About the Moslem scarf..

This comment was originaly published on Brian Anthony's blog: "In The Axes"
http://www.readingeagle.com/blog/syria/archives/2005/04/to_scarf_or_not.html

When an Arab girl starts to understand her gender, she is already a married woman. When an Arab man starts to understand what's it all about for him, he's already old. At least, this is how my generation sees the picture.

For both men and women here, teenage is very confused, and goes on somehow for most of our lives. Symbols -like the scarf, the rosary, or the mustache- are essential to everybody and everyday. And unlike the very popular idea, they are completely irrelevant to their historical and cultural origins.

Symbols are the shortcuts for the wordless and voiceless. Strangely, they do change, but you can't be the one to change them. For you they are ultimately fixed and defined. You don't need to be clever or educated to use them. You just have to hang around and you'll learn, and be safe.

The scarf, and its absence, are both of these symbols here in Syria. Align your identity with some presumed, and highly unlikely, groups. You'd feel you belong to some. Actually you might really do, from time to time.

And the symbols, collectively, become me, him, and her. A scarf with hot pants. No scarf no make up. A beard with no mustache. Doesn't mean a thing, of course. Except to you. If you were lucky enough to have a choice. They say (I know) some women, or many women, in the middle east, who do not have that choice.

There might come a day when we decide to reconsider one of our famous "intellectual" exaggerations: A woman with no social presence? Can't show her face? Too shy to talk? A symbol made of a human being?.

Yep.

If you think that her life is miserable, meaningless, or imprisoned, you're sure right. But she is in no different position from the rest of us. True, I can let my nipples (just as an example)show against the fabric of my top. But we live there too, with her, and we eventually find ourselves in the same boat: If she has no face, then my face is just a mask. If she has no freedom, then I have no personal opinions. If she has no ambitions, then I only have the burden of ages of history(Just look at the TV serials, everything in the world happened when people held swords in their daily business, and talked only beautiful Arabic)..

If she can't talk, who am I gonna talk with?

Like the rest of us, she's sure doing her best to learn her survival kit. And she'd better be good, because everybody is on to everybody. And "they" are nervous, they are shrill and savage.... "Sorry, that's the face on show today. Try again tomorrow!".

(..In some corner, there the compassionate, the funny, and the honest hall of mirrors...)

Some believe in the inner inherited conflict in our being. And that goodness is the victory of the human over the animal, the soul over the body. That means goodness is a personal product, utterly sexless, and of a theoretical nature. So there is man fighting animal, hero battling dragon. But if you divided yourself into these two, if you initiated this conflict, what are you using this sign language to tell me? Who won, good or evil? Are you the wounded animal, or the wounded man?

But as we all know, we'll never get anything except mixed messages, each part should reach a specific part of our receptors. It is not meant to be reconstructed all together in a single logical idea. That will certainly give us this confused and incoherent content. What do you want, read minds?! Absolutely not! It's the only secured place we got. It's for the dreams.

So let them, let each part of their clothing or whatever tell you different from the other. They are all true, and all are liars. We Syrians are probably the most skillful people in surviving oppression, where a lie is only a make up necessity, and love is everything that is forbidden, and trust is a jewel handed into your palm.

And they are right, beauty is still to be protected in our lives, because it is still a child, a-will-be in the dreams of blue sky and green grass. We accept nothing in our heaven, except perfection.