Via Letters from a Tory who comments at some length (as do the commenters on the thread), I see that Sarkozy is taking on Islam in a big way.
Today you will make a speech that could spark another ferocious debate over religious symbols and Islam in France. Having caused uproar over your decision to ban any religious symbols in French schools, you are now considering banning the burka and other Islamic clothing which French MPs claim is degrading to women. It is a debate that many other European countries will be watching with some interest, I daresay.
Possibly so. However, while I share Sarkozy’s and LFAT’s disdain for the repression of women inherent in Islamic society, and while the clothing such as the Burqua and the niquab are potent symbols of that repression; banning such items makes us the very thing we despise.
No one tells me what I may (or may not) wear and I defend absolutely the right of anyone to wear their choice of clothing freely. It’s what makes us better than them.
You will notice a theme here, I suspect.
Bit hot in summer, the burqua.
.-= ´s last blog ..[creedence] put a spell on you =-.
I don’t mind women wearing burkas, provided they cover it up with something inoffensive.
The 1936 Public Order Act, aimed at Mosley’s Blackshirts, made it an offence to wear political uniforms in public. It could be extended to the wearing of religious costumes otherwise than for religious ceremonies. The issue, after all, is social harmony and many people believe – rightly or wrongly – that the public weating of burqas is an aggressive political statement and not a mere personal preference.
Possibly so – indeed, I agree with the sentiment. However, I do not agree with proscribing what people may or may not wear. It’s ultimately counter productive.
1. “to wear political uniforms”.
WTF? Any political organisation that has a uniform is clearly up to no good at all, but let’s have this out in the open please so we know who the badduns are.
2. But aside from that, there is a real problem here. Whilst LR is quite right that the state should not be banning stuff, that’s not the point. The point is that Muslim women are, in some cases, being forced into this mode of dress by their usually male usually family-member co-religionist zealots.
Banning stuff cannot help here: the problem is how to ensure that the individual rights we take for granted are extended to people being repressed – possibly unlawfully – by their own kith and kin.
I have no idea how the state can help here.
This quaint notion that you can – and morally should – force people to be free has been around since Rousseau. It is a totalitarian version of democracy, and underpins the “liberal interventionism” of Bush and Blair which has led us to such disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When will otherwise intelligent people grasp that Islam and an open tolerant multicultural and multifaith society are as unmixable as oil and water? If Muslim women wish to be subservient to their husbands and other male relatives, and Muslim men see such female subservience as the natural order of things as ordained by the Prophet, who are we non-Muslims to question this? It is impossible to alter it by legislation. But we can and should act to ensure that our own traditions and values of personal freedom are not eroded by alien influences (as all too many on the Left weirdly seem to welcome these days).
Banning Burqas is one method of doing this, though I am inclined to agree with Longrider that it is not the best way. The French, of course, have a long and at times bitter history of anticlericalism reaching back to the Revolution, so Sarkozy’s approach is perhaps less controversial in France than it would be in the United Kingdom.
Motorcycle helmets are banned in shops, hoodies have been banned also from some establishments, inappropriate dress is banned from some hotels, restaurants, jeans from golf clubs.If you ban the Burqua from an establishment there is an outcry of racism. The Burqua should be banned from passsport control and other high risk factor places as there is a high degree of concealment with this garment.Although I would not myself instigate a general ban, I feel that establishments are allowed to dictate their own dress codes and the French are entitled to do what they think best for their secular country
It is of course nothing to do with ‘racism’ – the favourite boo-word of the Left. It is about religious and cultural identity and in the West it is also increasingly a political statement of non-acceptance of other people’s habits and traditions. Western forms of (un)dress are not tolerated in strict Islamic countries, so why should burqas and other customs such as polygamy be tolerated in Western countries?
I am a frequent attender at London hospital outpatients, and I often feel uneasy because of the increasingly numerous presence of women swathed from head to toe in black garments with only tiny slits for their eyes, shepherded by swaggering macho men who are clearly ‘in command’. It offends my sense of fairness, and also my sense of public propriety, but I am not at all sure what is the best and most democratic way of dealing with it.
Knowing that the same phenomenon occurs in towns and cities across the country to the discomfort of the indigenous population, I am not in the least surprised that the BNP picks up votes, and they will continue to do so until the mainstream parties recognise that there is a far wider cultural issue than clothing to be addressed unless social disharmony is to escalate. How far can and should we tolerate ghettos in our midst?
I have no problem whatsoever with private owners decreeing a dress code on their property. Their place, their rules. Likewise, I see nothing wrong with a secular state insisting on no overt religious symbols on state property. Again, their place, their rules. Where I cannot support a ban is outside of this – in the street, for example, as this is a public place.
I also feel that such a ban would be counter productive, creating rebellion and resentment in those whom the secular state is trying to win over.
I am more pessimistic than you are about the prospects for the secular state winning over those whose traditions are grounded in theocracy which they believe is decreed by God.
As a convert to Islam in Fez in 1979, at the Spanish Mosque there (where my name was written in a book by a little man in a fez, the only one I ever saw worn in Fez! — after I’d made my shaHada or testimonial of acceptance with three [!] witnesses), I can certainly agree that exoteric Islam, like Marx’s capitalism and the Russian and Chinese versions of communism, is certainly going through one of these periods where it collapses because of yet another cyclone of internal contradictions. But, then, many thought it was all over for Democracy in 1939, too! As my Sufi teacher, MuHammad Najmi, tried to get across to me at a difficult stage (I was only in my thirty-first year), it is of course a matter on all sides of more than mere sloganeering. And then there is the matter of common courtesy to those who have no interest in the conversation at all and not unreasonably simply want to be left alone. In that connection, for the more inward-looking reader, I would suggest that Beyond The Veil and Dreams Of Trespass, both by Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi, should open up some interesting vistas on the future. In the complicated relation between present oppression and coming flowering, if this is what the imposition on “their women” by sour old men of the burqa and public modesty in dress can elicit by way of reaction, then there certainly is more to the muslim woman situation than (grin) meets the eye. In any case the sour old men on all sides in this post-contemporary ruckus, including Mr Cheney and myself I have no doubt, /are/ functioning in the completely necessary role to History, of so many useful idiots. Else why join at all in the generalised public shouting match?
