You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Will Rogers
When you apply for a job, experts agree that it is absolutely crucial to make a good first impression. You are basically a salesperson hawking a product, and the killer app is you.
Thus, you dress as best as you can and strive to make the best possible first impression.
You and your body language want to say: my smile and the way I present myself show that I am friendly, easy to get along, eager to work, and willing to blend smoothly with your workforce.
Similarly, an asylum seeker is akin to a job applicant saying, “I want to live in your country and share your way of life”.
But a woman wearing a veil, a hijab does not project this kind of message. By wearing a hijab she basically retreats behind a wall and ghettoizes herself and her family.
I wanted to know why some Muslim women elect to wear such a garment in western countries and I found an article in the UK Telegraph describing, “why Muslim women chose to wear the veil”.
Women variously said:
“I was forced to start wearing a hijab at the age of 13 and now find it hard and very uncomfortable to take it off in public.
This I understand. It is a habit and habits are notoriously difficult to break. But to flourish, women have to trample barriers erected by chauvinist men.
“I fear and love God, and He has said that women must cover their hair, so I follow what He tells me, simple as that.
God has nothing to do with this. She never said that women had to cover their hair. Jealous, insecure men decreed this and everything decreed by oppressors should be abolished.
“It honestly liberates me because I get to choose how much of myself I reveal to the public.”
Poppycock! Balderdash! Flapdoodle!
“The only times I wear a burqa – the black robe thing, is when I don’t feel like changing so I just throw it on when going somewhere.”
I find this difficult to believe. When I don’t feel like changing, I go as I am (warts and all) or I stay home. Donning a potato sack is not going to make me feel more comfortable and it will definitely make my interlocutors pretty uneasy.
Living better together is not erecting but toppling walls.
What the world (especially the Muslim world) needs are leaders like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk or Peter the Great who ordered their backward people to cut out the religious crap, and get in line with the rest of the world.
There is nothing more painful than a relapse. After years of steady improvements, the condition of women is jeopardized anew by retrograde populist zealots like Recep Erdogan or somebody closer to home.
A tradition is like plumbing. It needs to be regularly overhauled.
When in Rome… for crying out loud, eat spaghetti!
Alain