Posted on 11/06/2003 8:27:09 AM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
Everything I know about diversity, I learned from Captain Kirk. Well, that's not quite true. There's also Captain Picard. My point is that I've always taken what might be called the Star Trek approach to multiculturalism. It says in a nutshell that you should, whenever possible, avoid judging a foreign culture by the standards of your own. Just because a guy has blue skin and eats worms through the tentacle in his forehead doesn't make him a bad person. Words to live by, I've always thought. So you'll understand my hesitancy in discussing Vida Samadzai and her little red bikini. She is, for those who don't know, a gorgeous 25-year-old Afghan woman who recently competed at the Miss Earth pageant in Manila wearing the aforementioned swimwear. Draped across her chest: a sash that said Afghanistan. NONE TOO HAPPY That nation, just two years removed from Taliban tyranny, is none too happy to be represented by a half-naked woman. Samadzai, a college student who lives in the United States, has been sharply criticized by both men and women in her native land. ''Cheap,'' ''lascivious'' and ''un-Islamic'' are among the choicer epithets that have been used. Some have demanded that her citizenship be revoked. Afghan culture, you will recall, holds women to a dress code of utmost modesty. The nation's religious customs dictate that a woman be covered from head to heels, rendered anonymous by the flowing fabric of her burqa, lest she incite unbridled lust in some innocent man. It seems strange to me, but my instinct is to keep my big American nose out of it, to remember that it's their culture, not mine. And if it were just a burqa, maybe I could. If it were just a question of modesty, I might bite my tongue. Problem is, it's more. Even before the Taliban came to power in 1996, Afghanistan was not exactly a paradise of women's rights. But women were at least integrated into the workaday life of the nation. They taught school, they served as doctors, they even worked in government. All of which came to a crushing stop in the five brutal years of Taliban rule. It wasn't just that women were banished to the burqa, effectively rendered invisible on the streets of Afghan cities. It was that they were in large part banished from those same streets, forbidden to leave their homes unless accompanied by a male relative. They were, with rare exceptions, not allowed to work. Girls above the age of 8 were barred from going to school. Makeup was against the law. And all of it was enforced with brutal chastisements. A woman found to be wearing fingernail polish beneath her burqa might have her fingertips cut off. A woman caught not wearing her burqa might be raped as punishment. A woman waiting at a hospital for treatment of a severe asthma attack is said to have torn her robes off, trying to get some air. For which she received 40 lashes with a whip. So the issue here is not just a woman's modesty, but her subjugation. THE DEVIL'S WORK And Samadzai's bikini is not just a fashion statement, but a freedom statement -- odd as that will seem to old-line feminists to whom beauty pageants have always been the devil's work. She is, in her small way, a Chinese man facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square, a German citizen jumping atop the rubble of the wall in Berlin, Rosa Parks under arrest on a bus in Birmingham. The burqa represented the theft of identity. It made a woman shapeless, faceless, sexless. In casting it aside, allowing her face and body to be seen, Samadzai reclaims a woman's most basic possession -- herself -- and defends her most basic right. The right to be. Afghans looked at pictures of her in her bikini and saw something hateful. I saw something hopeful, something self-possessed and free that I could never have seen before. I saw her face.
They always had absolutes. Killing of innocents was wrong, thievery, etc...They didn't judge by appearance or what was eaten. There were quirks to deal with, but there were always lines drawn for the absolutes.
.....and Miss Arruba or whatever( behind her) isn't too bad looking either... :)
IMHO Middle easter women can be some of the most physically attractive women on God's Earth....
And here I thought that Star Trek multiculturalism meant making a sound decision on whether to kill it or have sex with it!
Yes Star Trek respected the values of other "civilizations", but it also followed moral absolutes.
Star Trek=Liberals in Space
That is actually very possible. Afghanistan has not been known for having massive or ever adequate amounts of food in the past 10 years.
As for the " Star Trek approach to multiculturalism" thing. I prefer the "British approach to multiculturalism".
India-"It is our custom to burn widows with their dead husbands"
British-"It is our custom to hang people who burn widows with their dead husbands"
There are some things that are just wrong. The deliberate killing innocents is one of them. No matter what planet you are on.
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