Well, I’ve got to question the whole ‘security’ thing. Does the legislation ban one from wearing a full suit of medieval armor? And what about driving around in a car with dark-tinted windows, is that still allowed? Huh? Huh?
This is a burka. As you can see, vision is extremely limited. It’s obvious why you wouldn’t want a woman wearing a burka to drive a car. I wore a similar mask [Here’s a picture) on Halloween and couldn’t see well enough to use my computer.
Here is an article about the difference between hijab and niqab, with pictures.
I fully support banning the wearing of burkas. Hijab seems harmless, and I have mixed feelings about niqab. I lean towards thinking you ought to see an adult’s face when out in public for various social and security reasons.
Dude- technology is a wonderful thing. You know that now they can program the face of a known criminal or terrorist and then scan faces in crowds looking for that face via computer? Now, I agree that this would also apply to masks, but there might well be laws against wearing masks, too.
I agree with **John Mace ** here, too- the burqa is a symbol of sexism and oppression. Some european nations also ban the wearing of a swastika.
That picture reminded me of something, and then I realized it was Cousin It and was ashamed.
Anyway, I can see limiting certain activities such as driving while wearing something with such limited visibility. And banks and similar places should be able to say “You can’t come in here with your face covered.” But I don’t think there should be a law.
It is? Really? I’m genuinely surprised; don’t you describe yourself as a libertarian? How do you fit the government legislating choice of clothing in with such a world view? How do you view the french ban on headscarves on public property, for example?
It’s not cultural relativism, it’s the very firm viewpoint that I feel everyone should be free to make their own choices where they don’t impinge on others, even if I can’t begin to comprehend them. I imagine quite a lot of burqa wearers would indeed rather not don them, and I think they should be supported as much as possible. But I don’t believe that simply legislating the “right” choice can possibly be the answer, and I have trouble believing that you do, given your posting history. This isn’t freeing people to make their own choice; it’s making it for them. And while you may feel that if “enough” people agree with your choice, then that makes it okay, I simply can’t agree. I think there’s an absolute gulf between emancipating people and bestowing choice from above.
To choose an example which may resonate, I believe this is akin to assuming that we make everyone richer by doubling the minimum wage (he says, dreading the potential hijack). It’s an utterly useless blunt tool that far from helping oppressed women merely gives the appearance of victimisation for no benefit whatsoever. And what now for these few burqa wearers in the Netherlands; assuming they are being oppressed, are they not now just going to be stuck at home? Is our hamfisted legislation going to address the cause of their oppression in any way whatsoever, or is it just a salve for our need to be “doing something” (at the same time as tackling those troublesome immigrants, natch)?
It’s true in a way; if I had any confidence whatsoever that this was about eliminating male oppression, I might have fewer misgivings (although I would still oppose the law). As it is, however, I believe that is nothing more than a fig leaf for a bit of populist windmill-tilting, in which opportunistic politicians take aim at the very lowest of the low-hanging fruit.
I’d be all for banning metaphors as comprehensively mixed as that, mind.
That’s an excellent point, I think. If a woman is being oppressed and forced to hide her face, the burqa at least offers the freedom to be out of the house. Her oppressors (if any) aren’t going to say, “Oh, since it’s the law, go flaunt your shameless hussy face-having ways, o temptress!”
I think you’re confusing my view of that law with whether I think **Guin **should wear a burqa to protest that law. I thought I made it clear in the OP that I opposed the law:
I’m conflicted because on the one hand I do believe that people should be able to wear whateve they want, and while I don’t want legislation banning the wearing of burqas, I think that they serve mainly to oppress women and that few women would choose to wear one if their culture didn’t demand it. If I wanted to protest the law, I would find some other way to protest it lest my actions be miscontrued as being pro-burqa. I am most decidely anti-burqa, but pro-choice.
Can someone clarify for me whether the wearing of a burqa is required by the religion, or is it just a custom of the culture?
Yeah, that’s why I was confused; I was clear that the post I originally replied to was referring to protestors, but your followup seemed to be broader. My mistake, sorry.
Gotcha. Yeah, I’d probably balk at a burqa, but I wouldn’t scorn a scarf (daft though I might look in one). I was half tempted to head over to France specifically to protest when they had their moment of madness, and I’m really not the sort of person to even consider that sort of thing. This sort of legislation just makes me furious in a way very little else does.
To be honest it’d be really interesting to find out if anyone has actually talked to the women affected. Difficult though it might be to get a reliable (i.e. uninfluenced) opinion from them, I’d be really interested to see what they say; I suspect just about no-one involved in this debate has any personal perspective on the matter (unless Angua turns up), which makes the whole thing slightly too once-removed.
Depends on whom you talk to. I think an objective look at the matter, though, tells us that it was a custom that was woven into the religion after the fact. Not the burqa, per say, but the idea of covering the entire body. The Qur’an only says that a woman must dress and behave modestly in public.
One has to wonder how this will affect the actual women involved. I suspect that if they are forbidden by law to wear a burqa in public, their husbands/fathers/brothers will make them stay at home.
