Jean-Francois Copé, “majority leader in the French National Assembly and the mayor of Meaux” attempts, in the pages of the New York Times, to explain.
… The visibility of the face in the public sphere has always been a public safety requirement. It was so obvious that until now it did not need to be enshrined in law. But the increase in women wearing the niqab, like that of the ski mask favored by criminals, changes that. We must therefore adjust our law, without waiting for the phenomenon to spread.
The permanent concealment of the face also raises the question of social interactions in our democracies. In the United States, there are very few limits on individual freedom, as exemplified by the guarantees of the First Amendment. In France, too, we are passionately attached to liberty.
But we also reaffirm our citizens’ equality and fraternity. These values are the three inseparable components of our national motto. We are therefore constantly striving to achieve a delicate balance. Individual liberty is vital, but individuals, like communities, must accept compromises that are indispensable to living together, in the name of certain principles that are essential to the common good.
… [I]n both France and the United States, we recognize that individual liberties cannot exist without individual responsibilities. This acknowledgment is the basis of all our political rights. We are free as long as we are responsible individuals who can be held accountable for our actions before our peers. But the niqab and burqa represent a refusal to exist as a person in the eyes of others. The person who wears one is no longer identifiable; she is a shadow among others, lacking individuality, avoiding responsibility…
Let’s take a look at the first woman fined for doing so.
[Amel Marmouri, a Tunisian immigrant resident in Novara, an Italian town,] was in a post office when police officers stopped her and issued her with [a 500 euro fine for wearing a burqa].
“As far as I know this is a first in Italy,” said police officer Mauro Franzinelli.
Her husband, Ben Salah Braim, 36, said the family would struggle to pay the penalty.
He said his wife would continue to wear the full-length item of clothing because he did not want her to be seen by other men, but in future she would be forced to stay at home most of the time…
And what does Amel have to say?
Amel?
Amel?
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As for the struggle to pay the penalty: Wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia, which feel strongly about fully veiling their women, should establish a Save the Burqa fund for this purpose.
Next up, France and Denmark.
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“We’re the first country to spring the locks that have made a good number of women slaves, and we hope to be followed by France, Switzerland, Italy, and the Netherlands; countries that think,” said Denis Ducarme, a liberal deputy.
… the Poles will be leaning – very visibly – in the next few weeks of masses and memorials make the most recent New York Times column by Stanley Fish particularly topical.
He’s reviewing a book by Jurgen Habermas, titled An Awareness of What is Missing, in which Habermas — long associated with the view that “the authority of the holy,” is in the process of being successfully replaced, in modern, secular culture with “the authority of an achieved consensus” — seems to change his mind. Fish writes:
In recent years … Habermas’s stance toward religion has changed. First, he now believes that religion is not going away and that it will continue to play a large and indispensable part in many societies and social movements. And second, he believes that in a post-secular age — an age that recognizes the inability of the secular to go it alone — some form of interaction with religion is necessary: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”
What’s missing, then, is the “substance of the human,” “normative guidance” …
[The] modern Liberal state, … Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield. Worldviews bring with them substantive long-term goals that serve as a check against local desires. Worldviews furnish those who live within them with reasons that are more than merely prudential or strategic for acting in one way rather than another.
The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.”
The liberal citizen is taught that he is the possessor of rights and that the state exists to protect those rights, chief among which is his right to choose. The content of what he chooses — the direction in which he points his life — is a matter of indifference to the state which guarantees his right to go there just as it guarantees the corresponding rights of his neighbors (“different strokes for different folks”). Enlightenment rational morality, Habermas concludes, “is aimed at the insight of individuals, and does not foster any impulse toward solidarity, that is, toward morally guided collective action.”
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You see the moral paralysis Habermas has in mind in a recent interview about the burqa with historian Joan Wallach Scott in Salon.
Scott insists that “One can’t assume …that [the burqa] signifies oppression.”
Why then, her interviewer asks, “does the [burqa] so dominate conversations about the rights of Muslim women?”
Well, that’s an interesting question. I think it is a way of avoiding talking about the discrimination Muslims (men and women) face in Western societies, a way of indicating “our” superiority to “them,” of blaming “them” for the discrimination they suffer, a way of depicting “them” as less modern, less enlightened than “us.”
