Regarding my earlier posts on Islamism and geekiness, H. sent along some interesting links, saying:
There's a goody-goody aspect to Islamism, those horrid young men often lecture their families about how they aren't devout enough, blah, blah, blah, blah, until the families kick them out. Here's an example from Egypt:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/international/africa/07sharm.html Goody-goody, and with a sense of superiority like this British dude:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/international/asia/08jihad.html And just plain cruel in an ultra-legalistic way, like the Taliban punishing all men for not having beards, even the Hazara with their inherited inability to grow a proper beard. Women with disabled husbands couldn't work to support their families. The RULES are more important than anything else.
My summary: bossy, sense of superiority, goody-goody, angry, and extremely cruel. I think I remember the type from childhood.
The NYT stories reminded me of a moment in a movie (made-for-tv, I think) about the 9/11 terrorists supposedly based on available documents and interviews with family members. The movie focuses on the marital relationship between one of the bombers (I forget his name) and his spouse, and at one point shows him chastising his wife (a Turkish Muslim) for not wearing hijab inside their apartment while she is alone with him, and she is shocked; the demand seems bizarre to her.
That particular example goes to illustrate, I think, the highly mechanical way in which Islamists understand the "rules" of Islam. There is a great deal of debate, of course, as to whether the Qur’an really requires a particular mode of dress or even just head covering for women at all, or whether the Qur’an merely demands modest dress, and various iterations of the veil have simply been the historical costume of modesty for women living in Muslim lands; Muslims who interpret the Verse of the Hijab the latter way believe loosely-fitting and non-revealing Western dress and uncovered heads are perfectly modest in the Western context and hence are appropriate for Muslim women living in the West. But even among those for whom the veil is considered straightforwardly an Islamic requirement for women, there’s no belief that a woman should wear one while alone with her own husband. The requirement is contextual, not absolute. It’s not that a woman should be veiled all the time, it’s that she should be veiled when within sight of non-related men. The idea that a woman should just wear hijab all the time, period, appears to be an invention of 20th Century Islamists, and you will find some fundamentalist texts advising women that they may, for example, take off their gloves but not their headscarves in front of their husbands, sons, and uncles. This is distinct from normal and traditional Muslim practice, in which the veil is removed as soon as a woman is inside her own house with her own relatives.
Subsequent thought: And the hectoring about indoor hijab seems only to arise in proselytizing Islamist texts. Even within the Islamic Republic of Iran, nobody seems to believe that one should wear hijab indoors. I remember reading about an Iranian filmmaker grappling with the problem of presenting scenes of private life in films to be shown to the public. Islamic covering had to be maintained, yet it would seem totally unnatural to an Iranian public to show a woman wearing hijab inside her own house. The solution turned out to be things like, making it so the woman had just come out of the shower, wearing a robe and her hair done up in a towel, and so forth.
It could be that part of the purpose of encouraging a strict, mechanical rules orientation for prospective recruits is precisely to alienate them from their families and former friends, the better to allow an alternate consensus reality as created by recruiters to take hold in their minds. Separating recruits from non-believers seems to be a common tactic for "cults" of all stripes.
Update: Mr. Bell Jar came across "a kindred thought."