somehow . . . missing the *point*

[realthog]

Peccavi, I know, but I found myself with an ever-broadening grin as I read the report in the Beeb tonight:

Aceh outrage over Miss Indonesia

By Karishma Vaswani
BBC News, Jakarta

Clerics in Indonesia's conservative Muslim province of Aceh say they are outraged that an Acehnese woman has won the title of Miss Indonesia.

Qori Sandioriva, 18, won the Miss Indonesia title on Friday, beating 37 other contestants for the crown.

The clerics say that by failing to wear a veil during the competition she has betrayed her Acehnese roots and brought shame to the province. [. . .]

They say she should have worn a veil during the competition, in keeping with the traditions of her mother's province. [. . .]

The controversy is likely to return next year when she goes on to compete in the Miss Universe contest where she will have to don a swimsuit as part of the pageant.

What next? Playing golf without aiming for the hole, playing pinball without putting the coin in, getting a university degree without learning to read . . .? Oh, I forgot. These backward bozoes don't believe in women getting university degrees . . .

Comments

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

On the subject:

Hm... speaking as a non-Acehnese Indonesian there's really no way she should have entered the contest as Miss Aceh (she doesn't even look Acehnese, but I suppose all Miss Indonesia contestants these days look more Chinese than "Indonesian"). She also doesn't sound (like a practicing) Muslim, and would Israel send a contestant to Miss Universe who wasn't Jewish (or who claimed to be Jewish and then ate a bunch of pork for the talent portion)? Uh, no. Not sure how that happened. I'm sure competition was stiff to be Miss Jakarta, but that was just idiotic planning.

Related Soapbox:

Aceh is extremely religious. It's not just the clerics. They're one of the oldest centers of Islam in the world, and yes, they've got sort of "olden" interpretations of Islam but in the context of the civil war they've been waging against Indonesia for the past, oh, fifty years, it makes sense for them to make big deals about how very very orthodox they are. It's part of how they keep an identity separate from the rest of Indonesia, justification for wanting to be separate. They want to be independent - never wanted in on Indonesia in the first place, but they were annexed like East Timor and West Papua - and the government won't let them go because there is a lot of oil/gas in Aceh (that doesn't benefit Aceh). The more the government suppresses them, the more fervently religious they'll get, and that's a guarantee.

What I'm saying is, it's so much more complicated than "backward bozoes" not wanting women to get university degrees (which incidentally has nothing to do with beauty pageants - at all). Of course I think that anyone should be allowed to get a university degree, but telling Aceh that its values are wrong and backward solves nothing, really. The reasoning for their extreme orthodoxy nowadays is tied up in power and identity and autonomy, and I suspect those problems need to be fixed before Aceh is even willing to talk about women's rights in Islam.

/Soapbox