False: Women must wear traditional garments. Men don’t have to.

One thing I realized that we didn’t focus on in our project was the fact that men and women wear similar garments. The men wear the long white ropes and head coverings. The reason I bring this up is because I was made aware of another misperception people have here in the US about the Middle East. It was over dinner and I was discussing with friends what I had learned about Islamic culture while visiting Dubai. My friend says to me that her issue and reason why she has a problem with the women wearing the traditional garments is because the men do not have to do the same. When I realized that this was her impression, I quickly stated that this wasn’t the case. I said that both genders wear similar garments, they just happen to be different colors and it really all depends upon the place and the person. I think this issue is at the core of the idea that all muslim women in the Middle East are oppressed by the men. It seems so obvious now that people might think that the men didn’t have to do the same. Now that I am aware of it, I will be able to make a strong argument against this false impression.

Arab Women

Arab women are considered as the support beam of the society. They hold a special position in the Arab world, where their sayings are respected and taken in consideration. Arab women are allowed to be educated, have an opinion,  work, and  choose whether to  marry or not.  So this means that the Arab women are not  forced to do anything or silenced in any way.

Public vs Private

In America, fashion and clothing are used to express one’s unique personality. At MICA this is especially evident among some students, each struggling to out do one another to look like an “artist”. Unfortunately we sometimes (perhaps often) judge one another based upon this surface shallow perception. Americans recognize this fault and many try to swim against this tide of consumerism, but the current is strong and our fight is constant. It wasn’t until I came to the UAE that I realized how public our bodies have become. Over time the amount of clothing considered acceptable for American women has reduced. Today women can wear short shorts and tight shirts or a long shirt and leggings that leave barely anything hidden. A tiny amount of fabric compared to the long dresses and multiple under layers women wore a few decades before. We wear things that our ancestors would never have been able to conceive. I think America could stand to learn from Middle Eastern culture. The large percentage of American people with eating disorders and low self confidence could be directly related to how we see our bodies as public domain. Believing this enables us to make comparisons and judgments about one another and to measure our self worth upon appearances rather than the whole person. 

So Jazarish!

Through our discussions of our logo and concept, language is brought up quite often. Communication is the fundamental way humans interact with each other; the English language dispels the “Babel” story because it is used world wide. For those of us that speak English as a first language, we have a responsibility to show interest in the cultures we interact with by participating in their cultures as well, because other cultures are doing so much to learn about us; this is a way to dispel many of the stereotypes about Americans that depict us a culturally ignorant. 

Our group has come up with it’s own word for cool, Jazar. In Arabic there is no slang but in English slang is the fundamental way we categorize each other. Where Middle Eastern people pay attention to lilts in vowels or emphasis in hard consonants to determine where a person is from, English people pay attention to the flares in word usage to do the same thing.

Public Privacy

America thrives on it’s message of freedom, we flaunt it with the open-ness of our bodies and inhibitions, but our beliefs are what is kept more private. For muslims, privacy is found by keeping the body sacred and closed from those that are not the closest to you, and their beliefs are what keep them hidden. It is a duality that has created years of misunderstanding. Perhaps with many americans they look at the naqab or burka and recall others that have also felt the necessity to shield their face such as bandits or executioners and consider the muslim cover to be an act of sinister motives rather than a religious identity. I was struck by how so much of islam is designed to keep muslims focused on prayer. I was impressed with how honestly it admitted to the weakness of people are provided a shield so that they could be closer to Allah. When America was first created it was so the settlers could escape religious prosecution and set out to create a country where all people would be free to believe in whatever they chose to. So many scores later, flaunting your religious beliefs is it’s own taboo in America and is used as a label on your character rather than your faith. Through this project it is interesting how our cultures meet from the back.