[liberationtech] Bitcoin and The Public Function of Money

[Julian Oliver]

..on Fri, Nov 02, 2012 at 06:03:24PM +0200, Maxim Kammerer wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 4:20 PM, Julian Oliver <julian at julianoliver.com> wrote:
> > Relatedly, I met a young woman in Abu Dhabi who said to me in a mall "You
> > Westerners look around and see all these girls in full burkas and think they are
> > trapped, oppressed under Islam. In fact they are only wearing full burkas here
> > so their school mates don't recognise them when they're out on a date."
> 
> You are quoting her as an example of Muslim humor, right? 

No, she was serious, albeit I have no idea if what she said is true. We had a
long chat about Islam as seen from the West. I learnt a lot.

> Not sure how this is related to different varieties of freedom and liberty, though.

She was pointing out that Emirati girls were using the full burka to protect
their right to privacy, to give them more freedom of movement in a
peer-surveilled, gossipy social context. So, rather than the full burka being a
device of repression, as Westerners often consider it, it enabled more freedoms.

Naturally Muslim Emirati women cannot be used as basis for generalisations as to
the relative freedoms of Muslim women elsewhere.

Cheers,

-- 
Julian Oliver
http://julianoliver.com
http://criticalengineering.org