[Vision2020] Headgear, Religion, and Race

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:

The only religion I know that requires its male devotees to wear a 
turban is Sikhism.  Some Hindu males, primarily in Rajasthan, wear 
turbans, which, depending on their color, mark caste and marital status.

Right after 9-11, a Sikh taxi driver in a California town was dragged 
from his taxi and beating to death  because he was thought to be an 
Arab.  His murderers have finally been sentenced.  American ignorance 
in all areas will be our ultimate undoing.

By the way, Sikhs do not speak Arabic; they speak Punjabi and have 
their own separate religion. Iranian Islamic mullahs wear turbans, 
but they are not Arabs and they speak Farsi not Arabic.

Hundreds of millions of Muslim men, primarily in Indonesia, India, 
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and the Philippines do not wear any 
special headgear, but you will see a lot of "Sukarno" hats in 
Indonesia and Malaysia.  They are of different "races," and only a 
handful of these Muslims speak Arabic as a mother tongue.

Finally, just to put terrorist acts in perspective, more than half 
the suicide bombers in the world have been Hindu and Christian Tamils 
in Sri Lanka, who do not wear any special headgear and who act for 
socio-economic reasons not religious ones.

So let's just be clear:  Comparatively few Muslims are Arabs, and 
very few of them wear in particular headgear.  And "race," whatever 
that is, has nothing to do with it.

Nick Gier

"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to 
human affairs."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson  (Thanks, Jennifer McFarland, for this quote

"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who 
represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."
  --Mohandas Gandhi

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