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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

The images you link to aren't accurate. At least for any country with Bedouin women and Muslim control, these women wore this even hundreds a years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niq%C4%81b_in_Egypt#/media/Fil...

Some other peoples in the same countries of course wore less "fundamental" clothing.

Still your picture with a woman without the head covering and with the skin showing in Bosnia is 100% anachronistic (recent, somebody shot a waitress dressed as a tourist attraction in just some part of the old clothes, according to the Wikipedia page) and surely not "traditional." This is how it looked like traditionally:

http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/8913992104084b29887dc4ab7fa2fd0b/b...

They still look much nicer than the "modern ninjas."

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My wife's Iranian and she took issue with that meme as well, saying the "traditional" outfit wasn't accurate, in the case of Iran at least. But I wish someone would make a version of it based on actual historical primary sources, because there really is a striking difference in dress codes when you go back before the 19th century. Google "eighteenth century iranian women" and you'll see very clearly what I mean:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Hasht-Be...

There's no arguing that these are depictions of Muslim women by Muslim painters, so it's a bit simplistic to act as if Islam has always imposed the same interpretation of what "modest dress" means. Anyway, I'm not trying to wade into this larger debate but just wanted to point out that we don't need to speculate about what the traditional dress was like in regions like the Persian or Ottoman empires, there are abundant historical images that show us.

I agree fully. Women elsewhere surely wore much more colorful dresses than the Bedouins. At least the younger ones, the black color was at least in some cultures common as the "mourning" color.

Having women wearing black in the areas where the Sun could kill them while men at the same time wear white was surely practical for Bedouins restricting their movement and making them any kind of the "escape" riskier. Luckily, Persia was something else, thanks to its history.

Kindly allow me to be very subjective, to my eyes, Iranian women are beautiful above average (the ones I've met didn't wear headscarves). I do understand the people becoming poets in their presence.

As you are the OP, any chance of obtaining access to the other poems mentioned in the article? Any affiliation?

As far as I know, Bosnia was pretty secular and laid back for a long time (and is now).

What's "tradition" here? How widely were it practiced? Because I totally see this practice of digging in the past for some more obscurantist behaviors, and calling it "tradition" as if it is a good thing.

Define "for a long time." It was under the control of the Muslim Ottoman Empire until the late 19th century. It was under Austrian control until the First World War. Then it was a part of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had a secular (socialist) government since the end of the WWII and until the breakup. During the breakup wars, even Osama bin Laden (or his closest co-workers) received the passport from the new Muslim government (1). al-Qaeda was active there then, and the foreign "freedom" (Muslim) fighters came there just like they recently came to Syria. The current government tries to limit the influence of these, but Bosnia still has some "Mujahideen training camps" according to the recent reports.

BTW, Gaddafi was also secular compared to what followed:

http://africanleadership.co.uk/blog/?p=8161

That's what complex is: one word like "secular" isn't enough to understand what's going on, especially over any non-trivial time period or the area involving different nations.

> What's "tradition" here?

Under the Muslim control, which lasted for centuries, sadly, no woman was able not to wear a headscarf in the presence of the rulers. Non-believing men weren't able to do anything lucrative or have any real governing function. Once the Muslims have lost the control, the "tradition" was able to change. But there are the real forces pressing backwards even as we speak.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militant_activity_of_Osama_bin...

Having training camps and wrapping women in opaque blankets is two distinct things. Bosnians mostly did former and not latter.

> was able not to wear a headscarf in the presence of the rulers

There's a lot of things even I won't do "in the presence of the rules", but luckily I don't see much of them, so I'm free to do whatever I please. Wasn't same true for them?

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