There are, that is, no standards of enlightenment or modernity among us. As Scott’s quotation marks suggest, there’s no us. There are only bunches of people making choices and suffering discrimination as a result of some of those choices.
Muslim women, Scott says, must be choosing the burqa. Some of them must be choosing it. Enough of them for our liberal states to honor their choice.
We’re forced into this assumption because we have no general moral point of view from which we could assume otherwise, or, more importantly, from which we could put aside questions of the motivation of these women and instead defend our own set of collective moral principles.
Scott seems unable to perceive, in other words, the evisceration of “the substance of the human” that the burqa makes visible to pretty much everyone else.
On a deeper level, defending our own set of collective moral principles would be, for Scott, a logical absurdity, since we don’t exist (only individual choosers or groups of choosers exist). And its realization would be an abomination, since acting collectively on behalf of what can only be, as she describes it, a self-aggrandizing myth, would make us savage bigots.
… for women in Belgium’s universities. For women all over the country. For the country.
Support for the ban in Belgium transcended party lines, ranging from the Greens to the far right, and also resulted in a rare show of unity between the linguistically divided halves of the country.
In April 2009, organisers invited three radical Islamist preachers to address the [City University London’s Islamic] society’s annual dinner, with the “brothers” and “sisters” segregated, and the latter forbidden to ask questions.
Put aside the radical preachers; can you imagine any American university sponsoring a student group that segregates women students and makes them shut up?
A diversity event sponsored by a group called Project Dialogue at Vanderbilt University generated some interesting give and take:
[Chaplain Awadh] Binhazim… suggested that he, as part of his religion, would support the death of individuals involved in homosexual acts.
“Given the recent controversy surrounding homosexuals in the military, under Islamic laws if a homosexual engaged in homosexual acts, then the punishment under Islamic law would be death,” [a questioner said]. “As a practicing Muslim, do you accept or reject this particular teaching of Islam?”
“I don’t have a choice to accept or reject teachings,” Binhazim responded. “I go with what Islam teaches.”
… Binhazim, however, calls for perspective.
“As Muslims, we don’t just go around killing gays. That is a ridiculous misconception,” Binhazim said. “There is a set of strict criteria that must be met before this punishment is enforced. The rule is in place to promote the Muslim values of family. Even in rare cases where all criteria is met, it is even rarer for this conclusion to be reached.”…
Curbs on wearing the full Muslim veil come a step closer in France today with a report that will call for a ban on the dress in post offices, universities, hospitals and state-owned premises, as well as public transport.
A Massachusetts pharmacy college instituted a ban on clothing that obscures the face, including face veils and burqas, weeks after a Muslim alumnus who is also the son of a professor was charged with plotting terror strikes.
The policy change at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Services, announced in a campus-wide e-mail last month, went into effect Friday.
… The policy would effectively ban face veils, as well as burqas and niqabs, which either cloak the entire body or cover everything but the eyes…
UD hopes this is only the first American university to ban the degrading and dangerous burqa.
An organization working to impose a Sharia-law Islamic caliphate on the world through the destruction of democracy, cultural assimilation, and Jews, has free intellectual inquiry written all over it.
Students at the University of London invited a speaker from this organization — also gung-ho on suicide bombings — to a debate on their campus, but objections to the speaker from other students have been vociferous, and the event’s been canceled.
It must be frustrating for the pro-caliphate students. At University College London they invited a speaker who calls for the murder of all gay people. He too was canceled.
… [S]everal clerics and high-ranking officials have taken aim at Islamic Azad University, which is based in Tehran and has branches around the country. The university is largely run by the family of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a powerful moderate and leading opponent of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“This university must once again be purified,” Ayatollah Muhammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, the president’s spiritual adviser, said during a meeting with new cabinet members, the Rouydad Web site reported. “This purification must occur at the management level and other levels. You see just how many who do not believe in religion, Islam and God have attended and graduated from this university.”
The Iranian government
frees itself of free thinkers.
… because the weather was so beautiful she just wanted to stay out there, UD listened to C-Span’s coverage of the Sotomayor hearings. She finds Sotomayor’s low, slow voice intriguing, and wonders why there’s so little New York accent to it.
It looks as though C-Span will also be covering the closing event of the Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts University (Mr UD is one of the organizers), which began its inaugural two-week run yesterday. Details on the event:
The Obama Administration’s
Civic Agenda After Six Months
Friday, July 24, 12 pm-2 pm