University Diaries » More on the Hijab Dust-up.

See the post directly below this one for background.

One needs to parse the pro-hijab Council of Europe message to understand the problem here.

BEAUTY IS IN DIVERSITY.

AS FREEDOM IS IN HIJAB.

Let’s start with the first statement. Variety is the spice of life, I grant you. But surely not everything that meets the eye in a highly diverse environment will strike everyone as beautiful; and indeed given the notorious subjectivity of the concept “beauty,” mixed in this case with the feel-good vacuity of the sentence’s sentiment, it’s not terribly surprising that a lot of people were turned off. Karabash has a richly diverse urban setting, with unusual bright red water features, but I don’t find it beautiful. Los Angeles is highly diverse, with gated communities for billionaires down the road from rancid encampments, but I don’t find this diversity beautiful. The hijab campaign means to educate me, to make me more tolerant of people who wear hijabs; but it starts with an insult to my intelligence.

Plus, I’m not sure defending hijabs as diversity really… works anyway. I mean, they’re diverse from what non-hijab wearers wear, to be sure; but within the hijab community the whole modesty point is to make children and adults all pretty much look alike, right? Not a very diversity-positive community.

With the second statement, real trouble ensues. Beauty is to diversity as freedom is to the hijab. So… beauty inheres in diversity, just as freedom inheres in the hijab. The hijab is as obviously about freedom as diversity is about beauty. To wear a hijab is to say I am free. I am a free person, a free woman.

Now, if the campaign stated

FREEDOM OF CHOICE IS AN IMPORTANT FREEDOM.

I AM FREE TO WEAR A HIJAB.

no one would have complained. But if you are trying to say to me that you are free because you wear a hijab, that when I see a woman (or, horribly, a child) in a hijab I’m supposed to say There goes a free person. The hijab proves it. I’m going to refer you to Orwell’s 1984. You are not going to be able to make me believe that the very opposite of the truth is true.

I’m perfectly okay with all sorts of religious people marking their submission to God in any number of ways, but the whole point of this gesture, you understand, is to publicly reject “freedom” as the French, and ol’ UD, understand it. So the campaign lies, and since most people don’t find lies very persuasive, the campaign fails.

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