From the first hours of my writing honestly about burqas six months ago, our website swung out into unintended content directions.

In a world where honest talk is in short supply about burqas, Western women and Muslims, too, we launched quite a discussion at Anne of Carversville.

The Lubna Hussein case came a couple weeks later, and I haven’t looked back on what is a complex, multi-layered conversation around burqas.

In the world of fashion, a Persian Gulf woman can look both pious and cool, donning BQ shades, a burqa-branding concept from a London-based design firm Fitch brand in Dubai. via LATimes

The new BG shades attempt to offer the modest covering of niqab — oh where is Pixie when I need her! What we have here is a quasi-face veil, but the mouth is showing, so it’s not really niqab and certainly not burqa, which is a full body covering, as worn in Afghanistan.

The tag line on the BQ website says “it’s cool to be dramatic”. Forgive me, but that doesn’t sound very modest to me. And the debate is mostly about modesty, is it not?

Elan Magaine in London seems not quite so enamored with BG.

The Christian Science Monitor features an in-depth discussion Behind the Veil: Why Islam’s most visible symbol is spreading.

From my perspective, the article is fairly written, and I believe readers will agree. If not, you’ll say so. There’s very little new perspective in the article, but if you’ve not followed the conversations here, then the piece is an excellent overview article.

In an effort to spin the bottle a bit differently on this subject, I want to say that I’ve thought long and hard — I means hours and days on this subject of modesty, clothes and attitudes about women, and I believe that there’s as much misunderstanding about Western women from Muslim women and men as vice versa.

If you’re a regular reader of Anne of Carversville, you know that I believe strongly in women having control of their own bodies. This immediately puts me at odds with most religious figures and very religous women.

I agree with Shakira when she says that “libido is the engine of the world”.

Given the good that Shakira’s doing for poor kids in the world, since she set up her first foundation at age 18, I don’t believe that Shakira owes anyone any apologies for her clothes or dance moves. I’ll take her kind of social conscience and big-deal altruism any day of the week.

Shakira’s a mover and shaker among women, and I adore her for it. When two of the richest families in the world put $200 million behind her social activism and programs for kids, that Colombian chick can shake her hips any day of the week, in my playbook.

When Muslim women explain that they are more pious and respectable by freely covering themselves — as opposed to women who have no choice about how they will dress as in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, etc — I want to say that I’ve not felt disrespected by men because of my physicality.

With a single exception, a man has never run up and grabbed me on the streets in America, as happens constantly in Egypt and India, according to their press — not America’s.

Personally, I believe that Islam has built the woman as temptress argument into a larger than life story about sin in the West.

I’m at the gym almost every day, and it’s a very civilized co-ed place. I do not see men staring at good-looking women and dropping their dumbells. People are at the gym, not to gaze at the opposite sex, but to work up a sweat. Nothing even remotely bad happens ever.

These comments are just food for thought and a reminder that the conversation actually goes both ways.

Yes, Muslim women say they are discriminated against because Westerners are ambivaent about burqas. The Christian Science Monitor agrees with me that head coverings really aren’t the issue.

Western societies rely on eye contact and facial cues to communicate with each other. Frankly, animals do the same thing. This desire to see facial expressions is part of biological communication, empathy and human connection. It’s not anti-Islam.

Actually, I will research this topic, but I believe scientists tell us that the desire to connect and communicate with facial expressions is biological and in our DNA. We are hard-wired to look at each other’s facial cues.

Many women of every religion want to get out from under the partriarchal, clergy interpretations that brand women’s nature lascivious and impure — unless she proves otherwise. Many Western women are tired of being guilty until proven innocent.

Making some headway with Christian religions these past decades, we fear back-peddaling on woman as temptress arguments.

Western women believe we are honorable, upstanding women, even if you can see our eyes, legs, and the shape of our bodies. I freely admit that I’m less concerned about getting women out of burqas — when they’ve chosen to wear them, as opposed to have no freedom of choice — than having buraq-wearing women feed the notion that Western women are impure and immodest because we wear western street clothes.

Catholic nuns didn’t look so very different from Muslim women until a few years back. Many clergy would love to get all women wrapped up again with no birth control and as few rights as possible, being helpmates and properly submissive to men. Religious leaders regularly make these statements.

The ambivalence of many women about burqas has nothing to do with terrorism. We fear facing the piety argument all over again.

Mind you, the European women are more advanced on this concept than American women, who continue to struggle with the good girl/bad girl dichotomy.

One must also define what’s disrespect. I believe that a man screaming profanities at me and calling me stupid is far more disrespectful than a man appreciating the fact that I’m a good looking woman, treating me properly, and talking to me as if I have an intelligent brain.

Bottom line, this burqa business is far more complex than the story as now told.

I would like the media to investigate Muslim opinions of Western women among both genders, because I believe they will find every bit as much bias and discrimination against Western women, as Muslim women say they feel from Westerners.

Perhaps this is the nature of the cultural, societal beast — we all make assumptions about each other in an effort to rise above each other. In many cases, this is the nature of religion — to be the chosen ones and look down on others.

What I do know is that a woman can be honorable and decent and wear a skirt at the same time. I’m not accustomed to working and socializing with American or European men — and previously in my career Asian, Aussie and New Zealand men — who can’t get their minds out of the sexual gutter and focus on what matters at the moment.

Women are not regularly mauled in America or Europe, even if our arms are showing.

When I read in Arab press or blogs what life is like for Western women being 24/7 super sexy and getting no respect, I must say that people do not know what they are talking about. If you are programmed to believe that men are always looking at you as a sex object, then you will see leers and intentions that don’t even exist from people.

Quite simply, the men I know are way better than as desribed and discussed. But the subject is burqas. How the heck did I get on Western men. LOL Anne

While the World Debates Burqas, Fashion Designers Show Beautiful Abayas at Paris’s George V Hotel