Behind the Burqa

Link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0HhhaD_NZU&t=3s
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Saw this for a class a few semesters ago and was reminded of it after seeing Beau Travail. Gets at the heart of something that feels so odd and unsettling about how neoliberal discourse builds fantasies to comprehend the Muslim Other. That the Muslim Other cannot remain opaque, misunderstood, and complicated, but must Make Sense through an Explanation (*1). For example, I was watching the news recently and was confused when the news host referred to Islam as a "social justice religion" -- whether or not that is true isn't really what was off-putting to me, but rather the way the phrase "social justice" was invoked. Why must the religion be characterized and translated into legible and socially loaded Western categories like "social justice" in order to be spoken of?

I find William James' philosophy helpful not toward answering that question (*2) but toward understanding what one might do in the face of difference. In James' philosophy, it's this idea that we really have no right to issue absolute and exhaustive statements about how anyone ought to live their lives, because it is impossible to comprehensively understand how people derive meaning from their own personal existence. That everyone only sees the world through their own two eyes and it is impossible (*3) to ever know what another person sees, so it can be easy to dismiss particular actions or choices as "stupid" or "meaningless", even if those actions or choices involve immense joy or rapture. Yet James says that, as an alternative, one might live with a form of extreme tolerance and humility that centers the idea that there are very many equally valid ways to live a meaningful life.

In the context of this documentary, it is precisely that: no one can ever truly know or understand why these women choose to wear the burqa, because no one can ever truly know or understand why anyone might find meaning in whatever they choose to do, insofar as everyone is completely blind to everyone else's inner lives (*4). Which sounds kind of corny and slogan-like when I say it, but I think it's one of those ideas where if you sit with it for a few more minutes, it feels uncanny.
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(*1) Probably some residue from the Enlightenment here

(*2) I don't even know if it is possible to develop a coherent answer to that question -- why must the Muslim Other be made legible to the Western subject on the West's terms? I'm sure people have been awarded chairs in university departments to try to answer that question.

(*3) Holding constant any sort of technological innovation that could make people substitute for one another, thus making it possible to see the world through another person's eyes, literally. Aka, a world without an incredibly advanced version of Meta Glasses.

(*4) One might wonder, though, what about murderers or cannibals? Should we not issue judgments about murderers or cannibals because we can never understand their inner world? That is the logical extreme of the argument and does reveal a certain flaw, but James nonetheless addresses said question at the end of his essay On a Certain Blindness in Humans, which I've used to inform my understanding of James above.