Would you support a law that prohibits the wearing of a veil or a burqa for religious reasons if it were to come into being in the UK?
Support for a Ban on Face Coverings?
Sextremism
I have become really interested in Femen, the feminist group who claim the ideology of ‘sextremism’.
This is the new ideology of women’s sexual protest presented by extreme topless campaigns of direct action, serving to protect women’s rights, democracy watchdogs attacking patriarchy, in all it’s forms: the dictatorship, the church, the sex industry.
They are openly rascist, claiming that white women are not responsible for saving black women from black men, this got me thinking, is it the responsibility of a women’s movement to be representative of all women as a single entity? The way this group behave indicates they believe women are different based on race and therefore are not united based on the fact they are women. in terms of the veil, is the responsibility of the women who are in societies where it they do not have to wear face coverings in public to campaign for the rights of women who have to be veiled, just because they are all women?
Colonialism and the Veil
I have recently been studying a lot about France and Algeria and the process of decolonisation in the 50’s and 60’s. It got me thinking about the relationship between the colonisation mission and the veil. Public unveiling was a ‘civilisation tool’ used by the French, where Algerian women would participate in large, public ceremonies where a French official would remove their veil as a symbol of the French liberating the Algerian women of oppression. It made me question the differences between the present day Western interpretation of the veil and that of the French Colonisers. Do we still have the same attitudes? You could argue the reasons behind why one would want to ‘unveil’ oppressed women have changed, more for humanitarian and liberation purposes as opposed to demonstrate power as the colonisers did, however I think there can be links made about the knowledge about the veil. The French saw the veil as an immediate barrier and made the assumption that women need help in order to be liberated, when in fact the majority had to be forced to unveil in public. I think that today we still share the same misunderstanding about the veil as the French colonisers did, and the assumption that all women’s experience of the veil is that of oppression and male dominance, when this is in fact a massive generalisation.
”Muslim men shroud their women in black sacks of submissiveness and fear, and dread as they do the devil the moment women break free to light, peace, and freedom. ”
Following a recent post about the women in Tunisia and the use of topless protest to raise awareness about women’s rights, it got me more interested in the organisation and thinking behind it, which led me to stumble upon the feminist group Femen. Last thursday, the group started a ‘International Topless Jihad Day’ to raise the profile of womens rights throughout the Islamic world.
This does address some concerns I personally had about the importance of talking about burqa’s and niqab’s in terms of gender and development, and the idea that it is a subject heavily focused on, however could be considered relatively trivial compared to other problems that women face in the developing world, especially such serious breaches of human rights as FGM or child marriage. The use of women’s bodies as a symbolic means of communication is so powerful, and therefore how they dress or how they are dressed communicates a message to the rest of the world that is interpreted (especially by the Western world) as how they live their lives. Is what women in the developing world wear important? or is it just what is seen first by the rest of the world and other issues are therefore overlooked?
Western Women
I think that the West have a big problem with Muslim women wearing religious face coverings, however is the same feeling felt by the Muslim world about the Western women who publicly wear more revealing clothes?
I think this a very interesting question to consider, to what extent is what Western women wear dictated by societal pressures?
Tunisian Revolution; New Opportunities or New Threats?
A recent article written by the BBC, has highlighted the issue of women’s rights in terms of the Tunisian revolution. It first meets a young, educated Tunisian woman who is celebrating her new right to wear her niqab, (which was outlawed pre-revolution) she tells the journalist; “I feel like a princess when I walk down the street wearing this,”.
Her joy is quickly contrasted with reports of the recent protests calling for a more secular state, now that the Islamist Ennahda party dominates the new government. These protests were led by women that feel their rights were under threat from the new regime, stressed by the topless protest of a nineteen year-old girl, who posted a picture of herself with the words, ‘my body is mine, not somebody’s honour’ written in Arabic across her naked chest on the internet. The Ennahda’s political bureau’s response to this was that they ‘protect her rights, but we also protect the rights of women to wear the niqab’.
