My headscarf is giving me a headache! What I mean, is that the issue of the Islamic headscarf is a tricky, thorny one with no hard-and-fast solution in sight precisely when one is required. Just yesterday, a dear friend challenged me on this very subject.
She said: “How can you favor the state forbidding women from doing something that they want to do for religious reasons?”
A fair enough question.
My immediate response: Women’s freedom may depend upon the separation of religion and state. What one does at home or in one’s mosque, church, temple, or synagogue is one thing. But, is it wise to subsidize diverse religious expressions in a taxpayer-supported public school? Especially in the West where the headscarf is as much a symbol of jihad and women’s subordination as it is an expression of a modest, religious choice?
In 2004, the headscarf was a burning issue in France when the country passed a law forbidding the wearing of “ostentatious” religious symbols. This meant that no one could wear a cross, a turban, or a yarmulke either but the law was truly aimed at hijab–the wearing of headscarves by Muslim women. Feminists argued both sides of this controvery.
In 2008, the headscarf is again a burning issue in Turkey where an increasingly religious population, including women, is demanding the right to veil in university. This is seen as a complete reversal of the enormous gains made by Attatturk in 1921.
It is also a pendulum swing from the various Arab and Muslim feminist movements of that era in which unveiling was a linch-pin issue. Egypt’s Huda Shaarawi must be turning in her grave. I wonder what she would say?
Yes, it is true: Religious families in the West rarely give their children “freedom of choice” when it comes to religious education and practices. Both girls and boys are indoctrinated from an early age. This is true for secular fundamentalist families as well. Western law does not intefere with this. On what basis could we do so where only Muslims are concerned? Or rather, like France, are we now willing to interfere in the private religious realm because of new, Islamist “clear and present dangers?”
Ideally of course, tolerating diverse ethnic and religious choices is a great Western virtue. The problem arises when those who themselves are intolerant wish to use such Western virtues in order to achieve separatist, hostile-parasitic enclaves. But, hasn’t some degree of separatism been true for every immigrant group–at least in America? Hasn’t the genius of America resided precisely in allowing each immigrant group to remain identified in separate ways while simultaneously becoming identified similarly as Americans?
My friend is a religious Jew and is therefore very sensitive to the dangers involved when Jewish religious expression is forbidden. Indeed, even today, the Jews of Europe have been advised by their rabbis to hide their yarmulkes and stars of David lest they be scorned or beaten on the streets–something which has, alas, been happening.
But, said I, with a heavy heart: We can’t really compare apples and oranges. Crosses and yarmulkes are not the same as hijab or niqab. With some exceptions, both Jews and Christians are not only or solely defined as members of their religious group. They also partake of the public, secular, modern culture. Also, there are only about 15 million Jews world-wide. There are 1.2 billion Muslims and counting. If every single Jew covered every inch of themselves with Jewish symbols it would be as a drop in the sea compared to every single Muslim doing so.
Of course, as a religious Jew, my friend is still concerned with the morality involved. From a Jewish point of view, what’s good for a Jew should be good for every other religious group since all humanity has been created in “God’s image.”
But, what about women’s rights? Where do we stand on a woman’s right not to wear a headscarf? Will we protect her (at least in the West) from being honor-murdered when she refuses to do so? However, what do we do when a woman claims that her right to freely practice her religion is being interfered with if we stop her from veiling? Does the state have the right to force her, against her will, to expose her hair to strange men?
Indeed, this is the subject of a 2007 federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of Jameela Medina. She is a Los Angeles PH.D student who was riding a commuter train without a proper ticket. For what should have been a minor matter, she was taken off the train, arrested, kept in jail for several hours where she was forced to remove her headscarf.Medina also claims that she was “intimidated” by a deputy sheriff who accused her of “being a terrorist” and who called Islam an “evil” religion.
No one should be so insulted in America. And, prisoners are actually allowed to wear headscarves in jail–a point which the ACLU is arguing.
Yes, I know that many educated Muslim women choose to wear hijab or niqab. But, I also know that many educated Muslim women who choose not to do so are threatened, pressured, shunned, and even killed for this reason, both in the West and in Muslim lands.
