Well, I’m getting slovenly again. I’ve just had breakfast at noon after watching an hour of morning cartoons. It’s all part of the ceremony of enjoying Sunday properly. But now even my brain is on hiatus and now I don’t know what to type. Errrr…maybe some Turkish coffee will help. Turkish delight would be better though. Yum.

Speaking of all things Turkish, all of my Turkish students depress me. Obviously as employees of the foreign office (I teach English to embassy staff) they are the pro-government, secular type, and with me being a flaming, scarfified FUNdu, we have some interesting discussions.

First we start talking about hijab, and then it inevitably moves on to enforced religiousness, Taliban-style, stuff like that. And once we conclude that forced religiousness is a bad thing, I point out that enforced secularism is just as bad or worse (I think it’s worse, but to be polite I give the ‘just as bad’ option as well). Here I’m making an indirect reference to the ban on hijab in public places in Turkey, which they usually catch, and respond with, “Well, there have to be laws, to protect us from terrorism.”

Modesty is a terrorist tendency, I’m sure. It’s important that women be forbidden from covering their heads because otherwise all those scarves might be a fire hazard or something. You never know when all that religious fervor and polyester might ignite. Naturally.

The hijab ban in Turkey is so ludicrously severe that hijab is forbidden in public universities, and so the hijabis have to take their scarves off at the gates and replace them with wigs. Good grief, what does that achieve? The way I see it, banning hijab is more likely to create unhappy sentiment (unhappy sentiment being a precursor to terrorism, no one bombs a government they like) and is therefore more, and not less, likely to cause terrorism. Yes? (losers)

Anyway. At least their coffee’s still good.

posted by Abez @ 9/21/2003 12:20:00 PM