Burqa Ban is Legitimate and Necessary
by Lorna Salzman
Kenan Malik, in his Pandaemonium blog, has attacked the burqa ban which just went into effect in France. Like others who have tried to portray this ban as an intrusion into private life or an authoritarian and coercive measure, Malik ignores the "ground truth" of Muslim attitudes and behavior in their adopted societies.
First, one must recognize that the Muslim leadership preaches uncompromising resistance to secular civil law and to any kind of assimilation. In this respect, Muslim immigrant communities are self-isolating, practicing a voluntary and insistent separatism that liberals naively think is being forced on them by the government. When Muslim nurses in UK hospitals refuse to touch nonMuslim bodies, you know that more than religion is at work here; it is a sense of not just separatism but superiority that is unwilling to bend under any circumstances to accommodate the demands of nonMuslim society.
While no one can predict how the next generation of Muslims or the one after it will conform to Islamic mandates and sharia law (one fervently hopes they will break free and become willing constructive members of society), the present generation of Muslims, dominated by men, is determined to maintain its iron grip on the lives of its women primarily but of all Muslims by implication. This defiance is now being supported by naive liberals who have given Muslims the excuses they need to justify wrapping their women in shrouds. They are thus able to claim religious discrimination from nonMuslims by using the burqa ban alone as proof of their victimization.
Were there no other problems with Islam today, they might have a glimmer of justification. But Muslim terrorism on the ground has a bad habit of jolting us back into reality, through its vile anti-Semitic tracts, its honor killings, its forced child marriages, its suppression of freedom of speech and dissent, and in general a resistance to every aspect of post-Enlightenment secular democracy and to the western democracies' notions of equality and dignity for all. Let's be blunt: when an indigenous Amazonian tribe visits this country, wearing head feathers, paint and loincloths, we don't tremble in fear. We respect their traditions (and by the way, the head-hunting tribes in South America and Borneo gave up head hunting a long time ago, in contrast to Muslims' abusive treatment of their women).
There are compelling practical and security reasons for banning burqas and voluminous women's clothing just as there are good reasons for enhanced airport security and luggage inspection. The middle east has seen terrorists donning women's garb after throwing a bomb and escaping. They can conceal weapons as well as identities. To ignore this in today's climate would be foolish. It is all very well to defend a person's right to wear what they please but this right is not defensible today. One can be a staunch libertarian on individual rights but these rights end at the door of public safety and collective good, which must come first in any democratic society, especially one under constant threat of terrorist acts by radicalized Muslims. The use of these powers must of course be legitimate, not arbitrary, but given the clear risk of terrorism and the need for society to identify individuals at all times, the power to ban certain clothing is quite defensible.
And as Malik himself pointed out, today the burqa is either a political statement or it is forced on women by their husbands and fathers, as is the rest of their behavior. Allowing burqas therefore is a form of legitimizing patriarchy and misogyny and the mistreatment of women, not a religious statement. Talking about ideals in the abstract is no longer tenable. Also, were there no OTHER problems with radical Islam - were women fully equal, enfranchised and free beings and were there no honor killings or forced marriages, then wearing the burqa would have no political connotations nor would there be these security concerns. But this is a pipe dream. The reality of radical Islam is quite different and to ignore the context of the burqa is to ignore what is in front of our face and MUST be confronted and rolled back: the domination of Muslim men and their determination to impose their religious tenets not only on Muslim women but the whole Muslim world. This is what the burqa represents, not free choice or religion.