Politics of the burqa

Could this be the mother of all ironies, a delightful one at that? Whatever your view on the subject, one thing is beyond dispute: de-sexualising the female body, rendering a Muslim woman invisible in the public space is what the burqa (niqab, a head-to-toe veil) is all about. Yet, this very garment continues to draw global attention to the

Muslim woman, generate heat and ignite passion like nothing else does. Muslim women were headline news last year when France decided to enact a law banning the burqa. Several other European countries are also heading in the same direction. With the new law having been set in motion on April 11 (a 150 euros fine or a crash course on citizenship to any woman who refuses to unveil before a French policeman), there’s great excitement all over: cyber space, print and electronic media across the West and the Muslim world, including the Urdu media in India.
The irony is delightful too for those who acknowledge that truth does not always dress up in black or white: it often comes clothed in shades of grey. If you think this debate is about the clash of civilisations between the West and the Muslim world, about the burqa vs the bikini, think again. In this battle over the burqa, its West vs West, secularists vs secularists, liberals vs liberals, Right vs Right, feminists vs feminists, ulema vs ulema, Muslims vs Muslims, women vs women.
If you have a view on the subject, you have a point. But rest assured that someone with a diametrically opposite view also has a point. It’s a maze out there with no familiar markers to guide the bewildered. Only one thing seems clear: if the most passionate supporters of the ban are Muslim women, the most ardent defenders of the burqa are also Muslim women.
Welcome to the maze, one step at a time. Banish the thought, as many in the West will tell you, that the French action is motivated by lofty principles such as gender justice, keeping religion out of the public sphere or upholding the 222-year-old ideals of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity. With over five million followers of Islam, France is home to the largest number of Muslims anywhere in the Western world. Why then is an increasingly migrant-unfriendly France so concerned about just 2,000 (itself a highly exaggerated figure according to many) Muslim women who wear the burqa in France? The answer lies in politics: in the presidential elections due next year, the Right-wing Nicolas Sarkozy faces a serious threat from his ultra-Right rival Jean-Marie Le Pen. Mr Sarkozy is trying to outsmart Ms Le Pen by stealing her agenda and so what if this adds more fuel to Islamophobia in the country and the continent.
Critics in the West who believe Mr Sarkozy and France are playing with fire are invoking the foundational values of the Enlightenment. Of the numerous editorials and columns that have been published in the last few days, here’s what Timothy Gorton Ash wrote in the Los Angeles Times on the meaning of freedom: “We may not like their choice. We may find it disturbing and offensive, but that’s the deal in a free society: The burqa wearer has to put up with the cartoons (of Prophet Mohammad); the cartoonist has to put up with the burqas”.
If there is a debate in the West, there’s one raging in the Muslim world, too. In late 2009, in the midst of the storm then raked by Mr Sarkozy with his “no place for the burqa in France”, Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Cairo, had stunned the Muslim world with his fatwa that led to the official notification banning the stepping of any burqa-clad female teacher or student inside the Al Azhar campus or any affiliated institution. Muslim majority Syria has just relaxed its law prohibiting women from entering educational institutions with their burqa. The reason is simple: containing the spreading Arab revolution.
Egypt’s Tantawi, since deceased, is not the only important Muslim voice against covering up in Islam’s name. Included among those who argue that the veil is a cultural practice which has nothing to do with Islam are influential voices in the Muslim world: the octogenarian Egyptian Gamal al-Banna (elder brother of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna), the Sudanese theologian-politician Hasan al Turabi (interestingly, a man accused by many in the West of promoting radical Islam across the world), the late Abdurrehman Wahid (for years leader of Indonesia’s Nahdatul Ulema, the largest organisation of ulema anywhere in the world).
This column space is insufficient even to list the names of well-known Muslim men and women who, across the time-space continuum, have opposed the burqa/niqab. Even the fact that the Right-wing Sarkozys have their own political agenda is no argument as far as many Muslims are concerned. “I am appalled to hear the defence of the niqab or burqa in Europe”, opined Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian journalist based in New York, last year. “A bizarre political correctness has tied the tongues of those who would normally rally to defend women’s rights but who are now instead sacrificing those very rights in the name of fighting an increasingly powerful Right-wing. The best way to support Muslim women would be to say we oppose both the racist Right-wing and the niqabs and burqas which are products of what I call the Muslim Right-wing”.
Among Muslims opposed to the burqa there’s a near consensus that the spread of this infection “like swine flu” (Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Independent, UK) has little to do with individual choice and everything to do with petro-dollar promoted Islamic revivalism across the globe in recent years.
How then does one negotiate one’s way through this maze? The “location principle” enunciated years ago by the US-based scholar of Indian origin, Akeel Bilgrami, comes to mind. When an Indian Muslim calls for a Common Civil Code, it’s a progressive demand, but when someone from the Sangh Parivar makes the same demand, it’s clearly communal, he argued. Perhaps the same principle could be applied in the burqa debate.

Javed Anand is general secretary, Muslims for Secular Democracy