@mattbrowne – It’s profoundly disturbing that you are couching my argument in terms of moral relativism.
Arguments against the banning of the burqa are not by any means an expression of a need to culturally approve of the burqa. As I stated, and apparently need to reiterate, banning the burqa might very well push isolationist communities into more repressive behavior that will become increasingly private and separatist, so that law enforcement communities will have no way of detecting that domestic abuse is accuring.
Consider below:
Despite the ban being canvassed by both left and right as a measure to liberate oppressed Muslim women, it is opposed by leading human rights groups. “At a time when Muslims in Europe feel more vulnerable than ever, the last thing needed is a ban like this,” said Judith Sunderland of Human Rights Watch on 21 April. “Treating pious Muslim women like criminals won’t help integrate them.” The irony of using the threat of prison to free women from the so-called prison of the burqa is not lost on Muslim commentators, either. “The Belgians have a funny idea of liberation,” says the British Muslim writer and activist Myriam François-Cerrah: “criminalising women in order to free them.”
Amnesty International has condemned the Belgian move as “an attack on religious freedom”, and Sunderland has said that “restrictions on women wearing the veil in public life are as much a violation of the rights of women as is forcing them to wear a veil”. The award-winning Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, an outspoken critic of the veil, agrees. “It is surely a basic human right that someone can choose what she wears without interference from the state,” she wrote.
In his report, Hasan claims he’s not defending a ban and says he agrees with the 100 or so imams and Muslim religious advisers from 40 different countries at a recent conference in Vienna organised by the Islamic Religious Authority in Austria, who concluded that Islam does not make it a requirement for women to wear face veils. After all, the face veil is mentioned nowhere in the Quran, nor is there a Quranic injunction to cover the face.
According to him, even in the traditions, or hadith, of the Prophet Muhammad, there is no explicit command for Muslim women to cover their faces – only their hair. In fact, Muslim women are forbidden from offering the five daily prayers and from going on the Hajj – the religious pilgrimage to Mecca – if their faces are covered.
Mohammad Marmaduke Pickthall, the renowned English convert to Islam and translater of the Quran, observed in his 1925 lecture “The Relation of the Sexes” that the veiling of the face by women was “not originally an Islamic custom. It was prevalent in many cities of the East before the coming of Islam, but not in the cities of Arabia.” Muslim leaders adopted the face veil for their women, he said, “when they entered the cities of Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia and Egypt. It was once a concession to the prevailing custom and was a protection to their women from misunderstanding by peoples accustomed to associate unveiled faces with loose character . . . It has nothing to do with the religion of Islam, and, for practical reasons, it has never been adopted by the great majority of Muslim women.”
Hasan says his own Muslim wife, of Indian origin but born and brought up in the United States, wears a headscarf (but not a face veil). “She made the decision to wear the hijab at the age of 25, and it was a spiritual, not a political or cultural choice. I accept that, for many Muslim women, covering their face is not a choice, but is a ban the best response? There are many reasons to believe it is self-defeating,” he argues.
For a start, state-imposed bans will poison relations between Muslims and non-Muslims even further. Bans often encourage defiance. In the words of the atheist writer Shikha Dalmia, of the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, “this law can’t help but inflame French Muslims, not encourage them to assimilate. Besieged minorities after all tighten – not loosen – their grip on their ways.”
During Britain’s own row over the veil in 2006, which was prompted by the then cabinet minister Jack Straw’s revelation that he had insisted Muslim women remove their face veils at his constituency surgeries in Blackburn, Islamic clothing stores across the north-west of England reported a rise in sales of niqabs, burqas and other veils. One Muslim teenager I later met told me it had been Straw’s remarks that prompted her to switch from wearing the hijab to the niqab.
Then there is the matter of enforcement. How will a ban work in practice? Will wealthy tourists from Gulf states also be prevented from wearing the niqab or the burqa as they shop along the Champs-Élysées? Or should the ban be limited to public buildings? If so, why the need for new legislation when a law already exists banning conspicuous religious symbols from public places such as hospitals and schools? Even Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Islamophobic National Front has questioned the need for new legislation, saying “it should simply be a police regulation”.
Most damningly, there is early evidence that a ban on the face veil could serve further to isolate and seclude the marginalised Muslim women whom it is supposed to help liberate. In Italy, at the end of April, Tunisian-born Amel Marmouri became the first woman to be fined for wearing a face veil when she was stopped outside a post office in the city of Novara. Marmouri was fined €500 – and her husband has said he will now ensure she stays at home so that she never again has to venture out without her veil.
Other opponents of the move point out that only tiny percentages of Muslim women wear such veils and that banning them risks isolating the women concerned and fuelling anger within the Muslim community.
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If wearing the burqa is truly a sign that the individual is being oppressed, and it is outlawed, so that men are unable to ensure that their wives can leave the home without appearing immodest, it is a near certainty that the women will not be allowed to leave the home.
Oppressive practices are best dispelled not when they are shoved into the dark, but when they’re brought into the light. Your support of a ban on the burqa promises, not potentially could cause, as much harm as good, and could set back any community outreach and education we could provide for these oppressed women years, even decades.
I will celebrate the time when the burqa or anything comparable is a thing of the past. It’s your method, not your goal, that is wrong.
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