Burqa: Principle, Prejudice and Preference

What is the difference between the yarmulke and the burqa besides the fact that one is minimally small and the other is maximally large?

By now the controversy over the burqa is well known. In France, President Sarkozy has said: “The burqa is not a religious sign. It is a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement… It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic…. In our country we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity.”

In Cairo, President Obama has said: “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal…. and I respect those women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles. But it should be their choice.”

I am going to set these remarks against the backdrop of Bertrand Russell’s observations on the tyranny of the majority (from Political Ideals, 1917) where he discusses “matters of passionate interest to certain sections of the community, but of very little interest to the great majority. If they are decided according to the wishes of the numerical majority, the intense desires of a minority will be overborne by the very slight and uninformed whims of the indifferent remainder…. The tyranny of the majority is a very real danger. It is a mistake to suppose that the majority is necessarily right…. there are a great many questions in which there is no need of a uniform decision…. Wherever divergent action by different groups is possible without anarchy, it ought to be permitted…. it is of the utmost importance that the majority should refrain from imposing its will as regards matters in which uniformity is not absolutely necessary.”

Now I wish to extract the principles contained in these three statements. In Russell’s case, the principle is unambiguous – wherever divergent action by different groups is possible without anarchy, it ought to be permitted. In Obama’s case, the principle is seemingly clear but possibly problematic as I shall argue later – individuals can do what they wish (within the law) as long as they do it out of free choice. In Sarkozy’s case, there is no principle; there is a statement of prejudice (the burqa is a sign of subservience, of debasement) and a statement of preference (in our country we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen).

I do not have a problem with Sarkozy’s personal prejudices. Nor do I have a problem with the passage of a law in France dictating what kind of outerwear is acceptable in the country – that is a prerogative of the French parliament. But note that such a law violates Russell’s reasonable principle provided we assume that the wearing of the burqa is not going to be the cause of anarchy in French society.

My concern about actions based not on defensible principles but upon prejudices and preferences is that they can be quite arbitrary and dangerous. What if Sarkozy next gets it into his head that the bindiya too is a sign of subservience? Or worse, what if some new Fuhrer coming to power decides that the yarmulke is an absurd pre-historic head covering stuck to the hair of men with pins and that it cannot be accepted in modern European society?

How does Sarkozy know that the burqa is a sign of subservience? It may be in some cases and not in others. Even when it is, how will disallowing it prevent other less visible forms of subservience continuing inside the home? And how does he know the yarmulke is not a sign of coercion in some cases?

It is here that I sense a weakness in the principle of free choice as enunciated by Obama. It is not generally the case that individuals attain the age of majority and are presented for the first time with the choice of wearing or not wearing a certain piece of outerwear. In most cases, they are socialized into wearing that piece of clothing from very early childhood growing up with the feeling that being without it as almost akin to being naked (in the case of the burqa) or in a state of deep sin (in the case of the yarmulke). This is quite different, for example, from the case of consensual homosexual relationships, which can be seen as an act of free choice – no one is socialized into such behavior from early childhood as a requirement of social or religious duty. So Obama has the wrong analogy in mind on which he has based his principle. What Obama calls free choice, Sarkozy will term subservience.

At the same time, there are indeed European women who are not socialized into traditional behavior but who now prefer to wear a burqini. This is indeed an expression of free choice in Obama’s terms and not a sign of subservience in Sarkozy’s terms. French authorities have to contort themselves to find a public health rationale to keep the burqini out of swimming pools when Western women were wearing similar costumes not more than half a century ago as will be obvious from this pictorial history of the bikini.

Based on the above both Sarkozy and Obama need to reconsider their positions. I personally wouldn’t want to be inside a burqa and I find the yarmulke quaintly odd but as long as there are people who wish to indulge their desires to wear them without causing anarchy in society, I would have to learn to keep my prejudices and my preferences to myself and not goad an otherwise indifferent majority into imposing its will on a minority. At the same time I quite like the bindiya (as long as it is not green) but have to refrain myself from ordering its universal usage. I also consider the move from the burqa to the burqini a giant leap for humanity and would hate to step in the way of this promising evolution.

Not for nothing was Bertrand Russell a philosopher of the highest rank.

