Yawning Bread. November 2006

The niqab and the freedom of religion

    

  

 
Lately, there have been a number of controversies in Europe and Australia arising from the Muslim headscarf or face veil. While our newspapers have carried news reports, I don't recall seeing any commentary by local journalists. Perhaps this is understandable, for Muslim issues can get very sensitive in Singapore and our region.

However, this sensitivity may in fact argue for comment. Too often, many of us adopt a policy of not wanting to get involved in the question of the place of Islam in modern society. We may fear causing offence, or sparking uncontrollable passion. Many Muslims too consider it illegitimate for non-Muslims to comment on Islam. Our views are not welcome. We are dismissed from the outset as biased against Islam; this dismissal and prejudgement itself testifying to the fact that many Muslims see themselves and their faith as under siege by outsiders.


The niqab
 

The result is not healthy, for without engagement there can never be any resolution or synthesis.

The issue of Islam in the modern world is a very, very big topic. For this essay, I am merely going to limit myself to the question of the full-face veil, known as the niqab (sometimes spelt niqaab). In Singapore too, we occasionally see Muslim women in them, typically accompanied by their husbands in Middle-eastern garb, complete with turban.

 

Britain


Aishah Azmi, by Getty Images
 

Two news stories related to the niqab came out of the United Kingdom recently. One was about a 23-year-old teaching assistant from West Yorkshire, Aishah Azmi, who insisted on wearing the full-face veil while in her school which caters to 6 – 11 year-old kids. The school authorities sacked her, ruling that covering her face impeded her ability to perform her job, since children needed to interact with facial expressions. She sued, but the verdict mostly went against her.

Around the same time, Jack Straw, a British cabinet minister, said he would prefer that Muslim women not wear the niqab.

As reported by the BBC,

Asked on BBC Radio 4's Today programme if he would rather the veils be discarded completely, Mr Straw replied "Yes. It needs to be made clear I am not talking about being prescriptive but with all the caveats, yes, I would rather."

Mr Straw explained the impact he thought veils could have in a society where watching facial expressions was important for contact between different people.

"Communities are bound together partly by informal chance relations between strangers -- people being able to acknowledge each other in the street or being able pass the time of day," he said.

"That's made more difficult if people are wearing a veil. That's just a fact of life. "I understand the concerns but I hope, however, there can be a mature debate about this. "

-- BBC online, 6 Oct 2006,
'Remove full veils' urges Straw

Straw also said that he was worried about the "implications of separateness" and the development of "parallel communities".

Some quarters of the Muslim community in Britain reacted strongly to Straw's comments. Nazreen Nawaz, a spokeswoman for the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir said "The Muslim community does not need lessons in dress from Jack Straw".

"He has once again shown that for Cabinet ministers it is open season on Muslims and Islam," she added.

The Lancashire Council of Mosques said the minister had "misunderstood" the issue and it was a "very insensitive and unwise" statement. "Many of these women find Mr. Straw's comments both offensive and disturbing."

 
Netherlands

The latest news is that the Dutch government will ban the wearing of the full-face veil in public.

The Dutch government agreed on Friday a total ban on the wearing of burqas and other Muslim face veils in public, justifying the move on security grounds.

Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk will now draw up legislation which will result in the Netherlands, once one of Europe's most easy-going nations, imposing some of the continent's toughest laws against concealing the face.

"The cabinet finds it undesirable that garments covering the face -- including the burqa -- should be worn in public in view of public order, (and) the security and protection of fellow citizens," the Dutch Justice Ministry said in a statement.

-- Reuters, 17 Nov 2006, Dutch to ban
 wearing of Muslim burqa in public

 

Immigrants to the Netherlands to take test

The Netherlands used to be the most tolerant country in Europe with respect to foreign immigration. In the last 10 years, they have turned the other way.

Partly I think it has to do with the failure of large numbers of Muslim immigrants to integrate (some subcommunities refuse to even try), such that their values now stand in conflict against other values which the native Dutch consider supremely important to their national identity – full equality for women and gays being top of the list.