Yes, I also know that some feminists have claimed that historically, veiled women on the streets may have been less harassed by men in the East than unveiled women were at the same time in the West. Today, separate buses and railway cars for women-only have been launched in India and Mexico in response to the still ongoing harassment of women. (Insisting, in ugly or violent ways, that women sit at the back of the public bus used by ultra-religious Jewish populations in Jerusalem, is a slightly separate although equally awful reality and one that the Israeli Supreme Court will hear).
I also know that many Muslim women do not feel “coerced” into wearing a headscarf in the West as much as they feel called upon to register a permanent, visible, protest against promiscuity and the eroticization of women in the West. (Like nuns do).
In the 1960s and 1970s, I thought it was poetic justice for former “colonials” to sport their colorful customs all over London. Bangles, nose-rings, turbans, long flowing robes on both men and women–yes! But, by the 21st century, these exotic garments are ominously value-laden and less lovely. Now, they signify a serious cultural, military, political, and theological invasion of Britain and the West.
Quo Vadis my friends? What shall we do in America? Do we allow headscarves or do we ban them? What about female genital mutilation, daughter- and wife-beating, and secret polygamy? Finally, what about the indoctrination into hating Jews and other infidels which begins in childhood and is theologically driven in certain mosques and religious schools? Right here in the USA?
Digg This
del.icio.us
PJM Home
The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom
Women and Madness
The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It
Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman
Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism’s Holy Site
Letters to a Young Feminist
With Child: A Diary of Motherhood
Feminist Foremothers in Women’s Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health
Patriarchy: Notes of an Expert Witness
>Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M
Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody
About Men
Women, Money & Power
13 Comments
Anonymous:The real issue is that private employers, public establishments, schools, etc., should have the right to refuse entrance and services and jobs to those who insist on advertising their slave status. Their right to wear is fine even if coerced as is my right to shun those who do.
It is only when the state insists that we condone and tolerate and even fund the flaunting of the woman are dirty property coverings that I think we should protest.
Public schools that have dress codes should be allowed to decide. Those who do not have no right to make distinctions.
Why people are nervous is that we know we will be forced to accept these badges of female inferiority in our own life by agents of the patriarchy such as the ACLU and their ilk.
This has already happened to tax supported schools. Private Muslim OR Jewish OR Christian schools being funded with tax dollars to push their culture instead of assimilation should not exist in the US. But they do. This is done under the guise of teaching Arabic and accepted for “security reasons”(we need translators). I do not live in New York so I do not understand how this could happen. All I heard was different language schools are common. But that school is not just teaching language even if they are not selling “Jihad is good” teeshirts anymore.
Jan 31, 2008 - 1:07 pm George Jochnowitz:The problem is indeed complicated. At the College of Staten Island, where we used to teach, women may wear headscarves. Not many do, but I have had several such students in my ESL and linguistics classes, some of whom were very good students who went on to do advanced work. Similarly, men may wear yarmulkes, despite the fact that in Hasidic communities boys are an oppressed group who may not study secular subjects before their bar mitvahs, and who must attend school for many many hours a day.
Head scarves and yarmulkes, despite their link to possible cases of oppression, are not in themselves harmful. A free society should permit as much variety as possible. Yet in the United States, we do not allow female genital mutilation, which certainly is harmful. The boundaries of what is harmful are open to debate, and fortunately, a democratic society allows disagreement and thrives on it.
By the way, apples and oranges may be compared for sweetness, acidity, weight per unit volume, ease of peeling, etc., as I wrote in THE BLESSED HUMAN RACE.
Jan 31, 2008 - 1:34 pm Denis Eugene Sullivan:Greetings:
My take on this goes something like the difference between “salami-slicing” and cutting the Gordian knot.