This seems to be a very promising sign for Tunisia’s future in terms of women’s rights, it would appear as if the Islamist party are recognising that women should have the choice over their bodies, and will make different decisions.
However this is not necessarily an interpretation shared by all, as Amna Guellali, director of the human rights watch in Tunisia shares her thoughts that, ‘big changes are happening deep in society…so-called Salafist groups who tend to impose their own vision of society and religion – I think this might have a very strong effect on women’.
The article then revisits the at the beginning, and describes her modernity through her use of her smart phone, her studies and her love story with her fiancée. Maybe the revolution will be an opportunity for a new framework for women to express themselves within an Arab society how they wish, only time will tell.
Full article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-21925753
Is the Burka Threatening?
One of the main issues that I think westerners have with women wearing burkas, is that they feel they are threatening and make them feel uneasy as the true persons physical identity is concealed.
To what extent is this true in the western world?
This has not been helped by the few suicide bombers who concealed themselves under the burka, and used it as a tool to commit acts of terror. I think that this has created a distrust towards the covering, and therefore the women who wear them in the developed world.
If wearing the burka (through a women’s own choice) in the developed world creates a mistrust and difficulty trying to communicate with the rest of society and form relationships, how is this empowering?
‘I wasn’t allowed to feel the wind in my hair and on my body’
This article talks about Dana Bakdounis, a young Syrian women, part of the uprising of women in the Arab world, that posted a picture of herself, unveiled as a message to the world to say that she was against the strict rules that said she had to wear a burqa and to make a statement that she was not going to oppressed any longer. The image has circulated the internet, has hundreds of thousands of views and has generated a massive response, both positive and negative.
Through these actions, she’s received many death threats along with the end of the relationship between her and her mother, as she disproved of her daughters actions. Along with this however, she’s become an inspiration for so many Arab women who have said ‘we respect what you did, you’re a brave girl, we want to do the same but we do not have the audacity’.
This image was posted on Facebook, and shows her unveiled holding her identity card, with her veiled picture on it. The administrators of the site, took down the image four days after it was posted, and blocked Dana from having any further access to the social media platform.
This story is a really powerful message to the rest of the world, highlighting how this issue is key in representing women’s rights, and how although having to wear a head covering is not the biggest breach of rights that some women experience, it is certainly extremely important in it’s symbolic sense. I think it’s so powerful how Dana has used it as a tool in this case to get the worlds attention and to make a statement that cannot and has not been ignored.
Fawzia Koofi
Fawzia Koofi is a female MP, who strongly campaigns for the rights of women and children in Afghanistan, where she has lived all her life. She is running for president in their elections in 2014 after being elected as an MP in the Badakhshan province back in 2005 and becoming the first female Second Deputy Speaker of Parliament in Afghanistan’s history. She is a real inspiration and is creating change in order to make a new Afghanistan for her daughters to live in equality with the opportunities they deserve.
She grew up under the Taliban’s strict, repressive rules, meaning that she spent a lot of her adult life having to wear a Burqa, for fear of public beatings. She spoke about her experiences of this in her book entitled, ‘letters to my daughters’, and a particular quote stuck out to me, which was relating to her having to wear the burqa, saying it meant she was ‘looking at the huge word from a tiny window‘.
This is extremely symbolic of how it is used as a tool to narrow women’s horizons and restrict what they can do with their lives when the wearing of it is enforced. it highlights the disconnectedness and distance that it can impose and how it can act as a barrier, both from the world to the woman, and more importantly, from the woman to the world. Regimes that enforce the wearing of the Burqa, such as the Taliban are detrimental to gender equality and women’s rights, but then, there are women that choose to wear it in other areas of the world, does this mean, therefore, that the choice of wearing a Burqa is what’s empowering to a woman, and therefore the decision in countries such as France where it is banned, is as negative as the decision of those regimes where it is necessary?
The Burka; Prison or Power? 
