May 21, 2010

It would seem there are some things in Australia we are not allowed to discuss. A ban on the burqa is clearly one of them. But the time has come to get over our fears and cultural fragilities – and grow up. The call to ban the burqa is receiving serious consideration in European parliaments. And it should here, too.

Belgian legislators voted last month to outlaw the burqa in public places. On Wednesday, a bipartisan resolution passed by the French parliament deploring the burqa – on the grounds of “dignity” and “equality of men and women” – was presented to the French cabinet, and a ban is expected later this year. Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada are also grappling with the issue.

But in Australia, in a sign of cultural timidity and intellectual weakness, we seem intent on shunning any meaningful debate about the burqa and its place in a liberal democracy. At one level this is understandable, given the issue has become a confusing tussle between feminists and well-meaning liberals; nervous libertarians and right-wing ideologues; and the usual smattering of racists and dog-whistling shock-jocks.

Unfortunately for Muslim women, the burqa is not just a garment. It has become a weapon in a war of ideology: a war in which women are the battleground and their rights and freedoms are at stake.

Here’s the problem. Those who are critical of calls to ban the burqa perceive it to be an attack on personal freedoms. They view the burqa as an individual choice – which is arguable – and a religious requirement, which it is not. They look straight past the woman hidden from public view under heavy cloth, and instead applaud our multicultural tolerance. This is a mistake. The burqa has nothing to do with ethnic diversity and everything to do with a war against women. Those who wear it, and those who insist it be worn, subscribe to an ideology in which women are inferior sexual temptresses, whose female form is a problem and must be covered. This is based on the contradictory proposition that men are both superior and yet unable to control their sexual urges if they see women in their natural human state. If this wasn’t deadly serious, it would be funny.

Award-winning Muslim journalist Mona Eltahawy says she is appalled to hear Europeans defend the burqa and niqab. “A bizarre political correctness has tied the tongues of those who would normally rally to defend women’s rights,” she says. Yet, to argue directly with Islamic fundamentalists about gender equality is fruitless. According to Eltahawy, “the ideology that promotes the niqab and burqa does not believe in the concept of women’s rights to begin with”.

Let’s be clear. This is not about the hijab – or headscarf. Like any hat or cap, the hijab is a matter of individual right. Whether worn for reasons of devotion, modesty, conformity or fashion, it is personal and the state has no business banning it. The burqa is an entirely different issue.

The burqa and the niqab shroud the full body, covering every part of a woman except her feet. The niqab includes a slit for the eyes, whereas the burqa has mesh netting. Malalai Joya, an Afghan MP and a devout Muslim, hates wearing it. “It’s not only oppressive,” she says, “but it’s more difficult than you might think. You have no peripheral vision. And it’s hot and suffocating under there.”

When visiting Australia recently, Joya didn’t pack her burqa. She is one of the many millions of Muslim women around the world who choose not to wear it – when they don’t have to. Numerous Islamic scholars, men and women, argue that there is not a single reference in the Koran that mandates women must cover their face and bodies and hide themselves from public view. The Koran does call for modesty, which some interpret as an obligation to wear the headscarf. But even that is widely questioned by progressive Muslims scholars such as Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress. Furious at Islamic extremists for their “gender apartheid”, Fatah insists that even the hijab is being used by fundamentalists as a “political tool” who have turned it into “the central pillar of Islam”.

Outside Australia, there are plenty of Muslim women who despise the burqa and niqab as much as I do, and are prepared to say so. British journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a Shiite Muslim who pulls no punches. “I abhor the burqa,” she wrote in The Independent, saying that she was “offended” by the presumption that women who wear it “are more pious and true” than her.

There is no doubt that women who don this ostentatious costume in the West are proud of their piety. One such woman told me, “the niqab is submission and servitude to my Almighty Creator” and that I had no right to question her choice to wear it. Well, I do. What God demands men roam free while women wear a sackcloth that restricts their movement and dehumanises them? What God wants to punish women in this way? What God hates women so much that he restricts her right to be man’s equal?

The answer is obvious. No God. This is the work of men – who claim a direct link to the divine – and wish to keep women subordinate and under their control. It’s that simple.

Virginia Haussegger is a Canberra-based ABC news presenter.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-burqa-is-a-war-on-women-20100520-vnp3.html

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Some follow-up letters in The Age:

Isolated women will bear brunt
May 22, 2010

WHILE France’s legislation to ban the burqa makes sense to a Western mindset, so eloquently put by Virginia Haussegger (”The burqa is a war on women”, Comment, 21/5), it has the potential to polarise a multireligious, multicultural population. This ruling makes women, already powerless and isolated, bear the brunt of the responsibility for upholding religious norms and forces a defensive stance when what is seen to be threatened is freedom of religious expression, rather than equality.

The burqa may become a symbol of freedom rather than of oppression when, through this legislation, it becomes the focus of religious identity and expression. Imposing a law from above will strengthen resistance and encourages a simplistic understanding of the issue of oppression within religion. The French government is naive in proposing a law as an answer.

In our own context, I wonder how effective it would be to try to bring the Catholic Church to the attention of the Equal Opportunity Commission for its discrimination against women in the priesthood?

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I am hopeful that an attitude of acceptance and invitation of Muslim women into the social structures of our country will, over time, encourage them to reflect on the opportunities offered and a wish on their own behalf to promote greater equality within their own structures. This is a less heavy-handed, less immediate but more far-sighted approach that encourages dialogue and a possibility for real transformation.

Rina Madden, Nunawading

Cultural practices are demeaning

THANK you, Virginia Haussegger, for shedding the lights of sanity and decency on to the burqa debate. Many good-hearted people think they are defending human rights when they argue for Muslim women’s so-called right to choose.

Even international human rights organisations have been sucked into this line of thinking. Would they also defend a woman’s right to submit to foot-binding or genital mutilation? All three practices are cruel, oppressive and dehumanising. They limit women’s ability to live full lives. They are (or were in the case of footbinding) all cultural practices associated with sexuality and about casting women as inferior beings to be controlled by and for men.

Such cultural practices are as demeaning of men as they are of women. Unfortunately, it is the women who suffer the most. Not all cultural practices should be continued.

Kath McKay, Upper Ferntree Gully

Many forms of female subjugation

I AGREE for the most part with Virginia Haussegger’s viewpoint, with the exception that I don’t see a distinction between non-religious or religion-mandated customs. Muslim women wearing the burqa, Orthodox Jewish women shaving their heads after marriage, Christian women not being able to be ordained as priests, television advertisements featuring mums cooking dinner while dads watch TV in the lounge room, the custom that children bear their fathers’ surnames  ¢â‚¬ ¦

A modern, egalitarian, democratic society should consider all of the above, and many more, as forms of female subjugation.

We should all care about consistency of thinking. While we’re talking about banning the burqa in Australia, why don’t we also tackle the myriad ways in which our male-dominated societies and religions have successfully assigned second-class status to women? Why are we singling out the burqa, instead of campaigning to change the ways we think about gender (in)equality across the board?

http://www.theage.com.au/national/letters/isolated-women-will-bear-brunt-20100521-w1ol.html