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On Language and Communication

In the context of the Cairo speech, I had asked the question whether President Obama ‘got’ his audience right. The question was prompted by a conviction that speakers of different languages had subtle differences in how they saw and understood the world.

It is quite a coincidence that just a week later I found a fascinating study that has empirically tested this hypothesis.

Here are some (unconnected) excerpts from the article describing the study:

Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages?

These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.

The fact that even quirks of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect our thinking is profound. Such quirks are pervasive in language; gender, for example, applies to all nouns, which means that it is affecting how people think about anything that can be designated by a noun. That’s a lot of stuff!

I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people’s minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses. Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

Let us go back to what I had written in the post on the Obama speech:

Knowing one’s audience is an issue that has significance beyond the Cairo speech and beyond politics – it is at the heart of all communications, all attempts at persuasion, and all efforts at marketing.

Some socioeconomic situations make it easier to realize the nature of this phenomenon. Take a country like Pakistan with a colonial history where there are two broad groups in society – the English-educated, English-speaking elite and the others who communicate in languages other than English. The ways of persuading these two groups to a point of view require very different approaches. Again, if the constraint was to generalize with a one-word characterization, it could be argued that the first group is swayed more by deduction, the second more by precedent.

This might be difficult to accept as a first reaction. Try an experiment. Take an English language op-ed that you find particularly convincing. Translate it into a local language and give it to a local language speaker not familiar with English. Ask him or her the degree to which the message was found to be convincing. It is not that the local language speaker cannot be convinced or is impervious to logic; it is just that he or she has to be convinced in a different way.

This would be a great experiment for a journalism class.

In the post I had not mentioned how I came to feel that language had an impact on our thought process but in the context of the study mentioned above it is worthwhile doing so.

Many years back I happened to meet an editor of a local language newspaper at a time when he was planning an English language edition. My question was how he intended to deal with the scarcity of good opinion writers in English. He answered it would not be a problem because he would have the local language op-eds translated into English.

We met some years later and he told me the experiment was a failure. An op-ed translated literally from the local language to English seemed to lack something critical. It had to be fixed by someone who thought in English.

So I had empirical evidence of a limited nature.  Subsequently my own experiences of translating content from English into local languages for study groups strengthened the belief that it was necessary to understand how a person from a different language group thought before one could succeed in convincing him or her.

It is very exciting to see a systematic study attempting to deepen our knowledge of this complex phenomenon. It also tells us how we can go about understanding complex issues better by testing our hypotheses after we have argued and speculated about them.

The article by Professor Lera Boroditsky is also archived in The Best From Elsewhere section of the blog.

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Obama and his Audience

There can be many responses to the Cairo speech each depending on how one wished to incorporate it in one’s agenda for the future.

This is most obvious in the realm of politics: some want to see it as a hopeful point of departure and do not wish to be critical; others see in it the need to support Obama in his struggle with his domestic constituency that restrains his genuine aspirations; yet others read it as a reiteration of the Bush policy couched in more sophisticated words. Depending on the agenda some wish to emphasize the positives, others the negatives.

This blog is not about politics. Our focus is pedagogy and analysis that serves the interest of pedagogy. We often choose political themes to illustrate pedagogical points simply because students engage readily with issues that are topical and of wider significance.

Our perspective on the Cairo speech was determined by our pedagogical orientation. It simulated a classroom exercise in which the text was given to a group of students who were to think of themselves as part of a non-Western audience affected negatively in the past by American foreign policy. The group was asked to identify the points in the speech that such an audience would find weak and unconvincing.

This was a very academic exercise and one of our objectives was to highlight the importance of keeping one’s audience in mind. As we had mentioned, every audience is unique and its characteristics need to be considered carefully before an interaction.

In some cases this is very easy to grasp especially when the audience is self-selected. Thus the audience that goes to a show by a stand-up comic wants to be amused. On the other end of the spectrum, the audience that attends a majlis during Muharram wishes to be made to weep. It would be a disaster to mix up the needs of these two very different audiences.

Political audiences are more difficult to read because they are more of a mixed bag. Here we make some very broad and summary generalizations for the sake of discussion.

American political audiences who have never seen adversity or been at the wrong end of history want to be roused. Different segments of the audience prefer different ways of being roused. There are audiences for the Bush style of macho cowboy aggression, for Kennedy style idealism, for the Martin Luther King style message of hope, and for the Obama style that is an intelligent mix of all the other three.

