It’s given the Right Livelihood Award to Sima Samar, an Afghan, and a high-profile opponent of the burqa.
Swedish-German philatelist Jakob von Uexkull founded the donor-funded prize in 1980 after the Nobel Foundation behind the Nobel Prizes refused to create awards honouring efforts in the fields of the environment and international development.
For this reason, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation oftens calls its distinction the “alternative Nobel prize.”
Through laws like the one in France, and through high-profile awards like this one, the woman- (and child-) smothering burqa gradually assumes its place as an artifact of the past.
Senior clerics in Iran’s theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women, including declining birth and marriage rates.
[A University of Southampton student] was bewildered when she… flicked through [a university] publication [with her photo in it] and discovered her arms and legs had been covered up using computer software to make the image less revealing.
[The change was] made in deference to conservative cultural sensitivities of prospective students from abroad.
International pupils are a lucrative market for universities, particularly as the number of UK applicants has declined following the recent increase in top-up fees.
The institutions have an added incentive to recruit pupils from abroad as they pay 50 per cent more in fees than those from the UK.
It’s interesting to watch the various evolving photographic technologies here. The choice seems to be between
Erasure (as in Hillary Clinton’s removal from the famous Osama raid photo); and its opposite,
Sheeting (as in draping various amounts of material over pictures of women).
Of course the real solution is right in front of our noses, and it’s practiced by men all over the world. Never let them out of the house.
… writes a pithy and precise defense of her country’s burqa ban.
Debate about the legality and morality of allowing men to put their wives and children in bags will continue, but the direction of things is now pretty clear, as more and more municipalities and countries enact a ban.
Finally, a clear statement from the University of Virginia Board of Visitors. Heady stuff.
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UD thanks Daniel.
Handing the name of your university’s sports venues over to the local biotech, banking, or fried chicken establishment in exchange for money – making your university one humongous advertising vector – is, well, pathetic, but so what. There’s only so much whining we’re going to do here about the corporatization of the university. And after all this is a capitalist culture, and the university reflects that culture, blah blah.
To be sure, things get a little dicier when you’re stuck with the Kenneth Lay Chair in Economics, or even the Lloyd Blankfein Professor of History.
The University of Miami had the Nevin Shapiro Student Athlete Lounge, etc. Many universities have dealt (some of them, like Seton Hall, repeatedly) with the embarrassment of questionable names on rooms, buildings and arenas, on academic chairs, on programs, on honorary degrees, on whatever.
But it’s one thing to deal with the consequences of honoring over-zealous capitalists; it’s another to honor authoritarian regimes whose fundamental political identity is outrageously at odds with the values of American universities.
A National Review writer notes that Harvard has a Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations:
The Sultan of Oman shackles his nation’s media with one of the most restrictive press laws in the Arab world, and Freedom House rates the sultanate, on a scale of 1 (freest) to 7 (least free), a 5.5, making it “unfree.”
Then there’s the Saudis:
In 2005, Saudi prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz gave $20 million to both Harvard University and Georgetown University to establish centers for Islamic studies. At Georgetown, the prince’s gift funds the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the university’s vaunted School of Foreign Service. Saudi Arabia may be an American ally in the Middle East, but it is also one of the most repressive nations in the world. Leaving aside Saudi Arabia’s gross violations of the rights of all its citizens, the royal family doesn’t appear to have any more than an academic interest in “Muslim-Christian understanding”: The kingdom lacks even one Christian church.
The atrium of American University’s School of International Studies is named after the crown prince of Bahrain, another scandalously repressive country.
So I guess the point the NRO guy is making is that it’s hypocritical at best and a betrayal of fundamental values at worst when a university takes immense cash from authoritarian regimes and in exchange glorifies the names of those regimes. (Some British universities were, most recently, willing to do this with Gaddafi’s Libya.) The basic deal involves the university using its clean reputation to help cleanse not very sweet-smelling political units. And of course the deal can evolve into the university gradually incorporating nice thoughts about these units into their curricula; or let’s say overlooking some less than pleasant aspects of those regimes (Women in Saudi Arabia? You say there are women in Saudi Arabia? I didn’t see any when I was there…).
Students at Syria’s Aleppo University are being killed for protesting against the government.
France’s socialist presidential candidate says that, if elected, he won’t seek to overturn a law banning face-covering Muslim veils enacted by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservatives.
From an interview with Brishkay Ahmed, who made the documentary film Story of Burqa: Case of a Confused Afghan.
“The older people my father’s age or the experts I interviewed, oh my God, they’re dying to get rid of this cloth. Over and over they make that statement.”
Ahmed supports women’s choice to dress modestly and wear the hijab to cover their hair, but she believes the burqa should be banned everywhere.
“I have never met a woman in Afghanistan who has said she has worn the burqa because she likes it – never,” Ahmed said. “The fear associated with it is why it’s still hanging in the closet because [women] have been killed for not wearing it… The entire world needs to ban the burqa and I’m not scared about saying this and there is one reason: I’m a filmmaker and I’m not supposed to be politically correct. It’s not my job,” Ahmed said.
The moving memorial ceremony for Christopher Hitchens reminds me to link to his defense of burqa bans.
“It’s like saying, ‘I don’t like Pollock because he splattered paint,’” said Nina Rappaport, chairwoman of Docomomo-New York/Tri-State, an organization that promotes the preservation of Modernist architecture. “Does that mean we shouldn’t put it in a museum? No, it means we teach people about these things.”
Actually, disliking a local Brutalist building and wanting it demolished – see this New York Times article about townspeople in upstate New York interested in getting rid of a Paul Rudolph thing – is nothing like that. When you’re in the mood, you visit a Pollack painting in a museum. You don’t live or work in a Pollack painting. You don’t look at it every day whether you want to or not.
You don’t get to say I’m thrilled to have a job working for the city of Boston, but I’m going to work in a building I prefer.
It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to work for the FBI, but I’ll be moving into a space in the Old Post Office, thanks.
No, people feel strongly about architecture because it’s ubiquitous, inescapable, having profound quotidian impact.
Nina Rappaport can teach ’til she’s blue in the facade, but it turns out that no one likes to be brutalized.
You become a paranoid police state.
Chicago State University – graduation rate barely above ten percent – has just issued an email to its faculty:
In an email sent March 22 to faculty and staff, Sabrina Land, the university’s director of marketing and communications, wrote that all communications must be “strategically deployed” in a way that “safeguards the reputation, work product and ultimately, the students, of CSU.”
The policy applies to media interviews, opinion pieces, newsletters, social media and other types of communications, stating that they must be approved by the university’s division of public relations. “All disclosures to the media will be communicated by an authorized CSU media relations officer or designate,” the policy says.
Failure to follow the rules “will be treated as serious and will result in disciplinary action, possible termination and could give rise to civil and/or criminal liability on the part of the employee.”
Shades of North Korea.
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Update: Chicago State decides it doesn’t want to be North Korea.
In Harper’s, the political scientist Benjamin Barber called [Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind] “a most enticing, a most subtle, a most learned, a most dangerous tract.”
This would be the Benjamin Barber most enticed by the most subtle, most learned, Muammar Qaddafi.
The Barber who wrote countless opinion pieces praising Qaddafi, a man he called “a poet of democracy.”