Partly too, it may have to do with the fact that like all processes, immigration has reached a tipping point, where the numbers of foreigners have grown to a point when a reaction naturally sets in.

The Dutch now feel it is necessary for immigrants to understand and accept the core values that undergird their country. Since March this year, for example, would-be immigrants have to pass a test showing they have a basic understanding of the Dutch language and society, and a law is under consideration that would require certain immigrants to take courses on integration.

I am told, but I have not seen for myself, that the course would-be immigrants have to take includes a video of two gay men kissing.

And here's a video from a Dutch children's show featuring a boy singing about his two fathers.

 

 

The Afghan burqa - Reuters
  
The rule will actually ban all face coverings, including heavily tinted motorcycle helmets and ski masks, but for some reason, either the press or the government seems to be focussing on the effect of the new rule on the niqab. Hardly anyone in the Netherlands wears it, and critics of the government have accused them of using this angle merely to score points with conservative, anti-immigration voters.

Unsurprisingly, Dutch Muslims were unhappy. "They are going to have to find a better argument than security. It is an infringement on the freedom of religion," said Ahmed Markouch, a Moroccan mosques representative.

 

Nothing new

Actually, such a ban is nothing new in other countries. Italy bans face-coverings such as heavily tinted helmets, as does Singapore. Here, even cars cannot have heavily tinted windows. The bans were put in long ago, based on the reasoning that robbers would be likely to exploit such concealment.

 

The freedom of religion

Ah, freedom of religion. Truth be told, I am very sceptical of such a thing, particularly in its current, often dogmatic formulation, that takes it as given that religion should trump larger, societal interests.

It cannot be. Very often, organised religion has interests that are divisive and ghettoist. Basic crowd psychology will tell you that that is one of the proven ways by which leaders keep a flock together. Outsiders are painted as dark and sinister, insiders as pure and righteous, with contact cast as contaminating. The discouragement of contact then has the desired effect of minimising defection from the group, which in turn means the group's numbers and political strength are kept up.

Whipping up emotions, e.g. through imagining that the religion is under attack, is another good way of cementing solidarity -- and opening purses.

But there are larger societal interests e.g. that of getting along peacefully with each other with as little mutual suspicion as possible. Shared cultural outlook helps integration, and social mobility, e.g. promoting people on merit, renting homes from each other, maximises economic benefits for all.

So I have no truck with the notion that freedom of religion should come anywhere to claiming prior rights over the larger public interest, not when it's so easy to show that religion can be used for divisive and conflict-prone ends. In any case, the whole notion may be just a big red herring, for who defines what is religion?

Take the niqab. Nowhere in the Q'uran is this mentioned as an Islamic requirement. Most scholars, including Islamic ones, see it as a cultural practice and perhaps a political statement, but it is not a religious injunction. In fact, historians have suggested that it can be traced to the Babylonian, Persian and Moghul Indian practice of the purdah -- the seclusion of females from public view by clothing, high walls, curtains and screens.

Yet even if most Islamic theologians do not consider the niqab a religious requirement, minor leaders, usually the more extreme ones, do. Then what? Are we to say that a certain clique of people -– the more orthodox leaders in this case -– should be given powers to define religious belief for others? And that the State and larger society will defer to them to interpret what constitutes religion, and furthermore, whatever they say constitutes religion must be free from interference by the State in the name of "freedom of religion"?

Surely, that cannot be. Just because these more orthodox guys are more numerous or have more adherents doesn't mean the smaller sects are not sincere in their own beliefs. But then, what about a sect with a membership of one?

You'll never be able to draw a line to say this is where a religion begins and another ends, or determine who speaks for what religion. Ultimately, this leads us to the individual. Religion is not a matter of what any group says it is on behalf of others, but what each individual says it is for himself. In that case, how different is it from personal liberty, the pursuit of happiness, etc?

Note the term "legitimate, compelling public interests". We should not use this lightly.

