… burqa issue.

A Washington Post writer talks to one of UD‘s colleagues about George Washington University’s recent decision to bar men from its swimming pool for one hour a week in order to accommodate Muslim women students.

… Ira Lupu [is] a law professor at GW who focuses on church-state issues. I asked him if Muslim women could argue religious discrimination if they couldn’t use the pool because of men, or if male students could argue they were losing out? He seemed to think the latter camp had a better argument due to Title IX’s ban on sexual discrimination in educational programs that get federal money.

“If I was in the [university’s] office of general counsel, I’d say make it the same for men as women,” said Lupu.

… the hicky controversy.

UD doesn’t watch tv… Do all American political tv ads have the music from Halloween playing in the background?

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Update: A reader, Crimson05er, sends UD this parody of political ads. UD and Mr UD loved it.

… in Italy.

A Perth judge has ordered that a Muslim woman must remove a full burqa while giving evidence before a jury in a fraud case.

Judge Shauna Deane today ruled that the witness must remove her niqab, or burqa face covering when she gives evidence to the jury…

Ruby Hamad, an Australian-born Muslim, writes in the Sydney Morning Herald:

… [B]y decrying all criticism of the burqa as bigoted, we are actually consolidating its previously tenuous position within mainstream Islam in Australia, and thus hindering the religion’s progression in this country.

When even the so-called permissive West is staunchly defending an article of clothing whose primary function is to deny the sexual autonomy of a human being based on nothing other than her gender, what recourse does a lone Muslim woman have to stand against it?…

A professor at an Indian university refused to teach in a burqa. The student union told her she had to.

The university refused to back her up. She went to the media and made a humongous fuss.

In the wake of a “public outcry,” the minority affairs minister intervened.

After not being able to teach for three months, she is back in the classroom. No burqa.

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Says here that all of the other women teaching at this university have agreed to wear the burqa.

Now that Sirin Middya has lifted the veil, I wouldn’t be too sure about that.

… calls for a ban on burqas in universities.

… where ultra-orthodox Jewish women in the hundreds are covering their faces and being mistaken by police for terrorists and annoying their husbands.

A group of these women is demanding a totally veiled school for their daughters, where everyone will wear the burqa.

So annoyed are their husbands that they have gotten a major rabbinical organization to ban the practice. But this won’t work, since the women are under the control of a charismatic burqa-cult leader — a woman accused of child abuse.

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I find most intriguing about the Israeli story the language Israelis and other observers are bringing to burqa wearing. It is the language of pathology. Burqa wearing is a “craze,” it’s “weird,” it’s “obsessional,” it’s a kind of nutty “competitiveness” — who can be the most zealous? It’s a “sexual fetish”, it’s “promiscuous,” it’s “extreme” …

What happened to the language of religious respect most observers have brought to Muslim women wearing burqas in Europe?

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.