I never thought I'd find myself praising the burkha, though I understand its value for privacy (a value which doesn't mean its imposition is acceptable). Generally westerners think of it as imprisoning, yet in today's environment of mass-surveillance by CCTV it might represent freedom. Modern life is ironic, that way.
When spy cameras are installed in the halls and entrances of apartment buildings (against the pleas of those who value privacy), it puts us in mind of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (1791) -- a jail where prisoners might be spied on at any time by guards without knowing when they would be, so they behaved as if they were at all times. Correction officers did the spying, and "correctness" rules our lives today; we are monitored in more ways than one.
Today, CCTV surveillance is used in schools, asylums, workplaces, streets ... There's no escape. Hats and hoodies aren't enough, we need some sort of mobile tent to hide within if we want real privacy when we go out beyond our own front door.
But wait! That mobile tent already exists: the burkha. No wonder women is some countries put it on with a sense of relief. That is counter-intuitive to us westerners, but privacy and anonymity too are forms of freedom, which is going extinct .
So now I see the point of burkhas, for their wearers. It's for disguise, a place from which you can see but not be seen, and in that there's a freedom we lack as we come and go down residential hallways, minding our own business but being tracked like criminals.
Who knew a primitive length of cloth with some very negative associations could become a tool of freedom in the also-negative metamorphoses of modern public spaces? You might not know who's wearing one. "Burkhas For Privacy"? Take that, spies!
