For the right to wear the burqa (and the right not to)
Posted on Friday 16 July, 2010
Filed Under Society
OF COURSE the state has no business telling people what to wear, and of course the French parliament’s 355-1 decision to ban the wearing of full face covering in public was motivated primarily by racism towards Muslims.
On those considerations alone, the move should be resolutely opposed in France, and certainly not be emulated elsewhere. But for leftists simply to leave the matter at that – as most British radical commentators have – surely smacks of what comrades used to call an undialectical approach.
It remains the case that both the niqab and a fortiori the burqa are deeply objectionable from any rational, feminist or libertarian point of view. They represent the oppression of women through the symbolic medium of black textiles.
Whether Muslim women don these garments through free choice, through coercion, or because they have internalised their long-term subjugation does not change this underlying reality.
Often the justification is advanced that women have to be covered, for fear that they will otherwise arouse men. In other words, they must be penalised for my gender’s ostensible lack of self control. It is essentially a variation on the old ‘she was asking for it, your honour’ defence once popular with rapists.
In one novel twist on the theme, Iranian cleric Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi has even warned that chicks brazenly flashing their hair all over the shop leads to dangerous extramarital nooky, and thereby increases the risk of earthquakes.
Once rare in Europe, the practice of veiling has only become common as the result of the efforts of the Saudi state in recent decades to proselytise for its ultra-puritanical brand of wahhabism.
In many countries, the wearing of the burqa is imposed by fear. In Iran, women can be arrested for failure to comply with dress codes. In Pakistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan, hundreds of women have gone blind after having acid thrown in their faces for going about unveiled.
An Iraqi feminist organisation claimed in 2007 that on average, 15 women a month were murdered in Basra for the same offence. Let me run that one past you slowly: 15 women a month. Murdered. In just one city.
There have been accounts of sanctions short of these extremes in Muslim communities in this country. Giving the missus or the daughter a good lumping for getting stroppy is no more acceptable.
It needs to be stressed here that Islam imposes no religious requirement for either the burqa or the niqab, or even the headscarf, for that matter. Traditional Islamic texts simply instruct women to dress modestly.
As I have said, it does boil down to a matter of choice and of course women have the right to select their wardrobe without the intervention of governments, parents or partners. That goes for the burqa, ripped fishnets and slutty red lipstick, or flowery frocks from Laura Ashley alike.
But I’d be somewhat more impressed if some of those who have made clear how appalled they are with the French decision would explicitly state their solidarity with the acid victims. Have they really nothing to say on the topic?
The correct approach is the one advanced by the Belgian far left in last month’s election contest:
non aux lois d’interdiction du port du foulard à l’école ou du niqab dans l’espace public: ni obligation, ni interdiction!
No ban, but no obligation either. Sounds just about right to me.
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Lobby Ludd rhetorically asks ‘where did it all go wrong?’, Good question. I just wanted to say remember that woman in Iran who was sentenced to be stoned to death, one of about 25 on deth row, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani? As we know she was reprieved from stoning, but tomorrow (21st July) the court in Tabriz are asking for her to be hung. I don’t know if hanging is more humane, I don’t think they use the drop in Iran, they just dangle them midair and it can take twenty minutes to half an hour to choke to death. As a Westerner, I know some people believe I have no right to apply Western standards of justice, mercy or womanhood, so I guess that makes the burka and all that flows from it alright.
Where have I changed my view?
I am against a legal all-embracing ban, but for the fight against the Burka politically.
As an Eyptian feminist said on Newsnight yesterday, it’s the far-right Islamists who back the Burka as such.
Hardly surpising that British Tories and those who travel with them on this issue should find common cause on the religious right.
Is the contributor formerly known as Sue R. now the Sewer Rat?
This is off-topic, but will interest some here
http://www.aryanunity.com/redwatchonline/redfronts.html
The only face I knew by sight is that of Charlie Pottins. Andrew Coates features, too.
I wrote to an MP, Ben Wallace, to draw his attention to REDWATCH – this was back in the day of the Labour government – and he quoted a government spokesperson as saying that H.M. Government was on the case 24/7.
Well, the current government is now in power but it took me no longer to find a REDWATCH site than it does to come here.
So W-T-F is going on?
Conspiracy theorists, apply your might intellects to these simple questions:
Who – if anyone – is REALLY behind REDWATCH?
Why can’t – or won’t – H. M. Government close it down?
