Forcing Muslim women to cover up can be a huge human rights violation;
banning them from wearing the veil is problematic too, says Judith Sunderland
in the collection of essays, "The Unfinished Revolution." In this
excerpt, she explains why.
Credit:
2011 Samer Muscati/Human Rights Watch.
(WOMENSENEWS)--On April 11, 2011,
Kenza Drider, a 32-year-old mother of four, broke the law in Paris: she wore
the niqab in public. She had traveled by train from her home in Avignon to
protest a new law banning the full-face Muslim veil in all public spaces
throughout France.
In June 2010,
25-year-old Louiza (not her real name) was shot at close range with a paintball
gun as she walked down the street in Grozny because she wasn't wearing a
headscarf. That summer many women in the Russian republic of Chechnya fell
victim to attacks and harassment during a "virtue campaign" to force
women to cover themselves.
What these
two incidents have in common is interference--sometimes brutal, always
wrong--with the fundamental human rights of women in the name of religion,
tradition or misguided protectionism.
In
Indonesia's Aceh province, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan under the
Taliban, as well as parts of Somalia, Gaza and Chechnya, women are forced to
cover up. At the same time, local and national governments in Europe have moved
to prohibit women and girls from wearing the veil in schools and public
service. In April 2011, France enacted a national law banning the wearing of
full-face veils anywhere in public; Belgium enacted a similar law in July 2011,
and comparable nationwide bans have been proposed in a number of other European
countries. Several cities in Belgium, Spain and Italy already have local bans
in place.
A Sad Irony
The sad irony
is that whether they are being forced to cover up or to uncover, these women
are being discriminated against. Banned from wearing the hijab--a traditional
Muslim headscarf--or forced to veil themselves, women around the world are
being stripped of their basic rights to personal autonomy; to freedom of
expression; and to freedom of religion, thought and conscience.
Though men
are also subject to religious and traditional practices, including dress codes
that impinge on their freedoms, women around the world are far more likely to
see their decisions dictated, their options curtailed, even their physical
integrity and lives threatened, by official and societal norms about propriety.
Women's rights
activists, both within and outside Muslim communities, have long argued that
veiling, and full veiling of the face and body in particular, is a powerful
symbol of the oppression and subjugation of women. The burka, a full face and
body covering, is commonly associated with the Taliban, who systematically
violate the fundamental rights and freedoms of women in Afghanistan, a country
with the lowest life expectancy in the region and some of the highest rates of
maternal death.
The Right to Choose
Given the
evidence that forced veiling constitutes a serious women's rights issue in so
many parts of the world, it is perhaps not surprising that proponents of bans
on veils in Europe see them as a way to liberate women and protect women and
girls from societal pressure to veil themselves. Bans on students and teachers
wearing headscarves in schools, on civil servants wearing any kind of religious
symbol and on full-face coverings are also variously justified by the need to
ensure secularism in state institutions, as well as on security grounds. Though
some (but not all) bans are crafted in neutral terms, the political debate
around them in Europe is infused with discomfort with an increasingly visible
Muslim minority population, and concerns about integrating newer Europeans
while preserving so-called European values.
Pro-ban
arguments relating to women's rights have the greatest resonance. Yet denying
women the right to cover themselves is as wrong as forcing them to do so.
Muslim women, like all women, should have the right to dress as they choose and
to make decisions about their lives and how to express their faith, identity
and moral values. And they should not be forced to choose between their beliefs
and their chosen profession.
Generalizations
about women's oppression do a disservice to one of the basic tenets of gender
equality: the right to self-determination and autonomy, the right a woman has
to make decisions about her life and her body without interference from the
state or others. There are undoubtedly women who are forced to wear the veil or
feel tremendous pressure to do so against their own convictions. But there are
also Muslim women in Europe, some of them converts, who have spoken out to say
that veiling was their own decision, citing motivations such as an expression
of their faith and a desire to assert their identity.
As alien as
it may seem to some Europeans, veiling can be a choice, in the same way that
other convictions or conduct that have been shaped by societal, family or
religious influences are experienced by the individual as an expression of
their identity.