Salman Rushdie on the ‘Today’ programme on Tuesday. The subject is a collaborative exhibition with Anish Kapoor, based on Scheherezade. Rushdie points out that people forget or don’t realize how murderous the sultan is – he doesn’t point out, but could have, that the reason the sultan murders all those very young women after he’s had sex with them is so that no one else will have sex with them. He gets a new virgin every night, and she is killed in the morning. The subject has echoes of recent discussions, and the reporter asks them about Jack Straw. Kapoor says it’s a matter of respect, and Rushdie asks to disagree. Then he proceeds to do so as thoroughly as possible. So I transcribed it.
“But speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there’s not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of the veil, and I think the battle against the wearing of the veil has been a long and continuing battle against the limitation of women, so in that sense I’m completely on his side. He wasn’t doing anything compulsory, he was expressing an important opinion, which is that veils suck, which they do. You see one of the things that’s interesting about the story around which this work is based is that it is precisely about a woman taking into her hands the matter of her life and taking power back from an extremely powerful and bloody ruler, and I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.”
Damn right. You rock, Salman. And veils suck.
Comments
15 responses to “Rushdie on Veil-wearing”
And here’s another grass fire just itching to join the big conflagration: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-10-cabbies-culture_x.htm
What precisely do veils suck?
Ass.
The Minnesota-cab-drivers thing was reported on Pharyngula, some time back.
And, yes, covering up the face, for dominance resons (Which is all it is) is not acceptable.
How long before shopkeepers and teachers start refusing to “serve” these people, until or unless they uncover. (But not in the fashion of lecolonelchabert, I hasten to add ….)
Tingey’s comment set off a train of thought that culminated in a memory from mid-90s Israel, somewhat similar to the creeping pig-imagery ban one sometimes reads about (especially in England, I think): after “Jurassic Park” came out, there were dinosaurs everywhere, including on the containers of one brand of yoghurt. The ultra-orthodox threatened a boycott of the maker’s products and the yoghurt became dinosaur-free faster than you could say “How dare you do anything that might be interpreted as contesting my Old Testament literalism?” (That’s not literally true, either; it took a few days.)
Sorry Stewart,
I’m probably being a bit slow here, but why exactly did they object to dinosaurs?
Creationist literalism. If they’re not in Genesis, they didn’t exist, so they can’t be on yoghurt containers. Or, to put it another way, dinosaurs are secular and therefore forbidden.
Alright, not that I feared I’d been hallucinating or anything, but I went to check to see if anyone else remembered this story and found a reference here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20031103/lazare/5
The specific bit is phrased thus: “… the Israeli dairy company that discontinued a line of children’s yogurts because ultra-Orthodox parents might have trouble explaining how the cartoon dinosaurs on the cover squared with a biblical tale of creation that supposedly occurred just 6,000 years ago.”
I guess there are some things one really can’t make up (unlike religion, which one can and always has).
There was a commentator last night on a News 24 slot on the Jack Straw item. She we clearly of Asian background, with her beautiful sari and long black hair, and was quite nastily dismissive of Straw and Rushdie, and saying how they were too many men chipping in noisily on the issue, meaning Straw and Rushdie. No one deemed it politically correct to point out that not too many females from the MCB etc had been forthcoming either…
A couple more places the incident is mentioned. I won’t waste more space on quotes but you can find the right bit on the pages by finding “dinosaurs.”
searchinghttp://calivalleygirl.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_calivalleygirl_archive.html
http://www.torahaura.com/Bible/Learn_Torah_With/LTW_5761/LTW_5761_Bereshit/ltw_5761_bereshit.html
>There was a commentator last night on a News 24 slot on the Jack Straw item. She we clearly of Asian background… and was quite nastily dismissive of Straw and Rushdie, and saying how they were too many men chipping in noisily on the issue, meaning Straw and Rushdie. No one deemed it politically correct to point out that not too many females from the MCB etc had been forthcoming either…< Re the remark by the “commentator”, there’s hardly been a shortage of women expressing their opinions in the public domain, including Labour MPs such Ruth Kelly and the redoubtable Ann Cryer.
That’s quite funny, in a sad way. Too many men chipping in like Straw and Rushdie – never mind all the serried ranks of men chipping in on the other side! Often with car antennas or whips to back them up. The nerve of a man to speak up against ‘the limitation of women’! He should be siding with all the men who are for the limitation of women! The bastard. It’s an outrage.
Yep, Jack the lad has gone a tad towards redeeming himself after he shopped his son to the cops a few years ago. Sometimes a total shit can be right. (I got one of those talking Muslim dolls for my birthday with a string in its back. We never heard what it said – nobody dared pull the cord. Only joking.)
“It’s important to respect personal choices. It is a woman’s right to choose how they dress and not be told by men,” said Ms Collecto.
Just in case the lack of context confused you, that was Ms Collecto criticizing those who would like to “ban” the niqab at Imperial College, not her criticizing the doubtless overwhelmingly female Islamic clergy who dictate the wearing of the niqab in the first place. Oy vey…
Something like “it is every woman’s inalienable right to submit – unconditionally – to the will of anyone who attempts to oppress her. Attempts to deny women this right must be stamped out ruthlessly.” Am I getting warm?