Authoritarian and conformist-minded people have a tendency to demand that people who are different in some way, erase those differences in the name of "public interest". The more similar we all are, the smoother and happier the society, they believe.

That is to seriously misunderstand the concept. Infringing on people's liberties requires better justification than that. Injury to others is one -- and I mean real injury, not the "hurt my feelings" type that is so prevalent in Malaysian discourse, or the "conservatives find it offensive" excuse that is common in Singapore. Action that is likely -- likely, not just conceivably -- to lead to serious social conflict is another.

Furthermore, the limitation that society imposes upon the individual's liberty has to be proportionate to the severity of the individual's acts. You do not hang people for vandalism. Noise restrictions apply only at certain times, and so on.

So, while in this discussion, I have reported how political leaders have spoken up against the niqab as a security threat, or as a practice that engenders social separation, these same complaints cannot be made against the hijab (known in this region as the tudung). Thus it would be disproportionate, and hardly compelling, for the State to interfere with it.

But we do accept that personal liberty is not unconditional. It is subject to legitimate, compelling public interests: you cannot walk down a street brandishing a sword as your lucky charm, for example, nor can you play music at full blast at 2 a.m.

Hence, if religious beliefs and practices are in essence no more than the exercise of personal liberty, shouldn't they be subject to the same measure of conditionality?

On what woolly notion is the concept of the "freedom of religion" left to stand?

This is especially when some leaders of organised religion use their influence to control the way members of their faith live their lives, sometimes through subtle brainwashing, often through social shame and manipulated peer pressure. Church-led homophobia, mosque-led subjugation of women (see sidebar about Sheikh Taj al-Din a-Hilali) are examples that come to mind.

To me, such action runs counter to individual liberty. If the purpose of the State is to protect the individual's liberty from unwarranted coercion -– and as a liberal, I do believe in that fundamental principle -– then there will be times when the public interest, as represented by the State, collides with the interest of religious leaders.

So once again, I do not accept that there is any special value in "religious freedom"; a person's religious freedom is just one of his personal freedoms. There is no logical reason why "religious freedom" should be in a class of its own, accorded unusual immunity from intervention by the State.

© Yawning Bread 

 

Australia

In September 2006, the mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilali, preached a sermon in which he said that women who did not wear a hijab (head scarf) were like "uncovered meat". He implied that if men raped or took sexual advantage of women, it would be the women's fault.

The hijab

"If one puts uncovered meat out in the street, or on the footpath, or in the garden, or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, then the cats come and eat it, is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem!"

John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, urged Australian Muslims to act to defend their image. "What I am saying to the Islamic community is this If they do not resolve this matter, it could do lasting damage to the perceptions of that community within the broader Australian community. If it is not resolved, then unfortunately people will run around saying 'Well the reason they didn't get rid of him is because secretly some of them support his views'."

Despite emergency meetings, community leaders refused to sack al-Hilali.

As reported by The Australian on 30 October 2006, Haset Sali, the spokesman for Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC), the body that had appointed al-Hilali as mufti, described Sheik Hilali's Ramadan sermon as "repugnant" to the majority of Australian Muslims and conceded that "it should not be taken to represent the true views of Islam." However, the council still did not sack or censure al-Hilali.

In fact, the same newspaper revealed that, according to Haset Sali, the council "had appointed Sheik Hilali as mufti to save him from being deported for misogynistic and anti-Semitic remarks he had continually made since his arrival in Australia in 1982."

Al-Hilali himself, asked whether he would volunteer to resign, remained defiant, saying, "After we clean the world of the White House first." He was referring to President George W Bush.

There were loud cheers and applause from supporters.

However, condemnation continued to pour in from other Australian leaders and commentators. After further meetings, AFIC proposed abolishing the post of mufti in due course as a way of placating critics.

(If you read the transcript of his entire sermon, you'll also see al-Hilali lambast Christians for polytheism, saying they will go to hell.)

 

 

Footnotes

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Addenda

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