July 2009 
Year 15    No.142
Editorial


Battle of the burkha

So whose side are we on in this war of the veil? The American president, Barack Obama, who, in his lets-make-a-new-beginning address to the Muslim world in Cairo on June 4, said, "I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear" and also reminded Muslims that the "US government has gone to  court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it"? Or the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who also chose a momentous occasion – June 22, the first time in 136 years that the country’s president has addressed Parliament – to damn the burkha and declare that it was "not welcome" in France? (A 2004 law prohibits Muslim girls from wearing the hijab in government schools in France. Students from other religious backgrounds are also barred from any conspicuous display of their religious symbols.)

First, some facts: Many Muslim women across the world dress just like other women do with no additional garment to mark their religious identity. But many other Muslim women do wear such a garment. In countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan under Taliban rule, covering up is mandatory. On the other hand, such practice is prohibited or restricted in Muslim-majority countries like Tunisia and Tajikistan (where the clergy endorsed a law to bar "an imported garment" in 2008). Turkey has relaxed its no-hijab-in-schools rule only recently. In recent years new laws have been enacted or attempted in some European countries – Belgium, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Bulgaria – to enforce certain restrictions on a Muslim woman’s coverall garment.

Incidentally, the burkha is not the same thing as the hijab. In different Muslim countries, the add-on garment could be a hijab (a head covering), a jilbab or a chadar (garments that leave only the face and hands exposed), a niqab (a total covering except for the eyes) or a burkha (a total head and body covering).

Obama has defended the hijab as a matter of religious freedom. Commenting on the French ban on the hijab in schools during a press conference on June 6, he said, "In the United States our basic attitude is that we’re not going to tell people what to wear." But things seem to work differently under French secularism. There, as mentioned earlier, religious freedom excludes the right of students to wear their religion to school. Presumably Sarkozy still finds the hijab acceptable outside schools even if the burkha isn’t. In his address at the historic Château de Versailles, Sarkozy vehemently asserted that "the burkha is not a religious sign, it’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement". If we agree (a lot of Muslims do) that the burkha is not a religious garment, it follows that, whatever else it may be, a ban on the burkha will not be an infringement upon religious freedom.

So are we with Obama or with Sarkozy? Before we answer this, we have questions for both. To Obama: Is the burkha also covered under religious freedom? If so, should Muslim women only have the right to wear it or also the right not to wear it – in places like Saudi Arabia, America’s staunch ally, for example? For Sarkozy: Considering that only a small section of Muslim women in France wear the burkha, why choose such a momentous occasion to rage against it instead of facing up to the continued marginalisation within French society of millions of Muslim migrants – women and men – from your former colonies? That said, our answer is simple: We are neither with Obama nor with Sarkozy. Though not in the least impressed by any of the pro-burkha arguments, we respect Muslim women’s right to personal choice in a religio-cultural milieu where both options are real.

Obama’s Cairo speech has been greeted with scepticism and criticism from some quarters for a variety of reasons. It is useful, and necessary, to ask questions and we agree with some of the issues raised. (We publish the full text of the speech along with some of the responses to it in this issue.) But we also believe that Barack Obama deserves at least conditional applause for the tenor and the "semi-candour" of his speech. Whether, and how much, he will deliver on his promised "new beginning" are indeed legitimate questions. One thing however is certain: to deliver anything at all he needs to combine courage with caution.

Meanwhile, in the 30th year of its Islamic revolution, Iran is thirsting for reform and more freedom. Just when brute force seemed to have succeeded – for the moment at least – in sweeping the massive rallies protesting the allegedly fraudulent re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad off the streets, a new centre of resistance has surfaced in the city of Qom, Iran’s spiritual capital. While Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the official electoral watchdog, the Guardian Council, have endorsed the election results, as we go to press, a pro-reform group of clerics, the Assembly of Qom Seminary Scholars and Researchers, have publicly lambasted the Guardian Council, saying it no longer had the right "to judge in this case" and that some of its members had "lost their impartial image in the eyes of the public". What next?

– EDITORS


[ Subscribe | Contact Us | Archives | Khoj | Aman ]
[ Letter to editor  ]

Copyrights © 2002, Sabrang Communications & Publishing Pvt. Ltd.