I saw a picture in the Wall Street Journal the other day of a Muslim woman standing up in a Paris Metro car. Around this person were people dressed in what we might call “normal” attire. In other words, you could see their hands and faces. The Muslim woman was dressed completely in black, covered from head to toe with little slits for her eyes; she even had gloves on so that we didn’t see her hands. The image sickened me. I wanted to free this person from such despicable cruelty.
France has a population of 64 million and only 2000 women wear the burqa, the name given to the garment that covers Muslim women from head to toe, and the French government has just voted to ban the wearing of it in public. If it is found to be constitutional, the law will go in to effect in the next six months. My gut instinct is to oppose this ban for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the banning of the burqa by the capitalist state has nothing to do with a woman’s freedom. The French government and other “democratic” states do plenty of business with male dominated regimes that impose all sorts of oppressive laws on women, marrying them off at nine years old or stoning them to death for committing adultery, an accusation often made by husbands who might want to be rid of wives who refuse to divorce them.
The main issues in France right now are pensions, increasing the retirement age and austerity measures the capitalist class want to impose on workers in response to their economic crisis. The burqa ban and the assault on the Roma population are intended to whip up religious and racist sentiment among the French population as is the law aimed at “stripping nationality from naturalized citizens who deliberately endanger the life of a police officer."
Banning the covering of ones face in public won’t apply to riot police of course. And all French workers will be “endangering” the lives of police officers at some point. These points are clear in my mind.
So my instinct, and tradition, is to oppose the ban. I oppose the capitalist state banning Nazi’s from free speech or from intervening in the internal life of workers' organizations under the guise of rooting out corruption, and as I explain above, I have no illusions that the bourgeois state is concerned about freedom for women. But I have to admit, it is a complicated issue for me.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, in New Humanist Magazine writes in defense of the ban:
Muslim defenders of the burqa never support a woman's right not to cover up. Instead women like me are branded "Western whores" who will burn in hell. Is the veil a declaration of girl power? No. Ardent veilers are proxy Taliban agents and have no conscience about their sisters in Afghanistan, Iran and elsewhere--women who long to show their faces and wear whatever they want. We have them here too, those forcibly shrouded females, negated further in the narrative of choice. ... Bans may be hard weapons. But sometimes they are necessary. It is perfectly legitimate to require that faces must be visible in public institutions. And surely it's a defence of human rights to insist that pre-pubescent schoolgirls are protected from restrictive and inhibiting coverings.
Personally I cannot imagine any woman wearing a burqa out of choice, I do not agree with the author quoted above who seems to be implying that some women wearing burqa’s are “ardent veilers”. Taliban agent a burqa clad women might be, but that’s a different issue. But, I say to myself, if it is illegal for a woman to wear a burqa in public under threat of punishment, and if her husband can be punished for making her (something she is unlikely to admit given her limited power in her community), is it not possible that supporting the ban would end up confining women to the home entirely as the man would simply refuse to let her out?
If the Imam, the mullah and the misogynistic culture she is surrounded by is forcing her to wear it and the bourgeois state will punish her if she does, I cannot see it not driving her further in to isolation. If we are to oppose the ban then are we not obliged to offer this woman somewhere to go? Just stating what are obvious truths to socialists that Sarkozy is using the law as a distraction or that we should oppose the bourgeois state denying us the right to dress as we wish, (I repeat, I don’t believe that any woman desire to dress this way and that it is a form of slavery) isn’t enough. And don’t we support laws against racism? The argument that we oppose the ban on the basis of religious freedom and separation of church and state is a weak one in this case if you ask me.
And shouldn't socialists defend democracy and democratic rights. In some Muslim countries as I point out they marry children off at nine? Would we oppose a law against this on the basis of religious freedom? I defend the rights won under what we socialists call bourgeois democratic regimes or capitalists states. I defend the right to vote even though we have never won anything significant through voting and can't achieve socialism through voting. The point is that it was a concession from them. I realize that the burqa ban is not the result of a mass movement of workers, burqa wearing women or women in general against it, but I am a bit torn.
I am opposed to the ban on the wearing of the burqa, but I am conflicted about it and not so confident I am right. We had a very good blog piece about this issue and I urge readers to return to it. But I would really like to hear from readers about this issue, especially women and Muslim women especially.
Footnote: I left out another major justification for opposing the ban which is that this law, like laws that restrict democratic rights under the guise of fighting terrorism (in other words, protecting us from harm) are always used against workers in struggle generally, it is just another restriction on all our rights. Will it include people dressed up for Halloween? The conflict I guess I'm having is that I don't see the person the state is claiming to help as having a real choice in what to wear. I realize that the way young women dress now is imposed by Madison Avenue in a way but that is a bit different.
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