Ban It and They Will Protest
What's more, the protest will turn to defiance. Women have become the unwitting scapegoats of the war of words between the West and Islam. It's difficult to distinguish motive and intent in Muslim men, between men who appear to belong to the mainstream of reasonable Islam, and those dedicated to extreme fanatacism. Much easier for simple Western minds to grasp the idea that if a Muslim woman wears extreme religious clothing, taken to be the burka, the niqab, she becomes a visible symbol of the Islamists' intent.So the Muslim woman who is already beleaguered by the very fact that she is identifiably Muslim in a Western society is adopted as a symbol of what is wrong when Islam refuses to meld into the societal mainstream, the ideal of Western secular humanism, keeping herself apart, deliberately refusing even the illusion of assimilating into the social fabric and universal culture of her newly-adopted country.
Conservative Islam in its latest manifestations, exhibiting its rigid Koranic interpretations inimical to living in harmony with other religions, other cultures, other social constructs has already had a dampening effect on Muslim women's human rights. Along comes outside sources who, given the most recent history of clashes between the solitudes of Islamism and the West, begin to blame the most visible symptoms of Islamic repression.
The response is predictable: insults within the family are borne with quiet dignity; insults from without are not to be tolerated, the family draws together. Thus, Muslim women, like it or not, feel compelled to rush to the aid of their religion, that succouring religion that informs their very souls' ease, their way of life from cradle to grave. Those who have never before given thought to the veil - hitherto relatively emancipated Muslim women - begin to see the political utility of defiance.
This is human nature, this is the way most people respond to criticism, to hostility - by drawing into themselves by disowning their detractors' insults, by embracing those elements of their personal beliefs that have been the cause of their social grief. Muslim women then point out that to wear the hajib is their right, their choice, the manner in which they pledge themselves to Islam.
Is that any less acceptable than the suggestively obscene manner in which liberated young Western women flaunt their physical presence with thongs poking out of low-slung jeans? This is a legitimate observation brought forward by Muslim women in defence of their body-covering traditional garb which marks them as Muslim women embracing their faith in a public manner, and which we Westerners discover to be so intolerable.
Muslim women have become an unfortunate scapegoat of intolerance. It is not the women, not the coverings they are now adopting where they once eschewed them, because to wear them has become a statement of defiance against general approbation, a political statement of allegiance to their forebears, their culture, their history, their religion. By seeking to ban the hijab and the burka we are succumbing to an inappropriate response to our own inadequacies in dealing with the very real threat of Islamism.
Yes, it is disconcerting to be faced with another human being who chooses to withdraw her individuality, her presence, from the scrutiny of society, and more particularly, from the potential of meeting one-on-one in recognition of the elemental social need to be able to view that person to whom one speaks, even on the most superficial level of passing on the street and delivering a greeting in passing. This is an alienating social act, behaviour not anticipated in the normal mainstream of life in Western society.
But it is not illegal, not until a ban comes into effect. And if and when it does, it avails nothing at all; its purpose is clouded in rhetoric and suspicion. By banning the burka and other like coverings for Muslim women society only succeeds in driving diversity away by feeding on the unpalatability of accepting mores not our own. This does nothing to advance the cause of harmony among peoples, and goes a long way to creating ever more divisions among people of varying cultures.
This is not the answer to the dilemma facing Western society against the noxious rise of Islamism and the threat it poses to the world at large, and just incidentally to moderate Muslims around the world.
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, November 21, 2006
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