Anyway. Fantastic exchange this morning:
"Did you see the article about the Jewish women wearing burkas?"
"That's horrible!...It threatens my smug sense of cultural superiority."
Indeed, a few Jewish women have adopted the burka and there are several articles available online about it, such as this one at Lilith: http://www.lilith.org/blog/2008/01/orthodox-jewish-women-wear-burkas-and-their-men-dont-like-it/ I don't like the attitude of some articles that the women must be stopped. While I agree the jewburka wearers are odd and the movement's leader may be an unpleasant person, people should be free to wear whatever they damn well please when they walk down the street.
I am reading Morag Murray's My Khyber Marriage, which a friend from the blogosphere gave me upon our real-life meeting, and the author describes traveling to Afghanistan just after World War I to live with her husband, a chieftan's son she'd met whilst he was at university in Scotland. Morag casually mentions her burka at several points but it is always a casual aside, as when she mentions moving aside the niqab part to eat. But eighty pages into the book she has yet to properly comment on, let alone judge, the garment. I am intrigued that something that seems so radically foreign to me, living - as she did - in the UK, should be adopted so silently and with seeming ease.
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