WRT: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/45618
Dear Mehul Kamdar,
What you are strongly objecting to in your piece on the relationship between Canadian liberal politicians and the tragic death of Aqsa Pervez is Cultural Relativism, a tool cunningly and most conveniently deployed by religious fundamentalists all over the world. It is a difficult enough concept to explain in all its manifestations to well-meaning educated people, let alone to those who are gloating in its practice. Even at a United Nations sponsored Women's rights conference, where I presented my paper on the dirty politics of hijabization of women in the Muslim world, I have had to clarify conflicting interests between 'religious freedom' and 'cultural diversity' issues.
I will evoke your memory of the opposite case of another teenager, a 15-yr old Bangladeshi schoolgirl in Luton, U. K. This girl refused to wear the school uniform (which included a shalwar-kamiz version common in BD) and insisted on weraring a weird, totally un-Bengali, nosebridge-to-toe black 'Nikab' that she claimed was her religious duty to wear. The school did not comply, so she pressed an expensive lawsuit against the school authority with full financial backing from Hijb-ut-Tahrir. There was a lot of talk of 'multiculturism' in the media brouhaha. She won her case in 2005. Guess who the Queen's Counsel was pleading her case? None other than Cheryl Blair, the then Prime Minister's wife!
There are a few famous Cultural Relativists, villains in my book, whom the sophisticated ne-razakars of BD admire. Md. Mahathir of Malaysia is one of them. That vainglorious charlatan single-handedly ruined the wonderfully pluralistic cultural fabric of Malaysia by brutally Islamizing it. Forty years ago one would rarely catch a glimpse of a woman wearing a burka in the streets of Kuala Lumpur. Today I hardly meet a woman from Malaysia without a tight hijab around her face.
These are complex issues that are getting more complicated everyday as the world we live in keeps changing its vectors of values and their measuring yardsticks. We need to ponder and think a little more deeply than we are accustomed to.
More later.
Sincerely
Farida Majid
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