The nuanced discussion
The recent ban on Islamic face veil in Switzerland has renewed the debate on burqas. It is now the liberals’ turn to decide if they wish to remain consistent in their fight against federal censorship and ban-mania.
Ticino, an Italian-speaking canton in Switzerland, has banned the use of niqabs and burqas in public places, following a referendum. Some 65 percent of the population decided, for various reasons, that such odd, ethnic garments have no place in the bastion of civil liberty that Ticino is.
If you’re a liberal reading this, allow me to put your mind at east by acknowledging that niqab is often used by societies to help scandalise women’s bodies and render them invisible, and the fact that women are often coerced or simply indoctrinated into wearing them. And for your consideration, every argument that I’ll make here on will be built on an assumption – correct or not — that burqa and niqab are inherently harmful to women’s social well-being.
To begin with, it’s important not to fall prey to binary thinking on these matters: asserting either that the burqa is bad and must be banned, or that it is good and must be allowed.
One has to reconcile his or her liberal perspective on burqas with other liberal views on women’s liberty, citizens’ freedom over their own bodies and government censorship. As a feminist, particularly a male feminist, I cannot offer my blessing to any attempt at policing women’s appearances, whether it’s forcing them to wear a certain garment or forbidding them not to wear it. Although we may cautiously discuss the pros and cons of wearing certain kinds of clothing, the final decision must always be retained by a woman regarding what she wishes to put on her body.
Consider why you, as a liberal, might feel incensed by the idea of banning garments deemed incongruous with our conservative Pakistani values. A conservative could make a solid case for such restriction, citing prevention of objectification of women’s bodies. Likewise, a Muslim conservative could make a reasonable case against a ban on makeup and skin-whitening creams, given an environment where women are forced to spend an agonising amount of effort on their aesthetic upkeep. Wouldn’t it benefit women if these shallow and expensive rituals were to be banned?
While there’s merit to the argument against burqa, there are many reasons why a legal ban on religious garments is a terrible idea.
For starters, it robs a woman of her agency to decide what to do with her body, the same way right-wing Muslim men do when they force women to wear burqas. Some liberals rationalise their stances by deciding that the ban would be good for women, but that saviour complex is part of the problem. It patronises adult women, reducing them to infants in the arms of men, who are supposedly in a better position to determine what’s good for them. It can be safely assumed that most women, if not all, may not appreciate you making decisions on their behalf, any more than you’d enjoy me knocking a soda can out of your hands to rescue you from type II diabetes.
Secondly, even if you assume that all women who wear burqas have been coerced by their communities into doing so, it makes no sense to punish the ‘victim’ of oppression, rather than the oppressor. You cannot liberate a woman by fining her 10,000 francs, or roughly $1,000, for the ‘crime’ of having been socially blackmailed into wearing a niqab. Even if your intentions are noble, such laws are disastrous from a technical standpoint alone.
Those convinced of burka bans as a form of charity towards women should look at the series of photographs that have emerged from France since it first implemented its face-veil ban: an image of a brown woman with a half-torn niqab, being dragged through a police station by a white cop, is nobody’s idea of ‘freedom’.
Furthermore, the law makes the calamitous error of assuming that the ban wouldn’t make conservative Muslim women disappear off the streets along with the burqas. An unintended consequence of the law is further marginalisation of women who are already having a difficult time assimilating in the European environment. Such women may decide not to leave the house at all unless absolutely necessary, especially if they’re being coerced by their families to maintain pardah in public.
Lastly, and the point that truly deserves your highest consideration is why forms of patriarchy sanctioned by various Western cultures are not held to the same scrutiny as the ‘ethnic’ patriarchal practices.
It is permissible, for example, for a woman to wear a sole-crushing pair of stilettos. It is also legal for a woman to spend $30,000 on a potentially-dangerous cosmetic surgery, being part of a society that measures her worth primary by how she appears. Even worse, it is possible for her boyfriend to coerce her into this medically unnecessary surgery, at the threat of leaving her. Although widely considered unethical, it technically may not be illegal for him to do so.
However, the ‘desire’ to save women from themselves is amplified when women of colour bring their own ethnic brand of self-deprecating rituals to the table, resulting in mass outrage. When this happens, the legal action is not being taken in the interest of women’s welfare, but in the interest of cultural domination.
As Arundhati Roy elegantly explains, any attempt at coercing women out of burqas instead of generating a safe environment for them to ‘choose’ their way out of it, is an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism.
While it is impossible to deny the oppression of women in Muslim communities around the world, one must also be wary of the trope of liberating brown women as justification for imperialist measures. Laura Bush used the condition of women under Taliban rule to win public favour for the invasion of Afghanistan, which ironically, since then has been the cause of death of thousands of Afghan women trapped in unforgiving war zones.
It is tempting to fall into the trap of seeing the world split neatly into right and wrong, assuming that if burqa is ‘wrong’, anything opposing it must ipso facto be agreeable. It is far more productive to proceed beyond reactionary, contextual liberalism, and aim to uphold liberal values universally.
