Excerpts from the best denunciation of the burqa I’ve so far read. It’s by Feisal G. Mohamed.

… Liberty of conscience limits human institutions so that they do not interfere with the sacrosanct relationship between the soul and God, and in its strict application allows a coerced soul to run its course into the abyss. In especially unappealing appeals to this kind of liberty, bigots of all varieties have claimed an entitlement to their views on grounds of tender conscience.

… The burqa controversy revolves around a central question: “Does this cultural practice performed in the name of religion inherently violate the principle of equality that democracies are obliged to defend?”

… Lockean religious toleration… expects religious observance … to conform to the aims of a democratic polity. We might see the French response to the burqa as an expression of that tradition. After a famously misguided initial attempt to do away with all Muslim headwear in schools and colleges, French legislators later settled down to an evaluation of the point at which headwear becomes an affront to gender equality, passing most recently a ban on the niqab, or face veil — which has also been barred from classrooms and dormitories at Cairo’s Al’Azhar University, the historical center of Muslim learning.

… Our various social formations — political, religious, social, familial — find their highest calling in deepening our bonds of fellow feeling. “Compelling state interest” has no inherent value; belief also has no inherent value. Political and religious positions must be measured against the purity of truths, rightly conceived as those principles enabling the richest possible lives for our fellow human beings.

So let us attempt such a measure. The kind of women’s fashion favored by the Taliban might legitimately be outlawed as an instrument of gender apartheid — though one must have strong reservations about the enforcement of such a law, which could create more divisiveness than it cures.

… [S]ome [religious] belief provides a deeply humane resistance to state power run amok. To belief of this kind there is no legitimate barrier.

Humane action is of course open to interpretation. But if we place it at the center of our aspirations, we will make decisions more salutary than those offered by the false choice between state interest and liberty of conscience. Whitman may have been the first post-secularist in seeing that political and religious institutions declaring certain bodies to be shameful denigrate all human dignity: every individual is a vibrant body electric deeply connected to all beings by an instinct of fellow feeling. Such living democracy shames the puerile self-interest of modern electoral politics, and the worn barbarisms lurking under the shroud of retrograde orthodoxy…

Time to find out what it feels like to have sun on your face.

It’s titled The Burqa, and Being in the World.

You can read it here.

The Assemblée Nationale passes the burqa ban.

From CNN:

The vote was 335 to 1, with 339 lawmakers not voting. [Why would you not vote?]

… French people back the ban by a margin of more than four to one, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found in a survey this spring.

Some 82 percent of people polled approved of a ban, while 17 percent disapproved. That was the widest support the Washington-based think tank found in any of the five countries it surveyed.

Clear majorities also backed burqa bans in Germany, Britain and Spain, while two out of three Americans opposed it, the survey found.

… The bill envisions a fine of 150 euros ($190) and/or a citizenship course as punishment for wearing a face-covering veil.

Forcing a woman to wear a niqab or a burqa would be punishable by a year in prison or a 15,000-euro ($19,000) fine, the government said, calling it “a new form of enslavement that the republic cannot accept on its soil.”

The measure would take effect six months after passage, giving authorities time to try to persuade women who veil themselves voluntarily to stop…

Amnesty International cautions that some women completely annihilate their public existence “as an expression of their identity.”

A conundrum worthy of Jacques Derrida.

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Update: One advantage of all the attention the burqa has been getting lately: Thoughtful feminists are revisiting the issue. Here’s an example, from a blog written by a group of British feminists. One of the bloggers who has until now opposed burqa bans notes that

Mona Eltahawy’s comments have really given me pause for thought as a feminist.

She’s particularly responsive to these comments from Eltahawy:

I often tell (feminists) that what they’re doing is supporting an ideology that does not believe in a woman’s right to do anything. We’re talking about women who cannot travel alone, cannot drive, cannot even go into a hospital without a man with them. And yet there is basically one right that we are fighting for these women to have, and that is the right to cover their faces. To tell you the truth, I’m really outraged that people get into these huge fights and say that as a feminist you must support a women’s right to do this, because it’s basically the only kind of “right” that this ideology wants to give women. Otherwise they get nothing.