I believe that a fundamental tactic of the aggressive Muslims/Islamists is to exert a low level but continuing pressure on the non-Muslim societies they inhabit. The goal of this is to increase their power by cowing or overloading the psychic strengths of those they would dominate. In the West, freedom of religion provides an avenue of approach and, because so much behavior is dictated by Islam, a nearly infinite number of issues is available to be raised. In negotiating, this is considered “salami slicing” where the victim thinks he is giving up something relatiively inconsequential for resolution, but his opponent’s intention is to soon be back for more. (Similar to the camel putting his nose under the tent; he will soon be inside.)
The Gordian knot approach, with appreciation to Alexander the Great, cuts through the problem at its core. This exposes Islam as a supremacist and dominating political ideology camouflaged in a religion. I continue to be amazed at how, given the history of Arab/Muslim expansion and domination, people can compartmentalize their analyses to the religious dimension.
Finally, we had no real problem telling the Mormens to jettison the polygamy bit, which by the way is not only accepted in Islam but also largely unaddressed in any discussions.
Jan 31, 2008 - 4:27 pm heather:It appears to me that it’s time for some psychic spine stiffening and knot cutting.
Denis Sullivan is absolutely correct. Indeed, it makes an interesting intellectual exercise to view the complication of religious symbolism in public spaces. However, the hijab and the chador and all the other wrappings are not only expressions of religious ideas… not when the ‘religion’ we are speaking of is a political and military movement as well. And make no mistake, that political and military movement wants to take over, change and destroy my civilization, and replace it with Islam.
As a friend said, when we were talking of Catholic schools, which are tax supported in Canada: the Catholics and the Jews are DIFFERENT from the Muslims.
You bet they are.
Also, isn’t it clever of Muslims to put their women in the front line of this anger? That lady in the street car becomes the very picture of pathetique, ‘viciously slandered’ by those nassty police. I believe that that is the point of her hijab, by the way, to elicit that response from the future dhimmi.
Jan 31, 2008 - 5:35 pm Tom:Everyone interested in this issue should read Dr. Tawfik Hamid’s article on this. Dr. Hamid was once a terrorist himself, then pulled back from the brink and began to preach real peace, for which he was threatened and expelled to the U.S. He states the West can never stop Islamism unless we ban the Hijab. He says it is in reality a potent rallying symbol of Islamic pathological feelings of superiority and entitlement: “Our women wear the Hijab; western women are degraded whores because they don’t…and their men are disgusting weaklings for allowing their women to dress as whores. That is why we are superior and must and will conquer them”. Scary, huh?
It is a sickening sign of these twisted times that we must now agonize over whether we must consider limiting yet another freedom in order to protect ourselves. But maybe the real issue is PC and government intrusion. We restrict OUR freedoms because we are too unwise, cowardly and confused to restrict THEIRS. I’d rather see every extremist Mosque in the US raided and shut down by SWAT teams than see us give up a single ounce of freedom. THEY are the problem, THEY should pay the price.
Jan 31, 2008 - 6:07 pm Nancy K:It’s a wonderful, historically unprecedented cultural development that a world dominating nation is so full of love that it truly desires to embrace all others as equals and is doing so to the point of near national suicide. Our life or death Darwinian challenge is too realize that we must balance the goals of love and respect for others with the understanding that Evil really does exist and that we have a right and a duty to look for it, point it out, AND STOP IT, before this amazing civilization is ground into the dust of history.
All the comments and Phyllis’ blog are extremely important from the point of view of power relations. The essence of domination and the hijab, niqab, chadur come to function as the “dressing” of Dawa - passive aggressively pushing it on to the Other, on to us.
There is something else very terrifying about the headscarf as it morphs into the burqa, or should I say down submission’s slippery slope. The jihadis and the islamists are telling us something (communicating nonverbally) very revealing about their sense of sensory deprivation. I don’t say this to elicit sympathy for them — they tell us about themselves — that they must cover a woman from head to toe not only because they can’t sexually control themselves and hence their need to dominate but they do not know how to relate to others in a nonaggressive way. They themselves are “cut off” from life. It is as if the burqa is an artificially induced autistic environment. My hunch is that such a shroud terrorizes us at an even more profound level than we are willing to admit. Mitigating such terror is key to countering such islamization.
