BS. I am not defending culture. But you are inserting narrative. Exactly the way these 'men' are.

The reality is that it is not 'Muslim men forcing women to cover up.' It is society forcing women to cover up. Culture. The reality is that culture is almost always coercive & has many irrational elements. Dress codes particularly so. The fact that they base it on supposed hard facts is irrelevant. People always think they have hard facts backing up their irrational convictions. Covering women is a fact of virtually all societies. Including the US or wherever you're from.

As I said in the original. I do not agree with the conventions of Saudi. I don't like them. There are many cases of women being disadvantaged to the point where they have no hope of a satisfying life. That needs to be opposed. But when opposing there is a danger of considering all opposition equal. Taking anecdotes like yours as seriously indicative of any liberal Muslim country is like getting behind Khomeini because you oppose the Shah State.

Blurry is all BS, but there is another obvious reason : anybody who really travels knows that TV is ubiquitous in the Arab world, and they mainly watch Western programs. Moreover, there are a lot more occidentalized anchor women on Arab TV (like Aljazeera) than you might think, who don't wear anything at all. Tradition is not to be confused with dumb ignorance.

Your right. On the message as a whole. Middles Eastern countries are not generally very culturally isolated.

I call BS too. I've been to the Middle East several times. Uhm, "Women can swim!?" is about like one of those stories Europeans like to tell about Americans not knowing if Europeans have refrigerators. I'm also assuming you're referring to the Middle East from the tone, but let's not forget that the countries with the largest Muslim populations are Indonesia and the countries of the Indian subcontinent.

The views of women within various Islamic cultures varies widely and in some cases are quite disturbing, but the four countries with the largest Muslim populations (Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh) have all had female presidents / prime ministers. There are other odd data points like women's suffrage having reached Iran a decade before Switzerland (1963 vs. 1973).

Nothing is as dangerous as half truths so let's look at what really happened as far your example of female leadership in Muslim countries.

Yes, at first glance 3 of the 4 countries in your example (Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh) have "elected" a female as president/prime minister. However, without exception these women were the daughters or widows of the previous heads of state. Their appointments represent the feudal tradition of inheriting power by family relation rather than popular vote as you are implying.

The 4th country, India, is an even worse example. Not only muslims are a minority in India (a quick lookup tells me between 15% and 20%), prior to the elections the muslim-indian leadership demanded that the female candidate be disqualified because she made some sort of a statement against veils.

Given that the US has frequently, and recently, elected children of previous presidents, and that the only serious contender for a female president was the wife of a former one, I think it hardly fair to discount other countries elected leaders on those grounds alone.

As for feudal traditions, all of those countries had been European colonies for about a century prior to organizing under their current systems. In the case of Indonesia, their first female president began 34 years after her father left office and after three other presidents were in office. She then lost the elections after three years in office. That hardly sounds "feudal".

And yes, Muslims are a minority in India. I assumed anyone reading this thread was aware of that.

My point is this: if these countries are one way or another electing female leadership, then it indicates that the issue of the views on women in those societies is more multidimensional than you're painting it. At the very least it's not consistent across the range from Western Africa to Eastern Asia. The problems are real, but they're best addressed when approached through examining the situations in their complexity, rather than trying to reduce them to a single wacky-sane spectrum.

This thread typifies why I think politics should be kept off of HN. It just degenerates into this sort of stuff where everyone's regurgitating what they already believe and on the whole the net amount of respect for one another goes down.

"We can't criticize them b/c we do something loosely similar" is a bad argument to make. Really, we should criticize both cultures.

Also, topics that are traditionally hard to discuss online should be discussed more here. It is mostly on HN where I've seen people make an effort to understand both sides.

I do not think this thread is a good example.

You get all kinds. The united states is a vary technologically advanced mostly christian society. Yet, if you look at the Anabaptist Christian denomination and think that's how most Americans live your kidding yourself. We might call them Amish, but the 227,000 Anabaptist Christian's hold fairly mainstream beliefs for the most part are are a fairly large slice of the American experience.

Talking about Islamic culture while ignoring the huge divide in our own country is missing something. We have our splinter groups and so do they. Once you start talking about 100+ million people you will get poets and serial killers, teachers, and racists. But we can lump them into one group and say they are good, or evil, or whatever because they are far away and we just don't know the true story.

PS: Think about a Gay man living in the deep south in 1950 now how well do you need to know them to have any idea how far the public / private divide runs with them. Now move that into a society where denouncing your faith can get you killed.

Your missing the main point.

The comment being responded to is BS. 'Even modorate muslims actually believe that womean sink.' That's pure BS. You might encounter it in end cases, isolated, uneducated, poor or ultra-religious sectors but on the whole it's BS.

It is just like Europeans (& others) citing Americans that think the world is flat or don't notice when you swap Russia & N. Korea on a map. "Even American geologists think the world is 5000 years old."

All these upmods haven't been delivered because the level of insight or quality of argument. It's because attacks of this kind are easy wins in 2009. It was a (probably made-up) anecdote: Even moderate muslims thinking that woman can't swim.

Just like I've said multiple times already, culture isn't sacred. Just because it's cultural doesn't mean something should be tolerated. But giving infinite rope to any 'muslim women are oppressed' line is garbage. All up, dress codes are down the list of worries.

Now that's just plain rude. What makes you say that I made up my story? If you feel that your position is strong, why do you need to attack me personally? Talk about quality of the argument...

I think your anecdote is made up, embellished or an end case not representative at all of whatever moderate Muslim country you refer to.

Since you presented this 'example,' as an example I mentioned the above. It was not a criticism of you but a criticism of the fact that this example is not being treated as such. To me that is strong indication of an unhealthy bias here.

[anecdote]

Just for you: in 1992, in Boise, Idaho, I was asked (by a 16 year old boy, a local) whether I knew what a TV remote control is, and he then proceeded to explain to me as well the miracle of video recording. I was 14 at the time.

I am western European.

[/anecdote]

That's a pretty different case though since (a) you were kids, and (b) those were two things that had hit mass market success only about a decade before.