Here’s the unveiled verity of a serious university education: It provides a place for you to change in serious ways. It shakes you up.
A Dartmouth undergraduate, Leah Feiger, writes in the school newspaper that she thought she knew how to feel about the burqa. It was about freedom to practice your religion.
Enter Nazila Fathi from Iran. A reporter for The New York Times, Fathi has been instrumental in providing the Tehran perspective and has written countless on-the-ground articles exploring political and social development in an ever-changing Iran. Fathi visited Dartmouth’s campus on May 6 to give a lecture regarding reporting in her native country and touched on the issue of the burqa.
In fielding a question about her opinion of the French government’s viewpoint on the burqa, Fathi responded, “I can’t speak objectively since I don’t support wearing it. If you want to wear it, go back to where you’re from.”
You can sort of see people in Fathi’s audience shifting around uncomfortably. An astonishingly strong, and unpleasant, statement, eh?
Shakes you up.
May 24th, 2011 at 6:53AM
“change must come from within a culture in order to end traditions deemed harmful”…so the end of slavery in the American South should have waited for cultural change in that region?
This is inherently a collectivist viewpoint, that the rights of the “culture” are all-powerful and the rights of the individual are unimportant by comparison.
May 25th, 2011 at 12:23AM
Finally, a voice of reason. Thank you, Fathi!
And thank you, UD, for reporting it.