As UD anticipated, businessmen (well, one… there will be others) are stepping up to handle the fines burqa-wearing women in France – or their husbands – will soon have to pay.

UD anticipated that the Saudi government would be the first to make such a move, and she continues to hope that it will, because however rich one businessman is, he can never hope to compete with the endless resources of a country.

There is no question in UD‘s mind that, what with the growing popularity of burqas in Europe, and the very great need of countries like France for revenue, this is a fiscal marriage made in heaven. If UD were debating the ban in the National Assembly right now, she would urge lawmakers to designate the money for use in the education of young women.

She would also urge fervent American defenders of the burqa to make a contribution. Talk is easy.

Ain’t gettin’ anything out of her, though.

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Update:

First line of Radio France International’s coverage:

The burqa, the cloth bag which some Muslim men find it reasonable to keep their women inside, is facing a ban here in France.

“I personally feel that covering one’s face blocks human interaction, in a Western sense.”

Only in a Western sense, though. In the East, human interaction works beautifully with everyone’s face covered.

I mean, with every female’s face covered.

SOCIALISTS TO BOYCOTT BURKA VOTE

France’s opposition Socialist Party will refuse to vote on a bill banning full-face cover, the party’s MPs decided on Tuesday ahead of the opening of the parliamentary debate on the much-publicised proposal.

“We are against the burka but we believe that the means chosen to outlaw it are not good,” party leader Martine Aubry said after telling deputies that they should not take part in the vote scheduled for 13 July.

Earlier the Socialists were against passing a law on the question, arguing that the perceived problem is “marginal” and that President Nicolas Sarkozy was exploiting it to continue the “nauseating” debate on national identity.

But, after a year of intense debate and with opinion polls showing support for the move, they have backed away from outright opposition…

That’s it. Instead of at least taking part in the discussion, put your head in a sack and sulk.

I mean, franchement, if you hate the fucker, vote against it. If you think it’s an expression of personal liberty, vote for it. If you’re all je ne sais quoi about it, share your uncertainties in the political arena. Saperlipopette.

… continues the fight against reactionaries on campus.

… I was 13 when I came to hate the Taliban and knew that someday I would have to fight them. A woman who lived on our street was walking home, with her baby in one arm and her shopping in the other. Her little daughter was close behind, holding on to her mother’s covering. My neighbor was having difficulty walking because of the mud and lifted her burqa for just a moment so she could see better how to cross the road. Taliban members ran up from behind and began to beat her head and back with a long length of thick, metal cable. I watched as she dropped her own baby in the ditch and screamed from the pain…

Khoshal Sadat, New York Times

Soon I won’t have anything burqa-related to complain about.

The New York Times covers Pakistan’s ban on a play called Burqavaganza.

The article and film clip make clear that the play’s writer recognizes not merely the repressive nature of the garment, but its power as a “metaphor for hypocrisy in a ‘hidden nation.'”

[Take the case] of Amel Marmouri, arrested for wearing the burqa at a post office in Novara, Italy… There was nothing left for it, said her husband; he would have to keep her at home “night and day”. His reaction seems extreme, perhaps even cruel, to more liberal people…

Nazar Online

Spain joins many other European nations. Catalonia got there ahead of everyone else.

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Update: A past president of the Canadian Muslim Congress weighs in on a legal case there.

… Why is the law even considering accommodating a symbol of women’s subservience?

… For groups who fear forced sequestration of women as a result of state legislation, suffice it to say they are assuming the worst. Their conclusion is based on the flawed assumption that niqabi women will invariably refuse adherence to the legislation. Even the woman known as N.S. has agreed to testify without her veil if she loses [her legal effort to testify while wearing it]. She must be encouraged to overcome her discomfort in facing her alleged attackers. She cannot live her entire life hiding behind her niqab…

… A society that permits the marginalization of women is indeed a dysfunctional society. The proliferation of the niqab, and all it stands for, spell serious repercussions for Canadian society and its values built on gender equality.

