Bikini Diplomacy,
by Tunku Varadarajan
By making a Muslim woman their Miss USA, the judges may have done more to further American cultural diplomacy than all our government efforts combined. So instead of calling her win exploitation or affirmative action, why not rejoice in it?
Alexis de Tocqueville can hardly have had the likes of Rima Fakih in mind when he wrote, on the nature of assimilation in American society: “In the midst of the continual movement which agitates a democratic community, the tie which unites one generation to another is relaxed or broken; every man readily loses the trace of the ideas of his forefathers or takes no care about them.”
Ms. Fakih, as readers of this website must know, was crowned Miss USA earlier this week, making her the first Shiite on whom Donald Trump has bestowed his tiara. My first reaction was to wonder whether she was a Mossad agent in deep disguise. My second was to applaud her for the gusto of her assimilation, and for the extent to which this Muslim woman, clearly not an assiduous practitioner of her faith, had embraced American ways.
This integration by bikini could go a long way toward demonstrating to Americans that Muslims are not a weirdly, frighteningly monolithic group, and thus begin to break down prejudice.
And yet, missing this last point altogether, some clod-headed killjoys on the right have attacked the pageant’s organizers for “an odd form of affirmative action”. How could these critics have failed to respond more imaginatively to Ms. Fakih’s beguiling example? Her American integration has been wrought by a thoroughgoing subversion of her own forefathers’ cultural norms; and I can think of few sets of cultural norms that are as mutually exclusive as those of Middle America, on the one hand, and the Shiite faith, on the other............
