A few days ago I posted a comment in which I suggested that identifying and measuring social “integration” might be a little more complex that we often think. Today I encountered an even more interesting illustration of this.
I was waiting at the bus stop on my way back from my weekly Italian class at Leeds Beckett University, and found myself standing next to three young women, all dressed in traditional Islamic fashion. I gathered that one of them had expressed interest in taking up kick-boxing, and was recounting the response of her family to this suggestion. The idea had been opposed by her mother and father….but supported vigorously by her grandfather. “Why shouldn’t a young woman be able to defend herself?” he had said, and in any case it was up to her to make up her own mind.
Evidently traditional dress is no reliable indicator of cultural integration or lack of it. We need to put a question-mark also over the often taken-for-granted assumption that the elderly are always a force for conservatism.