Dear Julia,

I always feel woefully undereducated on rights issues for Muslims. (I still have that NY Times article about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict saved for later after all this time. There’s really no excuse for my lack of exploration into this topic at this point. Speaking tangentially of which, I’m glad you showed me Waltz With Bashir the other day. That was a really fascinating and powerful movie.) So, that said I was excited to go to this event showing the documentary film They Call Me Muslim. I love documentaries (as you well know), and I was particularly interested in this one because it focused on the experiences of Muslim women specifically. The film itself was only about a half hour long so we had a bit of a discussion afterwards to fill out the time a little more. I thought Piragash made a very interesting point about how the film conflates two issues that aren’t comparable. Yes, women in France can’t wear the Burqa and women in Iran are required to, but Piragash’s argument was that women in Iran face a systemic oppression of which the burqa is only a symptom, which is distinctly different from the discussion over the legality of the burqa in France. I thought the film still was worth watching just for the perspectives of the women it presented, but after turning this around in my mind for a couple days I’m inclined to side with Piragash that it might have simplified a complex problem to make its comparison feel more salient.

Love,

Robert