Good old 5 Pillars.
The full image:
Right. A woman who wears the full burqa is of course going to be hanging out with that nice lesbian next door and going to a party with all the nice everybody welcome here people the nice lesbian next door is friends with. They have everything in common, they just happen to have different tastes in fashion.
they just happen to have different tastes in fashion.
Probably it’s her husband’s taste in fashion. 20 or so years ago my wife was the organizer of presentations made by PhD students to say who they were and what their research consisted of. There was one young woman from North Africa who, in her first year, wore normal clothes, interacted with other members of the laboratory on a relaxed basis, and had no objection to having her photo taken by a man (me) for including in the announcement of her presentation. However, her husband wasn’t with her in her first year. When he arrived, in her second year, she started wearing a veil (not a full burqa) and having lunch in the laboratory with her husband and his Muslim friends. She stopped interacting with anyone else. No one can tell me that these were her choices.
I lean towards a different interpretation: the two women are a lesbian couple, and so the message truly supports freedom. After all, she is carrying the baby, and readers of Ladybird books aren’t likely to know the hostility of the Muslim world towards homosexuality. I think it really is as innocuous as it advertises, or close enough that I am not bothered by this picture.
Ugh, Athel, that’s so sad. One year of normal life and then back to prison.
I believe it was Kate Smurthwaite who once told the following anecdote that stuck with me (from memory). She was teaching English to adult immigrants, and one of her students appeared (judging by her clothes) to be a very pious Muslim woman. One time Kate needed an example of how to use the word “never”, so she said “I never go to church”. The woman held up her hand, and Kate expected her to say something like “Aren’t you afraid of going to Hell?” Instead the question was “Don’t your parents get angry?”. “No”, Kate replied,”They also never go to church”. The answer: “Then you are free”. It still gives me goosebumps whenever I think about it.
Kate is like that. She did a talk at the Dublin atheist conference I went to that raised the roof.
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