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.
January 5th, 2010 at 6:42PM
If the burqa is dangerous, that can only be because it’s voluminous. So there could be no justification for banning the burqa but not other voluminous clothing, such as capes, ponchos, and baggy jackets. So shall we do that?
And shall we also trust university administrators to decide what items of clothing are degrading to women? Because again, the burqa can’t be the only degrading item of clothing. I’d love to see the definitions of ‘dangerous’ and ‘degrading’ that a committee of university administrators and faculty come up with.
January 5th, 2010 at 7:24PM
Hi Alan: The danger of the burqa lies in its unique characteristic of totally hiding the human face, making it impossible to identify a person at all, face as well as body. This is presumably why it’s so popular with male suicide bombers, who more and more often are wearing burqas to pass as women in order to carry out their bombings.
Not only particular Americans, but entire countries — Egypt, France — have no difficulty distinguishing between an article of clothing that annihilates the identity of a person, subjects her to so little sunlight that she often suffers from vitamin D deficiency diseases, and makes peripheral vision impossible, and other articles of clothing. Egypt has various burqa bans in place, and will probably broaden those bans; France seems to be in the process of banning them outright.
January 6th, 2010 at 12:07PM
Margaret, but in America, with our “free exercise of religion” clause in the Constitution, and the values that underlie that, the kind of ban you propose is much trickier than in Egypt and France. If your problem with the burqa is that it makes peripheral vision impossible and causes Vitamin D deficiency, then that has to be the grounds of the ban — you can’t ban an item of clothing associated with one religion without banning other items of clothing that would have the same effects.
But the idea of a government banning the wearing of clothing that reduces peripheral vision, or enforcing a specified amount of exposure to sunlight for purposes of increasing Vitamin D — I mean, that would be the nanny state to the Nth power. And if a government is going to have such minute attention to ensuring the health of its citizens, wouldn’t it need to begin by banning high-fat foods? McDonald’s does a lot more damage than burqas, after all. It’s just not workable.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:43PM
The burqa has no religious significance. It is correctly read as a symbol of extreme fundamentalism within Muslim culture, but it has no grounding in Islam.
The reason I mentioned the burqa’s damage to women’s health was to respond to your claim that it’s like any other piece of clothing. It’s not.
It’s not the nanny state that should ban the burqa – it’s the democratic state, which realizes, as many British and French politicians have noted, that you cannot take part in civic life when you are entirely hidden. From various forms of official facial identification (there are now a number of court cases involving women who insist on being photographed for various forms of i.d. with their face covered) to general interaction in the public sphere, total invisibility is, to use your phrase, not workable.
January 6th, 2010 at 5:33PM
If you want to argue that in a democratic society “total invisibility is . . . not workable,” I can accept that as a valid argument. (I might want to suggest a distinction between “unworkable” and “highly unpleasant.”) But that’s different than saying what your earlier statement implied, that the government should be able to regulate clothing that reduces peripheral vision and access to Vitamin D.
As for whether the burqa is like any other piece of clothing, in one sense it obviously is. After all, you or I could create garments — let’s say, because we develop a wholly irrational and pathological fear of being seen, but still have to go to work to make a living — that covered our bodies in precisely the way that a burqa does. Cloth is cloth, coverage is coverage.
But we wouldn’t say that we were wearing burqas in that case, right? They would be garments that looked like burqas, but would not be burqas unless they were worn within a particular cultural tradition, for reasons associated with that tradition. So yes, in that sense, absolutely, there’s a difference, and the difference lies in the reasons for wearing certain items of clothing. And as you know, many of the people who wear burqas — or who force the women of their family to wear them — will insist that their reasons are absolutely religious, indeed, that the wearing of the burqa is intrinsic to the sexual ethic of Islam. Others will disagree, both within and without their tradition — but surely we cannot have any reason to think that President Sarkozy speaks with authority in this matter?
So you can see that my concern is not, or not primarily, with the prohibition of social invisibility, but with the prohibition of a particular cultural practice that for its practitioners typically has a religious significance. Again, the American Constitution has religious protections that France (the E.U.) and Egypt don’t, so these matters are trickier here. And I value those religious protections and am reluctant to give any of them up except under duress. I’m willing to listen respectfully if my government says that this or that way of dressing are incompatible with public life, but not if it claims to be able to judge on the basis of our thoughts and intentions — if, say, it bans the burqa but allows you and me to follow our pathological inclinations to cover up — and I would want to limit as much as possible the authority of governments to decide what is and is not intrinsic to a particular religion’s beliefs.
Of course, this opens a whole new can of worms, and there’s a long record of American courts having difficulties when people — especially people with brand-new made-up religions — claim religious exemptions from standard American law. But in general, I’d rather tolerate a few burqas than have congressmen and university administrators make new careers for themselves in defining the relations between clothing and religion.
January 6th, 2010 at 5:34PM
Wow, that ended up being long. Sorry!
January 6th, 2010 at 6:08PM
No, that wasn’t too long, and it helped me see where we differ and where we don’t.
I agree with your reluctance to think in religious terms about the burqa, and your greater comfort with thinking about it in civic terms. I’m a pragmatist, and am happy to see the end of women in burqas under whatever motive democratic governments and citizens find most compelling.
An important difference between us, though, lies in our responses to what the burqa says about and to women. You’re willing, as you say, to tolerate a few. As my regular denunciation of them on this blog suggests, I am not. I believe all free women should protest against the burqa.
My deepest objection to the burqa has to do with my belief that whatever the people wearing them tell you, the burqa is intrinsically — I would say obviously, Alan — an expression of the enslavement of women. It blinds, deafens, and erases them. As the woman inside of the burqa parades our streets, she parades this enslavement. She therefore represents – especially, I’d say, for young women beginning to test their power and freedom – an extremely demoralizing feature of democratic public life.
One other point: Note that you describe our possible decision to wear a burqa, or an article of clothing with the characteristics of the burqa, as “pathological.”
I’d suggest that it’s in fact impossible to think of wearing this sort of clothing, whether it’s Michael Jackson putting it on his children or Muslim women putting it on themselves, as anything other than an expression of pathology. Pathology, or, as I’ve been saying, enslavement.
January 6th, 2010 at 10:09PM
Agreed on almost every word of your last two paragraphs. The disagreement is the conclusion to be drawn from the belief we share that the culture of the burqa is pathological. I am reluctant to encourage government officials and university administrators to define, police, and punish all the pathologies that societies produce. Bureaucracies historically find it very difficult to distinguish pathology from eccentricity. I have greater trust in the solvent effects of open societies, of the (Habermasian) public sphere, to bring about the change you and I both desire.
January 6th, 2010 at 10:40PM
I take your point, Alan. I see the dangers in government involvement in this, and I’m still grappling with that part of the issue.
January 7th, 2010 at 9:08AM
We just had a civil debate online, Margaret. Will we be banned from the blogosphere?
January 7th, 2010 at 9:27AM
As long as I keep it hidden in my comments, I think we’ll be okay, Alan.