I shouldn’t wish to leave anyone with the foxey impression however that I am one of the out-and-hedgehogs, and so I will close with that.
It isn’t just sour old men, Emmett, it’s macho young ones – all very mysoginistic from a Western feminist standpoint.
As your Sufi teacher must have convinced you, all change has to come from within. These rigid types aren’t interested in gentle, mutually acceptable change (after the way the West has behaved to Islam over the past decade, why should they be?) – only in enforcing their world view not just on their women, but on the rest of us.
As the historian A. L. Rowse once said, those who believe nonsense must expect awkward consequences. Trouble is, the awkward consequences spill over onto others who don’t believe the nonsense.
As the topic of /nonsense/ is semantically a mare’s nest, Aunty, and all is essentially subjective, including ‘objectivity’, I expect we are in agreement after all. It is that the great discovery of the Hither West in the modern age was of constitutional toleration, and this for good long time in turn has kept for instance The Scientists from rounding up and offing all the other religionists…. Even so there were, and continue to be, many lapses within our cultural topos, the Nazis, legislation of sexual mores, “extraordinary rendition.” And, among the scientifically trained, we find the ranks of Auschwitz gynecologists. And so it goes, leaving not only Whigs but all thinking Tories, as well, aghast. Meanwhile, though, in the Easternmost West, other voices are raised by our unitarian cousins, to ask: Is THIS all there is?
The question assumes poignancy at the turning of the age. It was Renan at the cusp of high and late modernity who noted the pervasive atmosphere of sadness running through late antiquity, when he wrote that all of us bear secret mourning for Marcus Aurelius. The gifted composer of meditations no more than anyone else could solve the problem of succession, or the underlying question of all cultural and social endurance. The story of the late-modern is the story, in politics, of virtualy non-stop attempts to shore up the great discovery of constitutionality by ever-more unconstitutional methods. The parallel explorations of decadence in art and popular culture, in the ninety-seven per cent of life lived without reference to ‘governance,’ are coincidentally typical of the era. For be that as it may, the age turns and the western political solution to ‘all’ cultural problems, the omnipresent ‘programme’ of universal subsidy, has by now bankrupted any further breakthroughs, unaided, in our imagination, political or otherwise.
To the riddle of the future, Muslims throw up their own questions and phantasies of ‘the’ answer. Many more of these than ours are dogmatic on the face of it, and correspondingly irksome to our real learnt appreciation in the Hither West of /nuance/ — but behind all the uproar generated by brawling extraverts, other interrogations and responses are at least as well-nuanced, and they would as lief set off on courses we can not for ourselves even lay at this point. Given the statistical relative primitiveness of passion of Muslims, and the pervasive literalism (this is analogous to our technology, the literalisation of all knowledge ‘worth knowing’), it will come as no surprise that in the corresponding inner cultural world the visions are lively, and there are many gardens yet to be dug in the World.
The obnoxiousness of the muslim males, young and old, is real. It is latent and so oozes. It is because of impatience, that boyish thing, and not any /solid/ belief. It is essentially saecular and worldly, and it is just because as young men they are really profoundly “pissed off.” This is in some inner way, and it is at the inchoate realisation that they are merely seed-bearers and, all their lives abroad, will be foreigners under onus of contempt. And, so, that they too must die like anyone else, wanderers on Earth, and will NOT see the literalisation of anything about the religion in the Hither West in their lifetimes. Apart from some nervy, anxious repressive legislation, I mean.
These altogether are so many homeostases, and so Allah once more has relieved His feelings by yet another of His religious pranks! All there is in this for the missionary and would-be warrior exemplar is the initial irate responses of we otherwise adrift and bemused post-modernists, people who do not like all of the ponceing about with women in bags! This is why I do not go to the masjid in Mankato, it is full of young and annoying Pakistani males funded by the Saudi government, to distribute literalist tracts to fifth-generation German-Americans and Welshmen and admonish against ‘inwardness’.
Whereas there is a Salvation Army six or eight blocks away that does more /actual/ (‘literal’) good in the here and now for those all incapable of solipsism, at least to tide folks over until they CAN die and get out of this.
/amin/
Anticant. Sufism like most Asian teachings and some Western teachings tells us that we are living in an illusion clouded by ignorance. In my clouded ignorance it seems that militant Islam has behaved far more badly towards the states it is throwing violence at, than they are to Islam. As a somewhat biased libertarian( I hate smoking and piercings) I like variety in all facets of life as long as they are not forced upon me.
As a student of sufism, needless to say I much prefer of course the esoteric side; it is altogether more satisfactory than actually /trying/ to run things. Have /you/ ever tried telling anyone to do something? ‘For their own good’, hmm? Then, pray do, tell us all just what may have been the results? Given the high (!) signal-to-noise ratio of this molecular scale, or phase, of existence, I honestly can’t think why anyone even should want to try. But, alas, there /is/ the wife-beater personality that abounds in one form or the other, in all our fleeting human set-ups. The dervish, Mr Jack Vance, has written much of these conundra, in the corpus of his histories of the future….