An interesting, if somewhat inflammatory article comes to us today from Barbara Kay at Pajamas Media, in which she calls upon “the West” (however we are to define that term today) to ban the burqa and nix the niqab. She pulls no punches and comes right out of the gate praising France and Nicolas Sarkozy (of all people) for their attempts to ban the primarily Muslim full body covering for women in that country.
President Nicolas Sarkozy had called for a ban on the public wearing of the burqa altogether. But as of this writing, apparently a compromise has been struck and the burqa will be banned in public buildings only.
A partial ban is better than nothing, though, and may hopefully serve to inject some steel into the spine of other European nations who feel threatened by the rise of anti-Western radicalization amongst their own growing Muslim populations.
It may be my fundamental libertarian streak or the way that Ray Bradbury’s seminal works have embedded themselves in our collective conscience, but I always develop an alarming tic in one eye when I hear people using words “government” and “ban” in the same sentence. Of course, that may just stem from the way that “books” so often follows those words in short order. When you mix in a subject like this which also incorporates questions of religious practices outside of Christianity, the discomfort level rises further. Still, Ms. Kay anticipates my concerns and addresses them early on, albeit in a rather dismissive fashion.
Critics will claim that these garments do no harm to others and nobody has the right to interfere with women’s religious choices in a free society. But President Sarkozy got it right last June in explaining to Parliament why the burqa is “not welcome in the French Republic”: “The burqa is not a sign of religion; it is a sign of subservience.”
As with most things, subservience and religion tend to be in the eye of the beholder. It’s certainly true that the burqa is not specifically mentioned anywhere in the Quran, but it does instruct both men and women to dress and behave “modestly” in public. If you give any religious group a couple of centuries to play with phrases like that, you never know what you’ll get, but the religious traditions of the faith have also built up a heavy reliance on the concept of Namus, which ties in many stifling features in an effort to preserve the virginity, modesty and anonymity of females in the various families and clans.
I’m not here to defend a practice like this… far from it. Women have had to overcome a lot of challenges to get where they are in America and much of “the West” today, and I have no interest in sending them back to the dark ages. But a question such as the one raised by Barbara Kay comes with a whole slew of concerns in a society which provides the choices she mentions above and doesn’t place restrictions on which religion, gender or hair color gets to enjoy them.
But none of this addresses a deeper, underlying issue which merits attention, but is dismissed by the author in this brief throw-away passage:
Algerian-born Fadela Amara, France’s cities minister, reinforced her view in an interview with the Financial Times: “The vast majority of Muslims are against the burqa. It is obvious why. Those who have struggled for women’s rights back home in their own countries — I’m thinking particularly of Algeria — we know what it represents and what the obscurantist political project is that lies behind it, to confiscate the most fundamental liberties.”
I will readily agree that it might seem “obvious” (particularly to modernized, western oriented thinkers) that the “majority” of people would oppose dressing up women in burqas, but there are any number of practices from various religions which can offend modern sensibilities. If you’ll forgive the brief digression, let’s take a look at a couple of them.
Amish families – quite Christian by definition – still largely dress their women in neck to floor, black, formless dress designed to modestly hide the female form. They also keep them away from electricity and all modern channels of access to enhanced education and related advances. Remote, non-reformed Mormon groups (also ostensibly Christian by most accounts) also enforce very strict dress policies on females, along with other atrocities as viewed by the majority.
To ward off the protests I’m sure will follow, I’ll borrow a phrase from Ms. Kay and say, “critics will claim” that nobody is threatening to murder the Amish or Mormon girls in an “honor killing” if they don’t comply. (Though an argument could be made in the latter case on some of those compounds.) But that’s not the point. Murder and other violent treatment is already against the law in these western societies and, as such, must be ferreted out and punished where it’s found. The question at hand is whether or not a government such as ours can be allowed to forbid the wearing of the offending garb.
But let’s move away from the clothing specific questions for a moment and hit another subject near and dear to the hearts of many women’s rights activists – the Jewish “purity laws.” There are more of them than you can shake a stick at and they include provisions such as identifying certain days of the month when women are considered to be “unclean.” At such times, men are not to lie on the same bed nor even sit upon a chair where such an “unclean” woman has sat. How can any modern woman or feminist inclined man countenance such a society among us?
Last year I had the pleasure of interviewing A.J. Jacobs, author of the fantastic book, “The Year of Living Biblically.” It’s the story of his search, as a young Jewish man, for meaning and faith by attempting to follow every law in the Bible for an entire year. (You can still listen to the replay of the interview here if you wish.) I asked him that very question and he explained that many women in very orthodox Jewish communities are not offended by the laws at all for the same reason that these families employ the services of textile experts to inspect all of their clothing to make sure it’s not composed of two different types of fabric. You don’t need to know the reason, A.J. informed me. That’s not what’s important. You do it because that is your understanding of the instructions from God as practiced by your community. (It is worth noting here that not all Muslims enforce the burqa rules, just as not all American Jews observe the purity laws.)
But I think some critics who call for “outlawing the burqa” the most loudly may either have an ulterior motive or at least feel a bit more free to do so. There isn’t much of a political price to pay today if you condemn the practices of Muslims. By contrast, however, questioning some of the practices of Jews which are clearly offensive to women isn’t quite as safe, is it? Because that is immediately viewed as questioning Judaism as a whole, and by association, Israel. And that’s a big Bozo No-No in most conservative, Republican circles, don’t you think?
Modern society has a clear duty to help women who find themselves subjected to such rules against their will, and we certainly provide an atmosphere here in the United States where they can try to break free from those chains. But shall the federal government be handed the power to outlaw a particular style of dress in the process? More government control is rarely the answer to anything, and sometimes the people can influence the actions of their members through social pressure without handing another power to Washington.