In Praise of Shame

deafmuslimpunk:

creatrixtiara:

shoomlah:

Okay, these are getting more and more complicated, but this one was fun.

Let’s be frank- Aladdin is hardly an exercise in historical accuracy. Combine that with Claire knowing veeeery little about pre-Islamic Middle Eastern clothing before starting on Jasmine, and you’ve got yourself a few days of research before digging into this thing.

It took some effort to track down some midriff-baring outfits but BY GEORGE I DID, thank you Persian fashion plates. I now know what sirwal are called (besides Hammer pants), and that Persian women wore some pretty sweet little jackets that I wish I owned.

OH ALSO I DREW A KITTY

Aladdin is indeed hardly accurate in any way. The movie’s basically Indian iconography placed randomly in the Arab world - the tiger, the names Jasmine and Raj, what Jasmine’s dad is wearing. Having Jasmine wear something Persian is still inaccurate though, as you’re now introducing a third cultural element. Persia != Arab != India.

If you wanted to draw Jasmine with historical accuracy (and I can’t see why it can’t be placed in modern times; many Middle Eastern countries still have royalty) you’d need to figure out what the Middle Eastern monarchy wear, which is likely not something body-revealing. Or you’d choose to keep true to the Indian style and find something from there (which again need not necessarily be ages ago).

Wow, I’m so fucking sick of dumbasses who keep mixing up Indian, Persian, and Arab cultures together. We’re NOT the one and same. Get a clue, dumbass artist whoever drew this crap.

The original tale “Aladdin”, which is part of the collection “One Thousand and One Nights” (Arabian Nights), and which the Disney film is based on, is a mix-up of different cultures, though, so I suppose Disney were just continuing the tradition. In the story, Aladdin is actually Chinese, although it is set in a China that never actually existed - one that is an Islamic nation. The tale itself is of Middle-Eastern origin, not Chinese (the original inventor of the tale seems to have had little idea of what China was actually like, but the decision to set a story in a faraway and exotic land in order to make it seem more interesting is hardly unusual). It would be practically impossible to depict the characters from Aladdin (the Disney film) in historically accurate clothing, because the setting itself is not historically accurate, and has never been. I suppose that as suggested you could just pick a location and time period (Aladdin was first translated into French in the early 1700s, but I don’t think that anybody knows for sure when it dates from).

(via the-goblin-king)