No matter what you think of Islamic veiling one thing is for sure – criminalising the women who wear the burqa or niqab is only going to render them more invisible.
France looks set to pass legislation that bans Islamic face covering. The discussion over how this law could be enforced has centred around punishing the veiled woman. She will be taken home, or fined.
This belies the true intentions of those calling for a ban – banning the burqa is less about liberating oppressed muslim women and more about making white people feel more comfortable.
It is also about creating a scapegoat to unite and energise anti-muslim and anti-immigration sentiment. We should be mindful too that if the ban goes ahead yet another meaning will be transferred to this religious garment – that of defiance against the state on the part of women who flout the new laws.
The burqa ban is just one of a series of volleys fired in a chest-puffing display of European cultural dominance. The recent decision in Switzerland to ban minarets (there’s four of them there, they’re not exactly taking over the landscape), is somewhat dumbfounding if viewed in a vacuum, but it fits in with this overall shift towards a cultural war, which frames Islam as incompatible with secular Europe and enlightenment values.
This topic is a heated one and I am hesitant to weigh in. I’m an atheist white woman and I understand relatively little about the nuances surrounding this piece of clothing within a western context. Often muslim women are elided out of this conversation completely within the mainstream media, so I’m not going to unpack the significance of the burqa within a women’s rights framework, but I am going to talk about the reaction to it from western governments and the general western populace.
There are legitimate reasons to object to the burqa, including on theological grounds. The matter is hotly debated within the muslim community too and there are muslim women who have voiced support for the ban.
However, it is clear, from discussions I’ve had over the years, that it is often white men, who are not exactly torch bearers for the gender equity movement, who object the most vehemently to a woman who removes herself from their gaze. They not only object to face covering shrouds like the burqa, but also to the very common hijab. One problem these men have with the Islamic veil, even if they don’t realise it, is that it challenges their assumed entitlement to gaze upon women’s bodies – not a legitimate reason to object to the burqa. Of course, they co-opt the language of women’s rights to voice their objections.
Islamic veiling has become a marker of difference and a symbol of women’s oppression in muslim countries. That same oppression was used to justify a war in Afghanistan. Now the situation in Afghanistan, outside major centres such as Kabul, is worse than ever. The number of women driven, by such incredible despair, to commit suicide through self-immolation is at an all time high.
Our government has helped cement the power of brutal warlords in the country who are known for their crimes against humanity, in a war which began cloaked in talk of liberation, particularly the liberation of women. The West has a long tradition of using women to justify cultural imperialism and racism. It was also the West who helped to push the Afghan populace toward a radical and extreme interpretation of Islam in order to overthrow the Soviet occupation, funnily enough.
This selective concern for women’s rights is merely a way for people to articulate their racist nationalism and it’s an attitude that can be found through all levels of society – in the general populace, in the media, in the government.
One image that has stayed with me from the Cronulla riots all those years ago was of a hijabi running away from three young white men who were trying to rip off her headscarf. There was a lot of talk during that time of ‘their’ women and ‘our’ women. Women became, once again, the terrain on which to thrash out cultural difference on. Those men ripping off a young hijabi’s scarf probably still talk of how terribly muslim men treat muslim women without having the self-awareness to realise that they are the ones inflicting violence on and encouraging the oppression of that woman, not her brothers or her father.
Likewise, criminalising the 2000 women in France who wear the niqab or burqa (from the five million muslims in the country) only inflicts another form of oppression on fully covered women, both those who choose it and those who are pressured in to wearing it.
Imposing dress codes on people in order to oppose the imposing of dress codes on people is completely counterproductive, but as I outlined above, that’s not the real reason these laws are being considered, is it?
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