People accuse Muslim culture of being oppressive to women. Women are often forbidden from driving cars, going to universities, and even leaving the home without their husband's permission. I agree that this is unjust and oppressive.
However, the criticism of their concealing style of dress seems empty and hypocritical. In Western culture, society pressures women to spend a lot of time and effort to meet expectations. In the land of Cosmopolitan magazine, almost every magazine at the check-0ut aisle has a scantily clad, plastic surgery (and often digitally) enhanced woman on the cover, whether so-called men's or women's magazines. Every day women make up their faces to match the advertised ideal. They get into outfits that are often tight, constricting, embarrassingly revealing, uncomfortable, and even laughably impractical. The typical women's shoe has a high heel, which is painfully uncomfortable, unhealthy for the foot, and makes walking more difficult. The phrase 'wardrobe malfunction' is a nice way of saying that a woman was pressured into wearing clothing that fails to clothe. Many women now use tape to keep the little bits of clothing they wear from falling off. I don't think women in Muslim countries have to resort to taping their clothing on.
In stark contrast, the style of men's dress in both cultures, and virtually every culture in the world, is virtually the same. They wear loose, comfortable clothing that covers most of the body, except for the head and hands. So typical male attire anywhere in the world will be a button down shirt, pants, and shoes. There are places where men wear robes or kilts, but they are also loose and cover the body.
Muslim dress is oppressive because it is too baggy and concealing, and Western dress is oppressive because it is too tight and revealing. Neither allow women the luxury of dressing as comfortably and dignified as men. This is a case where the middle road is best, and either extreme is unhealthy. The West is right in criticising the oppression of women, but they must stop doing so themselves before criticising others.
The Rules According to Hoyle
Chess is one of the world's most popular and highly respected games. Benjamin Franklin, in his article "The Morals of Chess" (1750), wrote: "The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions; for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it." With these or similar hopes, chess is taught to children in schools around the world today and used in armies to train minds of cadets and officers. Countless books are written on the strategy of chess, and advanced computer algorithms are developed to win at chess.
The unique qualities of chess are a result of it's simple rules that nevertheless give rise to very complex interactions amongst the pieces. The development of the rules of chess is a singular accomplishment. I wonder, who wrote the rules of chess?
Legend says that a wise courtier named Sissa created the game and presented it to the Indian King Balhait. The king was so pleased that he promised Sissa any reward he would name. Sissa replied that he wanted one grain of wheat for the first square of the board, two for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth, and so on to the 64th square. The king was astonished and annoyed by the excessive modesty of his counselor, but it turned out that the number of grains owed was 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, an impossible amount.
When we play chess, the movements of all the pieces are restricted to the rules that have been created for the game. If one were to find a chess board in the middle of a game, with the pieces spread liberally across the board, one might deduce the steps that must have been taken to arrive at such a state by applying the rules in reverse, and thereby recreate each turn of the game from the very first. Of course, this is assuming that the pieces were moved only according to the rules. They may simply have been placed there initially, disregarding the rules entirely.
As Franklin wrote, life can be compared to chess. It operates according to certain rules. Rules of logic, nature, and physics. The endeavor of science is the discovery of these rules that give rise to everything we see around us.
One of the most basic underlying rules of the universe is causality. The rule that nothing is unless something has caused it to be so. (It is this rule that allows science to draw conclusions from observations.) But this could not always have been the case, or the world would never have come to exist. There must have been a time early in the chain of cause and effect when this rule had not yet been enacted, and a cause existed that did not itself require a cause. Something created this rule and began enforcing it. And this makes sense. Why should this rule exist at all unless something is enforcing it? The same goes for all the other rules of nature. There must have been a time when there were no rules, anything at all was possible, and it was decided to make rules.
I wonder, who wrote those rules?
The unique qualities of chess are a result of it's simple rules that nevertheless give rise to very complex interactions amongst the pieces. The development of the rules of chess is a singular accomplishment. I wonder, who wrote the rules of chess?
Legend says that a wise courtier named Sissa created the game and presented it to the Indian King Balhait. The king was so pleased that he promised Sissa any reward he would name. Sissa replied that he wanted one grain of wheat for the first square of the board, two for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth, and so on to the 64th square. The king was astonished and annoyed by the excessive modesty of his counselor, but it turned out that the number of grains owed was 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, an impossible amount.
When we play chess, the movements of all the pieces are restricted to the rules that have been created for the game. If one were to find a chess board in the middle of a game, with the pieces spread liberally across the board, one might deduce the steps that must have been taken to arrive at such a state by applying the rules in reverse, and thereby recreate each turn of the game from the very first. Of course, this is assuming that the pieces were moved only according to the rules. They may simply have been placed there initially, disregarding the rules entirely.
As Franklin wrote, life can be compared to chess. It operates according to certain rules. Rules of logic, nature, and physics. The endeavor of science is the discovery of these rules that give rise to everything we see around us.
One of the most basic underlying rules of the universe is causality. The rule that nothing is unless something has caused it to be so. (It is this rule that allows science to draw conclusions from observations.) But this could not always have been the case, or the world would never have come to exist. There must have been a time early in the chain of cause and effect when this rule had not yet been enacted, and a cause existed that did not itself require a cause. Something created this rule and began enforcing it. And this makes sense. Why should this rule exist at all unless something is enforcing it? The same goes for all the other rules of nature. There must have been a time when there were no rules, anything at all was possible, and it was decided to make rules.
I wonder, who wrote those rules?
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