You don’t have to be a Muslim or a woman to say “burka” and face a tide of reactions. It’s become quite the fashion statement to pick apart the most modest of Muslim women’s garments.
No, I wouldn’t wear one, but I’ve never lived in a country where I was expected to. I have heard a whole host of arguments (very occasionally) for and (nearly always) against them, but what most enchants me is how Muslim women themselves feel about them.
It isn’t all doom and gloom: Barbie wore a burka for charity… Sophie Ashraf is the self-proclaimed Burka Rapper – in the strangest of ways, when it comes to the most demure of couture, it would seem to some it’s all about how you wear it.
Prince Charming?
In 2008, German designer Markus Kison made heads turn at the Seamless 2008 design and fashion show in Boston, USA by debuting a digitally enabled burka that can broadcast a photo of the wearer to nearby mobile phones.
Kison calls it the “CharmingBurka,” and insists his high-tech creation isn’t forbidden under Islamic law.
The burka has a “digital layer” with a Bluetooth antenna, which lets Muslim women “decide for themselves where they want to position themselves virtually”, as the inventor explained in speigel.de
Nearby mobile phones fitted with Bluetooth will light up with any small file a woman chooses to broadcast – this could be a photo, a cartoon, text file or even a sound clip.
The Broadcasting Burka?
The CharmingBurka actually began as a marketing tool, via the “Bluebot” system, originally intended for sending digital advertisements to passing phones. What prompted the German genius to incorporated it into Muslim women’s apparel remains a mystery.
It’s likely that a broadcasting burka may not be explicitly forbidden under Islamic law merely because it was never even conceived as a possibility by many Muslims.
Yet it’s no secret that electronic flirting is a bone of contention in some more traditional Muslim counties.
By 2002 it was so common for teenage Muslims in Saudi Arabia to send each other pictures of themselves by phone that the government imposed an import ban on camera phones. Demand won the day – it was so high that the law was retracted two years later.