There’s a bunch of stuff about REDWATCH on WIKIPEDIA but we all know that WIKIPEDIA is about as reliable as Auntie Vera’s stories about the blitz.
Coates said,
“I am against a legal all-embracing ban, but for the fight against the Burka politically.”
Well shut the fuck up then and get your ass into the Muslim community and start doing some work.
(And if you abstain from the legal ban then you are for it)
I am Spartacus. (I changed my name because some people thought teh play on words between ‘Sue R’ and ‘Sewer’ was apt. The rest I thought up for myself. I might alter it to ‘The Sewer Rat, scurrying through the shit of humanity.’. What do you think?
News from Syria:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1296152/Syria-bans-burka-niqab-universities.html
The Sewer Rat’s name is heroically courageous. Underground cartoons stuff!
Bit like the Red Mole of History.
I don’t have an ass, mule or indeed horse: I carry all the produce of my allotment to market by hand, and if need be I take the bus or the train.
I resent the suggestion that I would exploit animals: apart from being a friend to donkeys like Dean I have defended comrade Renard, our local urban fox, to the hilt against the reactionary witch-hunt of his friends in the local Tory party.
Coates mentions foxes again.
Years ago, when resident in County Leitrim, I lost 4 guinea fowl to foxes, but one might choose to argue that – as migrants – they had no business being in Europe anyway, whereas the red fox is more-or-less the same animal from Mayo to Honshu.
Be that as it may, a Final Solution is needed to solve the Fox Question once and for all. If the coypu can be wiped out, so can the fox.
I see nobody had any reactions to the post about REDWATCH. Those who click on the link I gave can see the face of the vulpophile Coates for themselves.
Bill Corr. Your link which allegedly shows Coates is rather onerous. By that I mean why do people go about discretely photographing people. There has to be a purpose for it. Perhaps those photographed could become a target for violence. I cannot think of any other reason. At least Coates has his hair unlike myself.
Jimmy -
I am here on a lefty website and drew attention [and provided a link] to an appalling website which puzzles me greatly and you and I referred to it before now, too.
A few simple questions -
-1- Who – anyone – is ‘behind’ REDWATCH ?
-2- Why isn’t REDWATCH smacked off the ‘net?
-3- A lot of the pix look like inside jobs or am I being silly here?
The issue of REDWATCH’s existance and purpose has been debated at length – on Wikipedia and by a few MPs taking an interest in the subject.
You might care to send a civil e-mail to Ben Wallace MP or someone like Jeremy Corbyn MP. Go ahead!
My non-paranoid but rather suspicuious mind suspects undercover State forces* somewhere or other.
As I asked earlier, W T F is a-going on ?
* Class War was supposedly riddled with State infiltrators, as was the UltrRight in the 1960s.
From a folder and not about REDWATCH but of interest all the same …
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jun/18/comment.immigrationandpublicservices
Ms Bunting and Robert Putnam
Jimmy will enjoy this:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/09/351982.html
What awful people; they look like some of Dickens’ less pleasant characters!
While drawing the attention of Ben Wallace MP to REDWATCH, I also referred to this site …
http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/
… which rejoices in martyrdom operations against the kuffar and the kuffars’ collaborators all over the Greater MidEast.
Is it based in Estonia or Sweden?
Why don’t the intrepid chaps of the FSB arrange nasty accidents for those running KAVKAZ WATCH?
Bill Corr. My first introduction to state forces was the mid seventies. I attended a public meeting in Govan, Glasgow. The late Philip Agee was the main speaker. He had just had published ‘Inside the Company’. You may recall that Mr Agee was trying to get asylum in Britain but was refused. The CIA wanted him back for bubbling on them. During the meeting one of the guys on the platform (a councillor now an MP)pointed out that we had two visitors from special branch and pointed directly at them. Both got up immediately and walked out. I am sure this is a regular occurrence.
Good article, sadly I can’t say the same thing about the comments box.
Banning the Burka is both stupid and wrong. Dress codes should not be imposed by the State.
It is a pity that the feminist movement has declined so much in recent years or I doubt this would have become such a big issue.
modernity. The only reason we know it is a female under this prison garb is because the men do not wear it. Not unless they are cross dressers. But that is not allowed in Islam is it.
They do wear it sometimes, Mr Glasgo, to rob banks.
The Sewer Rat. Clever disguise.