I think these laws are complete and utter bullshit and actually exemplify what makes the US so great (No, I’m not kidding). A woman should be able to wear whatever she goddamn well pleases. (However, the US loses points on the ban on toplessness. That should be allowed too. Who’s with me?)
A government should not have the right to govern our fucking wardrobes. This is outright religious discrimination.
One does indeed. 
There’s really no pretending this legislation is written with the women in mind, as far as I can see.
Oakminster, support for hijab seems to draw from various sources, both in the Qur’an and hadith, and inevitably depends greatly on interpretation (at this point it’s traditional to call Angua in, although I would understand if she’s sick of these threads :)). I do wonder what relevance this really has, however, as it seems to me that a government getting in to the business of telling people what their religion says would be a veritable minefield, with a big pile of cans of worms in the middle. And after all, who is to say that tradition and culture aren’t a valid part of a religion? Vast swathes of Judaism are more traditional than scriptural (by my understanding). If, in the process of writing a law, we have to stop and work out what being a “true” Muslim entails, then this surely is a huge indication that we’re about to write a crappy law.
It is not necessarily religious discrimination, particularly if the faith does not require the burqa.
There was a case brought in Florida, where the State denied a driver’s license to a woman who refused to unmask for the picture. She sued. She lost. Appeal was reportedly pending at the time of this article:
It’s relevant in determining the appropriate legal standard to apply. If a woman is able to articulate a claim to a violation of her First Amendment rights, perhaps under the “free excercise” clause, she has a better chance of getting the Court to apply a higher level of scrutiny (and winning). If there is no free excercise claim, then she may see the Court apply a lower level of scrutiny, and if so, she may lose.
And I support a law that says if a piece of identification requires a picture, the picture has to be of an individual, not an article of clothing.
But to say that that same woman can’t stroll down the street is quite different. Being in public doesn’t require that you be identifiable. People should be allowed to wear disguises or dress atypically.
A better policy might be to make sure services are available and widely published about for women who want to defect from that culture since they probably have very few marketable skills or much experience in taking care of themselves. A government has a legitimate interest in ensuring a cohesive, integrated society exists, and the burqa is antithetical towards those ends.
We have a similar situation here in the US with the FLDS (Warren Jeff’s religion and the like). Girls are given almost no education, are married off (into plural marriages) at a very young age, and are often too scared to attempt to break away since they have no survival skills of their own. It’s hard to say that these girls choose their lifestyle in any meaningful usage of the term “choose”.
I disagree. I think it is an obvious stab at Islam. And I agree totally with what jsgoddess said.
Maybe, but first define “the faith”, or for that matter “require”. Your implication is clearly that if the burqa is more of a traditional phenomenon that has grown up within Islam, then we can define it as being not really Islamic, and thus declare it fair game for legislation. But then you’re making the rather dubious assumption that a religion consists only of what is explicitly written down, or even more dubiously that only subsets of the texts are valid (I’ve seen someone on the board make this argument; I think it was tagos FWIW). This puts us in the even more dubious territory of actually endorsing (say) the Qur’an over the hadith, which rather implies that the government is then making value judgements on individual holy texts.
It seems inarguable to me that hijab is well established within Islam as a cultural response to textual directives to dress modestly. Furthermore, it really doesn’t seem logical to me that “traditional” practices are not part of the actual religion. If you’re going to start trying to apply strict governmental definitions of what a religion really says (as opposed to what people really believe), I repeat: you’re going to end up drawing some awfully messy lines that make a whole lot of implications that don’t do anyone any favours.
Take, for example, Jehovah’s Witnesses and blood transfusions. It’s undeniable that JWs believe they are forbidden, and yet most other branches of Christianity, operating from the same texts, believe nothing of the sort. You’re effectively saying the government should wade in to this sort of debate, declare who is right and wrong, and legislate on that basis. I, on the other hand, think it’s undeniable that large numbers of people believe that hijab is a requirement of Islam, that they have some degree of justification for doing so, and that there’s a huge body of traditional practice to back them up. I don’t see that getting further in to this point can possibly be fruitful, without raising all sorts of alarming questions about what the government’s role in regulating religion actually is.
Truth Is Stranger-r-r-r Than Fictionn-n-n-n!
Part of the Iranian protest against the U.S. supported Shah involved the public wearing of burqas (which he had outlawed as an act of “modernization”). In retrospect, I am not sure how many Iranian women in 1978 and 1979 would have chosen to make that particular protest had they known that it would help bring Khomeini to power, but the ruthlessness of the Shah’s suppression of some forms of Islam justified it in their minds at the time. (It is also a bit ironic since the tradition of Persian culture only required the head covering, perhaps with the niqab/veil, not the burqa.)
Are you sure? I was under the impression that a rather large number of Afghani women have chosen to continue wearing a burqa even after the overthrow of the Taliban.
Given the instability there and the continuing presence of the Taliban even now, it can hardly be assumed that every woman choosing to get rid of the burqa can do so without fear of consequences. Maybe there are bits of Afghanistan where it’s fine, but we really can’t assume that women who choose to continue wearing it are doing so by preference, rather than out of self-preservation.