btw..in normal everyday situations pardah is meant to be in the mind, their shouldn’t be a need to segregate.

ps, just found this website from that asiana magazine.

After conquest and intermingling with Central Asians,Turk/Mongol/Tartar became a menace to civilised world (India/Persia/Arabia/Caucasus/Europe).

i wasn’t clear about exactly what you said higher up about the Moghuls. you weren’t suggesting they were turkic were you? because they weren’t -they were ‘persianized’ mongols.

There is a huge scholarly debate about the ethnicity of “Turk” and “Tartar”. Mughals themselves called them “Turks” and they spoke Turkic Language. Persian was the lingua franca and the language of Royal Court. Mughals called their homemeland “Turkistan”.

The entire Indo-Islamic period was marred in infighting among the Persian speaking Irani/Tajik ,Turani(origin Central Asia mother tongue Turkic language),Pathans and Hindustanis.

If it was a bunch of white house wives going to a strip club there would be no topic whatsoever.
If its a bunch of male muslim men indulging in sexual activity i.e prostitution, or bestiality, there would also be no topic.
Alright, maybe if it was bestiality.
So why is this an issue?
Thats the real question.
Women should be allowed to do whatever they want.
If they wanna have a dance party, good on them.
But i know there would be an immense amount of jealous, overbearing, insecure muslim males that would want to put a stop to this, especially if there wife is taking part.
How do you change that mentality?
errrm, it usually starts during childhood, so i guess then.
Men have to be taught early to understand that women are also human beings with the same urges, feelings and emotions.
Im quite happy to hear this as its about time.

By “Turkic” I was referring specifically to the Delhi Sultans, although it is often also used as a broader generic term (re: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_peoples).

When I used the term “Turkic-Mughal” I was therefore talking about the initial invasions resulting in the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, along with Islamic rule in other parts of northern India; followed of course by the Mughal invasion and imperial rule, initiated by Babur.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Rajput

Here’s the BBC on a privately run islamic school where the girls are walking black shrouds and prayer seems the most important thing on the curriculum.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4467370.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mughal_Empire

Sati and Jauhar are 2 different concepts, despite the fact that both involve female self-immolation.

“Jauhar” developed specifically in response to the tendency of invading Muslim armies to capture and attempt to rape the women of defeated Rajput armies — a practice the Muslim soldiers involved justified under their interpretation of the Quranic injunction of allowing them to capture such women and keep them as “wives and concubines”. In fact, Guru Gobind Singh explicity prohibited his soldiers from acting in this same fashion towards the women of armies the Khalsa defeated, specifically because this attitude was prevalent in the context of Islamic warfare, and he told his warriors not to behave in a “tit-for-tat” manner in this matter.

Here’s a good summary of the Rajput custom of jauhar.

I’m certainly not ascribing all of Rajput society’s misogynistic and partriarchal attitudes to the Mughals; but in the case of the “veiling” of women in front of men and so on, it is an established historical fact that they did indeed adopt this from their close links to — and interaction with — the Muslim aristocracy. Ditto for other high-caste Hindus, although as mentioned before this custom then trickled down into the rest of Hindu society in the affected regions too.

As with putting people in boxes, I myself as a man follow the men’s guidlines for dresscode, something often forgotten in the sexist world of Asian culture.

Tanvir, you can file me under hijab-hater if you like to put people away in neat boxes since I find ALL the reasoning behind the hijab pretty shoddy. That does not mean that I hate muslims but I guess that distinction may escape some on this blog.

Yes I did claim once that the entire SE Asia to be matriarchial, but I knew I was wrong about that even as I clicked the Send button. Unforgiveable, I know. I should have qualified it to mean Muslim Bengal, which is certainly not the entire SE Asia. And like the Malays is also suffering from the blight of Wahabbi muscularists.

What, as if everything available in British clothing stores is restricted to thongs and daisy dukes? For crying out loud, “dressing modestly” hardly requires a body-length flowing muumuu and a headscarf. Today I’m wearing jeans and my boyfriend’s sweatshirt because it’s farking cold out, and I don’t think men on the tube will be leering at me. Heck, when I was a teen us girls LIVED in baggy clothes because we had some sort of misplaced shame about our bodies developing, unlike all the girls and their muffin-tops today. All I’m saying is, if modesty is your goal, it’s not hard to find Western clothing that no one will blink twice at. I think it’s more of a conscious segregation on the part of those women. An Ismaili Muslim once told me that when all the African-born desi Muslims came to the UK in the ’70s, an important imam told them to wear skirts and style their hair and blend in, because integrating and succeeding in the new culture was the most important thing.

Indian society wasn’t exactly “Vedic” by the time the Turkic-Mughals came along. You need to take into consideration a gap of several thousand years, along with the substantial Buddhist period in-between, and the fact that by no means were all Indian regions Vedic in their interpretation and practice of Hinduism.

Your point about the Tuareg : they are traditionally a matriachal society but their way of life (and the women’s freedom)is actually being threatened by the resurgence of ‘pure’ Islam. You once (wrongly ) pointed out that muslim societies in SE Asia are matriachal (to sort of prove how tolerant Islam is); you may be interested to know much of the traditional (and pre-islamic) matriachal customs or adat of sumatra and malaysia have been slowly abandoned in the last 2-3 decades , due to the muscularity of ‘pure’ Islam again.