Jan 31, 2008 - 9:52 pm ggt:I don’t see a complication. Covering the face is seen as a sign of dishonesty in the West. Cover the rest of your body, but if you want to be taken seriously in the US, let us see your face.
Jan 31, 2008 - 11:27 pm Norman Simms:All things being equal, there would be no real problem about scarves; no more than about sheitels, strimmels, yarmulkas, or turbans. But all things are not equal. The question becomes: but how tolerant can society be of the intolerant?
Norman
Feb 1, 2008 - 2:53 am Tom:Heather and a few others get it just right:
Feb 1, 2008 - 3:22 am Heather:That pure, literal Islam is NOT a religion is we think of it, but a sociopolitical dogma with more in common with Nazism and Stalinism than with Christianity or Bhuddism or Hinduism. It is precisely because it is so different that we fail to recognize it. Our cultural “immune systems” can’t spot it because we hear the world “relgion”.
In fact, taken straight from the Koran and Hadith itself, Islam is genocidal, as defined by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
Yes, it is predatory and genocidal, the most intolerant culture on earth at the present time. What happens to your body when it doesn’t recognize a killer virus in time to stop it? You die. Darwin rules.
Anyone that understands how rare and precious the freedoms of the west are, must understand that the time to fight has come.
I read somewhere that the ‘niqab’ was a 1970s invention in Lebanon. It was copied from Christian nuns’ veils, and was intended to help Muslim women avoid being raped by Muslim men. It was a time of civil war, of course.
The niqab therefore was a way to signal what women were available for assault and rape by good Muslim men. Those were women with no headscarf, no niqab.
Keep that in mind as Islam becomes stronger in our society.
Feb 1, 2008 - 3:18 pm M. Levy:scarf, schmarf, the head cover itself is a minor issue. My fear is the burkha itself, will be used as perfect cover to commit terror act against unsuspecting civilians.
Imagine what happens when Al Quaida decides to use 10, 20, or 30 of their homicide bombers, hidden under these burkhas, walking into crowded areas in any major metropolitan in EU or here, then simultaneously blow themselves up. . Even if there is the slight suspicion, The police will not dare to violate their civil right to freedom of religious, and search them.
Feb 1, 2008 - 4:54 pm anonymous II:Then what.?
Even London’s 6000 hi resolution cameras will not be able to detect them. That is the main worry. Granted, such act WILL put an end to any coverings in Europe. However, it could be a very high price to pay.
An Islamic flag by any other name…
A women’s body is a country in which the future of a people is planted.
Whether hijab, niqab
Feb 2, 2008 - 2:34 am surj1936:abayas/burqas, abeyah, women’s head and dress coverings are all announcements representing a calling to jihad on land seen as newly acquired Islamic territory soon to come under Shar’ia - Islamic law!
After reading all the comments, I can only say we are all in agreement to headscarf, hijab, niqab, burkha and any such things MUST be discouraged, especially in the West. I think it is the weakness of our public at large who don’t write to their elected members of Parliament and let known their feelings. I am not a Muslim but I have been reading Quran, and I can tell you all it is a manual of evil doers, Here is Sura 9:111″ Allah has purchased from the faithful their lives and the worldly goods and in return has promised them Paradise, they will fight for the cause of Allah, they will SLAY and be SLAIN” Sura 48:13″ And if any believe NOT in Allah and his Messenger, we have prepared for those who reject Allah,a Blazing Fire” Sura4:123″O believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Let them find firmness in you. Know that Allah is with the righteous” If Saudi Arabia can ban the Bible or any other religious Books to be take into SA, then we have all the right to ban Quran in the West. Same goes for dressing. I think the majority of the people in the West have no will to fight back, and I can see the day when Islam will domonate the West if things keep going the way they are. So you better buy your prayer mat now,as you must pray 5 times a day, if you are not going to wake up now, I mean NOW. log on http://www.thereloigionofpeace.com
Feb 4, 2008 - 3:30 pmhttp://www.faithfreedom.org http://www.islam-watch.org
Which country in the world has fallen to Islam that has ever freed itself from it, name me one? There isn’t one.