Canada’s courts must set precedents discouraging this trend rather than accommodating it to satisfy the most retrogressive segments of Canadian Muslim society.

Feminists in Canada defend the right of a person testifying in a trial to hide her face behind a niqab; Muslims in Canada oppose the feminists.

A precedent-setting case that could determine whether a woman can wear a niqab while testifying in Canadian courts has a leading feminist group and a national Muslim organization on opposite sides of the contentious debate. But their respective positions, outlined in written arguments filed with the Ontario Court of Appeal, may come as a surprise.

The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) is arguing that an alleged victim of sexual assault must be permitted to wear the Muslim veil if it is part of her religion.

… Requiring a Muslim woman to remove her veil while testifying “could very well be seen and experienced as an act of racial, religious and gendered domination,” [said LEAF].

Before we hear what the Muslim organization has to say, let’s stop there for a moment. Listen to what LEAF is saying. Asking a woman to show her face, even for a few minutes while testifying in a trial, is a form of domination over her.

In contrast, the Muslim Canadian Congress maintains that religious freedoms are not absolute and must be balanced against the long-standing right of a criminal defendant to see his accuser in court and assess demeanour. As well, the Muslim group argues that … “The covered female face is a reminder to the wearer that she is not free and to the observer that she is a possession…”

The founder of the organization, Tarek Fatah, said yesterday that it is not trying to make it more difficult for Muslim women to testify in sexual assault cases. “They should be treated like any other woman and receive the same protections,” he said. (The Criminal Code provides for witnesses to testify by closed circuit television or behind a screen where they can be seen, but they cannot see the accused).

… LEAF counters that fair trial rights are being used as an excuse to justify stereotypes. “In the current political climate of fear and distrust of veiled Muslim women, courts and juries need to be alert to existing prejudices that a Muslim woman who covers her face cannot be believed,” writes [a lawyer representing] LEAF.

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UPDATE: Doublespeak.

According to written arguments filed by one of her lawyers, she is on par with female heroes of the civil rights movement: “Henrietta Muir Edwards just wanted to sit in the [Canadian] Senate. Rosa Parks just wanted to sit at the front [of the bus]. N.S. just wants to sit in the witness box wearing her niqab.”

Comparing N.S. to Ms. Edwards, Ms. Parks or any women who fought for sexual or racial equality takes us to heights of doublespeak. These women struggled to escape the shackles of discriminatory laws that kept them out of their chosen professions, restricted their ability to vote, forbade them from owning property, or banned them from even drinking at the same water fountain. Now, a woman who wants to cover herself from head to toe in a manner that excludes her from the mainstream of society is striking a blow for women’s equality?

Worse yet is the logic employed by the feminist legal advocates LEAF (the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund), which is intervening in this matter in support of N.S. Because she is Muslim, they question the entire value of her “demeanour evidence” (the usual in-person testimony which allows the court to judge a witness’s body language and facial expressions). LEAF submitted that “In this case, the sexual assault complainant is a woman of colour from a stigmatized racial/religious minority. The value of her demeanour evidence, already deeply suspect as a sexual assault complainant, is thrown into further question by the inevitable influence of prejudices (whether overt or hidden) relating to these additional markers of discrimination.”

By this logic, why should any woman have to testify in person in a rape case, particularly if she isn’t white or Christian? Why not put all women in a niqab so that their demeanour won’t be held against them in court?

Tasha Kheiriddin
National Post

A new crackdown on even minor alterations of the hijab is taking place in Iran. Guards are appearing at the gates of universities. They turn away insufficiently hidden women.

“I believe Hijab is an invisible political tool for the stagnant, patriarchal politics… a view that gives priority to woman’s sexuality over her other human dimensions,” [a student said] in a telephone interview from Tehran.

“Undoubtedly, the totalitarian system’s patronising way of thinking encourages people to deny their bodies, wear unkempt clothes, and gravitate toward sadness, and it has no room for human health and development. This thinking cannot be effective in reducing abnormal behaviour in the society,” she said.