Bastion of women’s rights, Iran, rushes to the defense of hijab-wearers in Quebec.
The optics really aren’t great when the first foreign power to come to the defense of protesters against Quebec’s secularity law are authoritarian mullahs.
Unfortunately, however, the rest of the world has so far responded to some public workplace restrictions on the hijab with a deafening silence.
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December 18th, 2021 at 5:20PM
For all its secularism, Quebec and France and other places aren’t upset about religious symbols or garb in general. People have worn crosses in jewelry and religious Jews have worn kippahs in Western countries for decades if not centuries. Those expressions cause no problems. The only concern of these countries is the hijab. Even that concern is really only the perception that its use is compulsory. Back in the days when nuns wore habits, no one would have tried to ban them; everyone understood that their use was voluntary.
France and Quebec broadened the ban to include other religious emblems and garb simply to hide their anti-hijab sentiment and provide a veneer of even-handedness, not because they really believed that crosses and kippahs somehow hurt students or others. Put differently, the supposed secularism is anti-Muslim, not anti-religious.
So the only real reason for the ban is the fear of compulsion. The obvious answer is to go after the compulsion, not the garb itself — to use a scalpel rather than a meat axe when designing public policy. Fortunately the First Amendment in the US protects religious expression by clothing or any other means. That would force any US government worried about hijabs to address the compulsion, not to prohibit free exercise.
December 18th, 2021 at 7:15PM
Dennis: I think there is another important element at play. It’s not only a reasonable worry that some hijab-wearers are being forced to wear them (obviously the common practice of parents putting their very young daughters in hijabs, and sometimes burqas, is much to the point here); it is also the particular symbolic values of women — and women only — in covering clothing. The hijab is a profoundly patriarchal, tribal, artifact; it says quite clearly to a world of modern women who wish to be free and equal that women are not at all free and equal. They are created by God as temptresses to men, and if they wish to go out in public they must cover their beauty lest they take the fall for their temptress nature. Their hijab marks their submission to male clerical authority in this matter.
Nothing of this sort in Islam applies to men; only women must cover, and they must cover because they wish not to offend God by their God-given temptress nature.
This is an understandably repellent ideology/theology for many women who act against the hijab not out of hatred but out of a desire that the values it carries and exhibits not erode their and their daughters’ efforts toward true equality. I’m perfectly aware that many people will argue at this point that it is the duty of citizens of liberal democracies to put up with publicly exhibited values profoundly at odds with the values of liberal democracies. The problem Europe and Canada are facing is that more and more citizens/voters do not put up with it very well. As you may know, the Court of Justice of the European Union has upheld the right of some shops in some countries under some conditions to bar their employees from wearing hijabs when interacting with the public. Why? Because many women apparently make a point of taking their business elsewhere if hijabs/burqas are worn. When asked, they tend to say, among other things, that they don’t want to expose their daughters to covered women and children. It is not the way they want them brought up; it is not something they want their daughters to see normalized.
I think this is not an anti-Muslim phenomenon; I think it is an anti-patriarchal phenomenon. The phenomenon is ablaze all over Europe and indeed in surprising numbers of countries in the Middle East, and one does well to look closely at the measures being proposed and taken. In non-Quebec Canada, total hysteria has broken out because several public professions are asked not to wear religious garb while working. If this measure seems to people just utterly appalling (and such is the language among the measure’s critics in Canada), they really need to calm down, look at developments involving religious garb in many other parts of the world, and decide how to respond in a rational, effective way. Even Justin Trudeau, who objects to the Quebec law, denies that it fosters hatred and discrimination.
December 18th, 2021 at 9:54PM
Those are excellent points, as always. Just two final comments.
First, the patriarchal symbolism provides a good basis for you or me to dislike the hijab. Without proof of coercion, however, it does not provide a basis for forbidding others to wear it. Take the nun’s habit, or the plain clothes worn by Amish women: again, there’s a patriarchal aspect and most modern women wouldn’t want to adopt those styles, but I trust you wouldn’t try to force those women into secular street clothes simply because of your personal dislike. It’s only the Muslim version that prompts these bans.
Second, the French and Quebecois are transparently disingenuous by pretending that their objection is to ALL religious garb. It isn’t. Wearing crosses and kippahs would never have prompted such bans in Western countries (leaving aside atheist and Stalinist Russia and anti-Semitic Nazi Germany). It’s just the hijab. The rest are just thrown in as fig leaves for what is really anti-Muslim discrimination.
December 19th, 2021 at 11:10AM
Dennis: There is an undeniable extra element here, which has nothing to do with extremely rare sightings of nuns who still wear habits/Amish people (and of course Amish men also wear modest/culturally specific attire). I can attest, since I live in Washington DC, to the rapidly enlarging number of women in this city who wear the hijab and/or the burqa. It’s increasingly common to see them.
Pace the ill-fated European ad campaign, I and many other people do not think “beauty” and “diversity” and “freedom” when we see more and more women covering themselves. If you look almost anywhere where there’s a notable increase in covered women (tourist areas of Switzerland, for instance, come to mind), you will find growing discontent with this spectacle among much of the population, and some restrictions (as in Switzerland) will typically follow. I think this is because at some point prolific female covering (and keep in mind that many hijab wearers also wear loose voluminous robes, deepening the “women must be covered” statement) becomes not a mere personal piety sign; it becomes a powerful cultural statement; and however you want to translate that statement it is profoundly at odds with the profoundly important egalitarian values of liberal democracies.
As I have said before on this blog, you can expect the first group of citizens who have serious trouble with this growing cultural trend to be mothers of young daughters. They are trying to raise free women unburdened by patriarchy, and they are watching their young daughters watch unfree women burdened by patriarchy. Worst of all, they are watching their daughters watch little girls, their own age, hidden under hijabs and robes – and sometimes by full burqas. These mothers are not Islamophobic – most of them aren’t, anyway. They are phobic about what they take to be reactionary behavior among more and more women among them.
Now one is free simply to condemn these women for avoiding stores where covered women work and for voting in favor of restrictions. One is free to condemn these women (and of course many men) as contemptible. One is free to virtue signal like mad. Me, I don’t. I think this disquiet and aversion is unfortunate but understandable and this avoidance behavior a significant fact with which the modern state needs to reckon.