American audiences respond to the personal anecdote, the hard-luck story, the heroic overcoming of odds, and the reiteration of the American dream like few other audiences in the world. Even Europeans view the American audience and what appeals to it as something quite different from their own traditions.

Non-Western audiences, especially those that nurture deep hurts and grievances, a sense of injustice and humiliation, have different needs. If there was a constraint to use a one-word description, it might be said that they do not want to be roused – they have been roused and let down too often. They wish to be respected.

This was the difference between Bush and Obama. Bush did not give them respect and Obama did. But Obama’s respect scratched the surface. It used the right salutations, the appropriate language, and acknowledged the heritage of his listeners. It aimed to mollify their sensitivities and flatter their egos.

But did Obama respect the intelligence of his audience? Here the verdict seems more mixed. As we mentioned in the earlier post, just because this was an address to a Muslim audience did not imply that the audience wished to listen to selective quotations from the scriptures and be told of what God wanted.

This audience might have responded better to a more forthright discussion of the critical issues. Even a frank portrayal of the difficulties in pursuing certain courses of action could have elicited a genuine appreciation of the obstacles in the way of getting to where Obama wants to lead the world.

The question we want to discuss in this forum is whether Obama read his audience right?

Knowing one’s audience is an issue that has significance beyond the Cairo speech and beyond politics – it is at the heart of all communications, all attempts at persuasion, and all efforts at marketing.

Some socioeconomic situations make it easier to realize the nature of this phenomenon. Take a country like Pakistan with a colonial history where there are two broad groups in society – the English-educated, English-speaking elite and the others who communicate in languages other than English. The ways of persuading these two groups to a point of view require very different approaches. Again, if the constraint was to generalize with a one-word characterization, it could be argued that the first group is swayed more by deduction, the second more by precedent.

This might be difficult to accept as a first reaction. Try an experiment. Take an English language op-ed that you find particularly convincing. Translate it into a local language and give it to a local language speaker not familiar with English. Ask him or her the degree to which the message was found to be convincing. It is not that the local language speaker cannot be convinced or is impervious to logic; it is just that he or she has to be convinced in a different way.

This would be a great experiment for a journalism class.

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Obama in Cairo: Ten Weak Points

I did not watch President Obama’s address in Cairo because I did not wish to be influenced by his obvious oratorical skills. But I have the speech in cold print and would like to highlight ten weak points from the perspective of a non-Western audience in order to start a discussion on its wider implications.

The reason for this approach is that every audience brings with it a different baggage of history, a different template for interpretation, a different metric of credibility, and a different set of expectations. Thus the reaction of an American audience is likely to be quite different from that of a non-Western audience especially one that has been at the receiving end of America’s pursuits of its national interests.

So, putting myself in the place of such an audience, I tried to identify ten points in the speech that would have come across as particularly weak or unconvincing. These are mentioned here in the order they appeared in the address and not in any order of importance. I ignore here the compulsions that might have forced Obama to say things that might not have rung true with him either.

1. On Stereotypes

In the discussion of stereotypes Obama equated Muslims with the American state. Now clearly it is only the very ignorant or bigoted who stereotype Muslims because Muslims come in all shapes, sizes, colors and convictions. But the American state is a well-defined entity and its interactions with the outside world are a matter of historical record. It is not a pretty record by any means and for people at the receiving end the stereotype seems quite well founded.

For Obama to call it a “crude stereotype” similar in nature to the stereotype of Muslims was a weak attempt at glossing over some ugly truths. A forthright acknowledgment that the American state had too often been on the wrong side of history as far as the rest of the world was concerned would have carried more conviction. Sure, America has been a great source of progress as Obama said but the Internet and the transistor do not make up for the imposition of brutal dictators that take away liberty in return for the fruits of progress.    

Roger Cohen was on the mark in reminding Obama a day before the Cairo speech: “Palestinians can be successful software engineers, they can have an espresso in a café and blog on their MacBooks, but they cannot hide from their children that they are powerless in the face of an Israeli teenager holding a gun who may or may not be in a good mood.”

And Obama continuing with “We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words – within our borders, and around the world” would not have resonated with the experiences of his wider non-Western audience.