That was in fact the slogan (ie no ban and no compulsion) adopted by everyone on the left I know of, well, when the debate was on the Hijab it was ‘the right to wear and the right not to wear’. I find many religious practices objectionable. But I’m against the persecution of religious minorities. Thats not rocket science surely. And the fact that in Europe we are talking about religious minorities and not religious majorities makes a real difference from a left wing point of view. That also should not be rocket science. The aim of these bans is not to fight against women’s oppression inside Muslim communities (everyone knows that banning religous practices of that kind simply entrenches them). Its an attempt to present muslims in Europe as a threat to our hard won liberties, in many ways reminicent of Paislyite rhetoric about Catholics. Its about stigmatising minorities for votes. Those genuine socialists, feminists and liberals taken in by this should reflect a little.
johng. Should that not read Catholic rhetoric about Paislyites. The Catholics were the main dictators long before Paisley arrived on the scene. Try getting your history in perspective.
Indefatigable as I am in bringing youse lot summat what you might not have read, there is this …
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2010/07/the_reafricaniz_1.php
… which I found jolly interesting.
Over at Al-Grauniad today they’re on about FGM – an issue which has Western feminists spitting and snarling in all directions like the singer ‘Pink’ in ‘Don’t wanna be me … I wanna be somebody else’ …
[one Amerikan uber-feminist said FGM was a kinda like uh a cultural thing and Westerners and white colonialists and imperialists and phallocentric hegemonists oughta keep their noses out of it and anyway it is kinda like very similar to rich Manhattanite superwimmin having $5,000 vaginoplasties to make their wotsits look like the wotsits of the babes in 'Playboy' and less like something clinging to the glass in an aquarium.]
ON F.G.M. …
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/25/female-circumcision-editorial
The comments are interesting.
NOT ONE PROSECUTION IN THE U.K. FOR THIS CRIME OF VIOLENCE.
NOT ONE. NOT ONE. NOT ONE. NOT ONE. NOT ONE. NOT ONE.
I found a site on the internet about the veil, it’s calle d’The Black Veil’ and is written by Muslims. Quite an interesting article on there about teh history of the hijab and burka. Apparently, it is a concession to modernity, it developed as a response to Nasser’s secularism. Prior to that, Muslim women wore a scarf that they wrapped round their heads, called a ‘chalour’ (or something like that, I’, doing this from memory). Older women went bare faced and bareheaded as they were no longer sexually attractive. (I would fall into that cateogory, Mr Corr). The burka changed its form, and became more fluid. I remember seeing a woman around Euston thirty years ago in a hessian sack with a thick crochet grill and I must admit I thought she was an escape mental patient, but apparently that wa what the burka used to look like. There is a class dimension to all this…(oh no…everyone knows Islamic society is egalaterian, they don’t do class!!!!). The women of the labouring class (or lower orders as johng likes to refer to them)did not wear restrictive garments and worked alongside men, the women of the sophisticated upper class did not drape themselves in bits of cloth, but it was the womenfold of the middleclasses who did, to show that they were not common labourers. Presumably, before the advent of the hijab, these women whould have been kept in purdah, so from their point of view it is a progressive thing allowing them to stretch their legs and earn a pretty penny or two in a job. See, there is change.
Sewer Rat / Sue R. may be dissing and or bad-mouthing herself unnecessarily
In the naughter corners of the ‘net there are hideous wimmin, grotesquely obese wimmin and entire platoons of 70+ wimmin doing their stuff in front of the camera
“We were all ready to send Great-Aunt Saie to the oldies’ home but then she ran away to become a porn star.”
Hope springs eternal
TO SERIOUS MATTERS:
Those who know Damascus, Cairo, Beirut and Istanbul will tell you that far more young wimmin anre headscarved [and veiled] than was the case 10 or 20 or 30 years ago.
This is 100% fact
Sue R. is at heart a Macauleyian nineteenth-century liberal with a nineteenth-century liberal’s optimistic assumption that the world is getting steadily better.
“See! There IS change!”
I suppose it’s better than kiddieporn. What are the sites you watch regularly?
Gerontoporn* is not – not yet anyway – an interest of mine.
I check out news and opinion sites but keep hitting glaring errors of fact that make me scream aloud and even the ‘serious’ sites are full of idiocies. HAARETZ is a good site but seems to be run by Israelis who are actually rather ashamed of being Israelis.
SPIKED recently told us that Tibet was more-or-less a British protectorate from the time of the Younghusband Expedition to the end of the Raj, which is utter nonsense.
