Egyptian Scribbles: flowers

Wednesday, 7 November 2007

Cairo Shopfronts II

Here are a couple more shopfronts that caught my eye this evening. The shop on the far RHS appears to sell underwear. The window display changes frequently and I'm continually amazed what appears on these models. Sometimes the female figures (like the girl model in this picture) are veiled. Sometimes the underwear is modest and unsexy. But most times there is a strange blend of hijabs/veils, and lingerie suitable for the most racey XX movies. What exactly is the woman wearing in this photograph?? I love the fact that she has a modest scarf draped over her shoulders and long sleeves covering her arms, but also has gaping holes all down her breasts and thighs! I guess we never know what women are wearing under their niqabs!

I also liked the photo of the flower shop with all the plastic flowers out on display. There are some beautiful fresh-flower displays in some of the houses and offices in Cairo. But more frequently, people have grand displays of plastic flowers -- if gold gilt and any other extra embellishment can also be incorporated, then all the better!

Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."