2. On the Killing of the Innocent

Obama said “we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children.” The audience would have sighed thinking of all the deaths justified as collateral damage in the defense of US interests. Those with memories would have recalled Madeleine Albright’s matter-of-fact assertion that U.S. policy objectives were worth the sacrifice of half a million Arab children. Others would have remembered Brzezinski’s casual disregard for sacrificing some “stirred up Muslims” in order to defeat the Soviet Union. Both these individuals were key representatives of the American state.

3. On Even-Handed Treatment

Obama said: “just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter our principles” and that the trauma of 9/11 has “led us to act contrary to our ideals.” The audience would have wondered why the response to the two violations of ideals was so lopsided: while the extremists are to be wiped off the face of the earth the Americans who acted contrary to ideals are not even to be questioned. The lofty words would not have been able to overcome the skepticism of the listeners.

4. On Israel

Obama stated that America’s bond with Israel is “unbreakable” being based upon “cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” This was a very strong statement and would have provoked two questions. First, what did the Palestinians have to do with this tragic history? And, second, what does ‘unbreakable’ signify? Is there no line that Israel cannot cross? Did Obama come across asserting that despite all the rhetoric might is right after all?

5. On Violence

Obama’s call on the Palestinians to abandon violence was based on the argument that it was not violence that won full and equal rights for Blacks in the US or in South Africa. Does Obama really believe this? The struggle of Blacks in the US involved the Civil War and urban riots and it was only when Martin Luther King was seen as the least worst of the alternatives that meaningful concessions were made. And how could the protracted and bitter struggle of the ANC in South Africa be ignored? One need not even go back to remind Obama of the French and American revolutions. It would be a great world in which power is gracefully yielded to the oppressed through rational argument. The audience could hope and wish that Obama may succeed in ushering such a world but the rewriting of history would not have gone down well.

6. On God and Religion

The President said: “All of us have a responsibility to work for the day… when the Holy Land of the three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be.” How does Obama know that? Perhaps God intended it to be a place of eternal conflict because He created three hostile religions in such a small space. Was there anything to be gained by making pious assertions that could not be supported by any evidence?

7. On Nuclear Weapons

Obama focused on Iran without saying anything about the nuclear arsenal of Israel. The audience would have interpreted this as a continuation of America’s unbalanced policy in the Middle East.

8. On Democracy

On democracy, Obama said: “we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election.” The audience would have been well aware that America has routinely intervened in the electoral politics of many countries from Latin America, Asia and Africa. An enterprising listener would have pulled up many examples on Google including this poignant one from Guyana. Leaving asides countries like Chile and Pakistan, even elections in Italy have not been immune to manipulation by the US. It would have gone across better if Obama had also said that we would no longer do so in the future.

Obama listed all the human rights and said “those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.” All the listeners would have thought of the US supported dictators who have denied these human rights to all their citizens and wondered if things were really going to change in the future. There would have been a lot of skepticism, no doubt.

9. On Muslim Intolerance

Obama said: “Among some Muslims, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of another’s” and “fault lines must be closed among Muslims as well, as the divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence, particularly in Iraq.” Here the wearied audience would have winced at being told to behave and be nice to each other. This would have come across as an oversimplification of religious and social tensions that have occurred everywhere over space and time. If this was to have been mentioned at all, it could have been in the context of trying to understand what lies beneath the emergence of such divisions and how they are exacerbated and exploited. The audience would have recalled the American exploitation of divisions in the course of the Iraq-Iran war.

10. On the Scriptures

Obama concluded by quoting from the scriptures of the three religions of the Middle East. The fact that Obama was addressing Muslims need not have implied that they were particularly susceptible to religious preaching. Obama would have known that the quotes were very selective and those who play this game could equally easily find messages in all the three books that would support completely contradictory positions. This could well have come across as a condescending gesture to an audience that the President felt was particularly prone to religious mumbo-jumbo.

And in the final sentence of his speech Obama reiterated: “The people of the world can live together in peace” following that up with “We know that is God’s vision.” Once again, Obama would have come across to the audience as the imam of the local mosque on a Friday rant using lofty words that signified nothing. How does Obama know what is God’s vision? This would have made the audience shudder having already suffered from the God inspired visions of Obama’s predecessor.

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