The Doha Debates on The Burqa Ban: Filling in the Gaps

December 8, 2010 By Guest Contributor

This is a guest post, written by Layla in response to our Doha Debates Roundtable.

I’m a Muslim woman by birth and cultural affiliation that has lived in the U.S., the Middle East, and most recently, France.  For a year and a half now, since President Sarkozy first began advocating the ban on the face veil, I’ve had mixed feelings about this issue.  So I was very excited to watch the Doha Debates on this subject, thinking that I’d finally hear an echo of how the two sides of this debate have been playing out in my own head for so many months.

But while the side I always verbalize when discussing this topic with supporters of the ban was very well articulated by Mehdi Hassan and Nabila Ramdani, the other side, which I have long kept bottled up for fear of adding fuel to the fire of opportunistic right-wing politicking here, was very poorly expressed by Jacques Myard and Farzana Hassan.  He came across as a bumbling old man and she was extremely scattered in her argument, relying on hypothetical possibilities and projections vs. on available facts and statistics.  As Sana points out at the recent roundtable discussion of the debates here on MMW, you could tell there was a bias simply in the selection of more competent speakers who rejected the motion over the two who supported it.

So, I figure that here on MMW is as good a place as any to try and fill this gap, and finally break my own silence on this issue. Quickly, then, let me sum up the points against the motion that I most strongly agree with before turning to the other side of the coin.

I agree that the niqab, as a symbol, has been opportunistically used by the French government to appeal to the far right and to distract voters from more urgent matters.

I agree that simply taking off a piece of fabric will not automatically liberate women from abusive or controlling husbands or result in their social integration.

I also agree that the way Sarkozy has approached this issue is more divisive than unifying.  He’s clearly not interested in having a real dialogue with the Muslim community, or addressing the many social problems (unemployment, discrimination, etc.) Muslim minorities in France face.  I also doubt he’s interested in dealing with more pressing women’s issues in this country (such as wage discrepancies, and the low numbers of women in high-ranking positions in government and industry, as evoked by Hasan in the debate).

On the other hand, I feel that there were legitimate issues raised in defense of the motion, which were not sufficiently discussed or well argued by Myard and Hassan. Some of these issues include the following: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Events, Politics Tagged With: , , ,

Gareth Compton’s Tweet: A Stone’s Throw from Islamophobia

December 6, 2010 By eren

Last month, Tory councilor Gareth Compton was arrested and later released on bail for writing a message in Twitter that said: “Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.”

Compton has apologized for the Tweet and has declared that he was quite frustrated because Alibhai-Brown said in an interview that no British politicians are morally qualified to talk about human rights violations. Compton’s membership to the Conservative party has been suspended, he is now under investigation, and he faces prosecution under the Communications Act 2003, as the National Post reports.

Although Alibhai-Brown considers the message an incitement for violence against herself, some people consider the issue absurd because they believe Alibhai-Brown should be “used to” threats, since she is a journalist. Some others seem to condone Compton’s message on the grounds that Alibhai-Brown is wrong in expressing her opinion in regard to British politicians’ moral characteristics.

Regardless of Alibhai-Brown’s observations on politicians’ ability or inability to judge human rights violations, Compton’s comments belong to a different category. Compton is a politician and a councilor of one of the most multicultural cities in the U.K.: Birmingham City. This means that he is expected to be sensitive to cultural differences, religious diversity, and political correctness. Yes, one can disagree with Alibhai-Brown, and her remarks may not be accurate, but she represents neither voters nor the government.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: News, Politics, Web Tagged With: , , ,

Revealing Democracy: A Conference on Bill 94 (Part I)

December 1, 2010 By Krista

Quebec’s Bill 94, which would deny access to public services to women who wear niqab, is back in parliamentary hearings and, by all accounts, likely to pass.  This past weekend, an international conference entitled “Revealing Democracy: Bill 94 and the challenges of religious pluralism and ethnocultural diversity in Quebec” was held at Concordia University in Montreal.  Its focus was on looking critically at the social and political contexts in which the bill has come to be.  Among other topics, presenters talked about secularism, racism, sexism, multiculturalism, and Islamophobia.

This discussion will be longer and more academic than some other MMW posts, but I thought it was worth sharing, because there were many issues raised that reflect a lot of the conversations that we often have on this blog.  I’ll talk about the keynote speech for now, and will get to some of the panels in part two.

Wendy Brown, a professor from the University of California – Berkeley, was the keynote speaker.  She began her speech with reference to this “astonishing historical moment in which women’s clothes are subject to legislation in a 21st-century liberal democracy,” a moment where, in order to remain in the public sphere, women are being asked to take off their clothes.  Brown followed this by acknowledging several elements of the context around Bill 94 that she would not be discussing in her speech: that the West is in the midst of a “giant Islamophobic seizure”; that the proposed Bill 94 here as well as the burqa bans across Europe represent an aggression towards Islam that exceeds any other form of institutionalized racism in recent decades; that the vast “range of reasons given for these bans cancels out their credibility”; that women are finding themselves as “battlegrounds for masculine norms of female sexual comportment,” and that dress is being attacked under the pretext of saving women, while other forms of violence against women are continuing rampantly and largely unaddressed.

Setting all of this aside, Brown moved to the main part of her talk, which was to look at the assumptions that make this kind of legislation possible, with a particular focus on understandings of secularism and tolerance.  She raised five major assumptions:

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture/Society, Events, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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