetermined by their culture? Even if that’s true, does that give us any right to treat them badly for that reason? To forbid doing what they feel right, even if without any choice?

No, don’t look at me expectantly like that. I don’t have convincing answers to share with you. But there still is another thing i want to discuss.

The source of this behaviour. The oppression system. The religious culture which creates barriers between people, programs people to live in fear from the early age. Does it have the right to exist? Can we idly watch as millions kids are being conditioned like that, and do nothing about it? Perhaps we should go and ask our governments to put the end to these malicious practices and allow only moderate islam at best? Take kids away from their fundamentalist parents if necessary and educate them, make them understand the evil of oppression?..

In case you haven’t sensed sarcasm in the last few sentences, now’s about the time. Suppose we forbid preaching islam (or christianity for that matter, or perhaps virtually any religion, most of them are built on some oppression), and spread the words of freedom, what’s the difference between our oppression towards religion and theirs towards kids? Ah, that’s right, they’re targeting kids!! That can’t be good, can it? We gotta make sure kids are properly educated and given all the best opportunities! We can’t let them go on a stray path of being oppressed and propagandized. We can’t..

Now i must stop my rambling. Make your conclusions.