Neck of the woods


“How’s this for the fashion police? In late May, in a suburb of Brussels, a Muslim woman was arrested for wearing a niqab—the garment worn by a tiny proportion of Muslim women that covers all of the face but the eyes. In the subsequent melee, the woman broke an officer’s nose while being frisked. Her arrest sparked clashes between Muslim youth and police in the area. A week later, the hard-right Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang offered a 250 euro bounty to anyone reporting veiled women to the police. The Belgian law banning the niqab, like measures across Europe ranging from outlawing the wearing of certain face veils in France to the building of more minarets in Switzerland, was ostensibly aimed at integrating Muslim minorities into Western culture. To the extent these laws have integrated Muslims into their place in the new hierarchy of European racism—a toxic blend of traditional fascism and Western bigotry posing as secular liberalism—they’ve been successful. But as a tool for promoting inclusion and equality, these laws have singularly failed. Indeed, this bid to prevent the importation of “radical Islam” has been both laughable and lamentable. The Belgian woman in question was a locally born convert, as were the girls at the heart of the French head scarf law, whose father is Jewish…………”

I do not believe that women should wear a the niqab or burq’a, especially if they don’t want to. I don’t believe that, say, Sarkozy, should wear a fedora or a dunce’s hat, if he doesn’t want to. Yet I believe they both have the right to wear what they want. The same Europeans who were for the ban would raise hell if their government banned them from wearing some item of their own national attire.
Some Arab and Muslim women who never wear the niqab or burq’a hurriedly supported this new European ban on public Islamic dress as ‘liberating’ the women. Maybe it is in some cases where they are forced to. Yet for some this may not be the case: then how can imposing restrictions on anyone ‘liberate’ them? What next? Banning speaking Arabic publicly as a “liberating” measure? Banning halal meet as a ‘liberating’ measure?
Cheers
mhg
[email protected]