* a new coinage: remember that you read it here first
I don’t think that it is a change for the better. I think it was a way of heading of real social progress and change. What I meant by’See, there is change!’ was not the liberal cri de coeur, but ‘these fuckers wil change when thy have to, if they know it means losing social and mental control over people.’.
Here a site and a smart article
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050731_fraser.htm
TO SUE R.
… from William Dalrymple’s FROM THE HOLY MOUNTAIN:
In Turkey … Ataturk banned the fez, outlawed* the Arabic script and tried to drag the Turks kicking and screaming into Europe. The result: a resurgent Islamic movement, mullahs being cheered in the mosques whenever they announce that the earth is flat and the sophisticated career women of Istanbul competing with each other to wear the most all-enveloping veil of medieval-looking burkha
* not literally outlawed and erased in an act of total iconoclasm.
It can be seen on tombstones in Turkey as in Bulgaria
One of my neighbours is a Turkish divorcee, who lived in England for about forty years. Last year she decided to go back to Turkey and put her flat on the market. It did not sell, and just as well because she has returned within the year. I have not asked her why she has come back, so I do not know if it was personal disappointment or the deteiorating political athmosphere. I do not really know her well enough to ask, and she is one of those people who always wants to present a positive face to the world (not like me!)so I doubt she would tell me theh truth anyway. But it makes you wonder.
“Sewer Rat / Sue R. may be dissing and or bad-mouthing herself unnecessarily”
That would be impossible.
We all know what sort of chip Dean has got on his shoulder. One about his education.
“Whether Muslim women don these garments through free choice, through coercion, or because they have internalised their long-term subjugation does not change this underlying reality.”
Oh dear. It’s all a bit reminiscent of the line taken by some separatist ‘feminists’ against women engaging in heterosexual intercourse. Just replace ‘donning a garment’ with ‘fucking a man.’
When I hear ‘internalised subjugation’ or ‘male identified’ I reach for my service revolver.
Anyway, I suspect half the idiots donning a burqa think their engaging in an anti-imperialist insurrection against the Zionists at Marks and Spencers. It’s all a bit daft, but doesn’t rise to the level of meriting legal attention.
Up to a point, Winston …
The problem is simple, to be frank, and it is simply this – 40 years ago you’d see maybe 3 burkhas in a day on London [Harley Street in particular] but now every town and city with Muslims has them …
Headscarves are no bother to me – like the Queen wears at Sandringham – but burkhas send this signal:
“I am too good for you to look at with your depraved and lustful eyes…”
Simply put,a woman in burkha ought to be living in another country.
AND THIS HAS EFF ALL TO DO WITH SKIN COLOUR
“emember seeing a woman around Euston thirty years ago in a hessian sack with a thick crochet grill and I must admit I thought she was an escape mental patient, but apparently that wa what the burka used to look like”
No its what the burka still looks like. The Burka is not the veil and nor is it Hijab. Its a burka. A different item of clothing entirely. You are correct about the concessions to modernity but your timing is wrong. In the 19th century as capitalism developed and purdah began to die out (and women, yes often middle class women) took to engaging in public spaces (as well as attending demonstrations often against the colonial powers, the veil began to become a mass production garment. The same process was observable in Hindu society in India, the Sari and blouse coming in about the same time and having many of the same associations. Both, as the anti-colonial struggle developed, also began to be associated with national identity and often national resistance. Hence the French ripping the veils off the faces of demonstrating women in Algiers. But this is all connected to the rise of capitalism and the different ways in which different societies were integrated into this system and adapted to it, in the west as much as in other parts of the world.
“40 years ago you’d see maybe 3 burkhas in a day on London [Harley Street in particular] but now every town and city with Muslims has them …”
This is absolute bollocks.
I have only seen a half dozen women in my entire life wearing a Burkha in britain. It remains a rare sight.
Are you thinking of the Niqab?
Cardinal Newman – from whose site I am banned for at least this lifetime for expressing doubleplusungoodthinkful opinions – is 100% right.
I saw enough burkhas in Gilgit and Kabul – which was a mercifully brief stay in 2007 – to last me this lifetime but the even more hideous bird-of-prey niqab is now quite a common sight in Britain.
Of course, I saw plenty of both in Kuwait, K.S.A., Oman, Qatar, U.A.E. and Bahrain. But very few in the K.R.G. zone of Iraq.
You’d certainly see more of both in Istabul these days than in Erbil.
We need an I-SPY BOOK so we can tick the boxes [only older readers will understand the reference here.]
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