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Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Teaching to the Veil





A thick veil of commentary lies over the full burqa question, both here and abroad. I freely admit to having a powerful visceral reaction against fully veiled women (I've written about that here), and I've certainly done my best to understand the causes of my repulsion. Anne Applebaum, in the Washington Post, says some of what I feel:












...[T]he veil, as a political issue, won't go away. The French have banned not only the full veil but head scarves in state schools. Some German regions have banned the head scarf for civil servants too, and they are not permitted in Turkish universities at all. Slowly, the issue is coming to the United States: Just this month a Michigan judge dismissed a small-claims court case filed by a Muslim woman because she refused to remove her full-face veil while testifying.

Critics call the veil a symbol of female oppression or rejection of Western values. Defenders say that it is a symbol of religious faith and that it allows women to be "free" in a different sense -- free from cosmetics, from fashion and from unwanted male attention. Debate about the veil inevitably leads to discussions of female emancipation, religious freedom and the assimilation, or lack thereof, of Muslim communities in the West.

And yet, at a much simpler level, surely it is also true that the full-faced veil -- the niqab, burqa or chador -- causes such deep reactions in the West not so much because of its political or religious symbolism but because it is extremely impolite. Just as it is considered rude to enter a Balinese temple wearing shorts, so, too, is it considered rude, in a Western country, to hide one's face. We wear masks when we want to frighten, when we are in mourning or when we want to conceal our identities. To a Western child -- or even an adult -- a woman clad from head to toe in black looks like a ghost. Thieves and actors hide their faces in the West; honest people look you straight in the eye.


In Don DeLillo's great novel, Mao II, the fearless photographer, Brita, repelled by the face masks worn by the self-abnegating followers of a personality- cult leader, suddenly pulls one off of one of his fanatics and almost gets herself killed for her trouble. In a novel about the flight from freedom, about the psychological and ideological appeal of self-annihilation, this gesture expresses the sense shared by people committed to personal freedom that willful demolition of one's individuality, willful evisceration of one's ability to engage in civic life, is a kiss-off aimed at all democratic values.



The prospect of teaching someone unwilling to share with me the world of embodied humanity is chilling.




--- my thanks to grammarpolice.net for the image --