STEPHEN Parsley, in his Nov. 29 column titled "Shrouding sexism behind multiculturalism," argues that "the battle over the veil is one of the key issues that will determine the future of Islam and the West." He goes on to suggest a ban on the veil in public schools and government places. As someone who had to discontinue her college education in her home country precisely because of the type of ban Parsely advocates, I read his piece in astonishment. Not that the arguments were new to me, but I was not expecting to read it here in the United States where I have been studying freely and comfortably for the past six years with my headscarf on and with no police at the campus door to treat me as a criminal. In what follows, I will try to point out some of the problems with banning veil under the name of liberation.
First, a clarification about the term "veil." It often refers to the modest clothing with which a woman covers all her body except her face and hands. Since wearing a long skirt and a long- sleeve shirt is not what makes a woman stand out, but covering her hair does, veil is often referred to as head-scarf. It is this veil that France has banned in schools. Millions of Muslim women over the world wear headscarves, in different shapes and colors. A great number of these women are active in public life, studying, teaching, working and engaging with their societies. Need examples? Look for instance in Egypt, Syria, Malaysia, Indonesia, Morocco, England and in this country, where the current leader of a major Islamic organization, the Islamic Society of North America, is a Canadian Muslim professor who wears a headscarf. In none of these countries is veiling forced, and in fact, except for a handful of countries, in most Muslim majority countries, women are not forced to wear the veil. These women are conscious agents and capable of understanding their religious sources. If they understand their religion as instructing them to dress in this particular modest way in public, are we to say that these women have false consciousness? Are we to say that these women cannot choose how much of their body to uncover? Are we to say that they cannot and ought not recognize their Creator whom they believe created their bodies and has set guidelines for their lives?
To be sure, the abuses against women who do not wear a veil should be rejected. Forcing a woman to be stuck in a burning building because she didn't have time to put her veil on or to kill a relative because of her suspected morality are abuses and are not justified in Islamic law, either. Similarly, the ideas of women as the malicious tempters, as lesser than men, her body as a commodity to fight over, and all other patriarchal ideas deserve being fought against. I share Parsley's frustration at these, yet the way to solve them is not to ban head-covering. To argue for a ban on the basis of these would be like preventing the use of cars for the sake of preventing car crashes. In fact, given the frequency of the crashes and the clear link between driving a car and crashing, perhaps the argument for a ban is not even this strong.
Furthermore, to symbolize Western civilization with one set of clothing (aside from forgetting Catholic nuns and Orthodox Jewish women in the West) and setting it against Islam is overly simplistic and misleading. In their article, "Feminism, the Taliban and the Politics of Counterinsurgency," published in Anthropological Quarterly, Saba Mahmoud and Charles Hirschkind question the assumption that "a Muslim woman can only be one of two things, either uncovered, and therefore liberated, or veiled, and thus still, to some degree, subordinate." These University of Berkeley anthropologists rightly ask: "Can our bras, ties, pants, miniskirts, underwear and bathing suits all be so easily arrayed on one or the other side of this divide?"
Finally, the veil is definitely not the problem before us in working for peace and fighting injustice and violence. Like the Feminist Front who failed to see the plight of women in war and poverty stricken conditions in Afghanistan, will we be misled to place the veil as a key factor in the making of terrorism and bigotry? We need a deeper insight and a bit more informed talk than this. Urgently.
Umeyye Isra Yazicioglu is a Religious Studies student in the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.
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