The law of the Brothers
Hitchens too sees flaws in Obama’s Cairo speech.
Take the single case in which our president touched upon the best-known fact about the Islamic “world”: its tendency to make women second-class citizens. He mentioned this only to say that “Western countries” were discriminating against Muslim women! And how is this discrimination imposed? By limiting the wearing of the head scarf or hijab…The clear implication was an attack on the French law that prohibits the display of religious garb or symbols in state schools.
He then quotes ‘from an excellent commentary by an Algerian-American visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School, Karima Bennoune, who says’
I have just published research conducted among the many people of Muslim, Arab and North African descent in France who support that country’s 2004 law banning religious symbols in public schools which they see as a necessary deployment of the “law of the republic” to counter the “law of the Brothers,” an informal rule imposed undemocratically on many women and girls in neighborhoods and at home and by fundamentalists.
This is what people who are horrified by bans on wearing the hijab so often neglect to mention, what they so often in fact obscure by calling the hijab a free choice which simply ignores the fact that in some places women are beaten or murdered for not wearing it. That’s an important fact and it shouldn’t be ignored.
The French research you cite is interesting – but I still find the idea of banning the hijab rather disturbing. As an atheist I think religious head coverings of all sorts are pretty silly but that doesn’t seem a good reason to *ban* it. Yes, I do see that if you ban it completely you are supporting those whose male relatives might perhaps coerce them into wearing the hijab. But you are also limiting the freedom of women who make an entirely free choice to wear it. Female circumcision, stoning adulteresses, throwing acid in the faces of schoolgirls – these are all things which I condemn unequivocally. But the hijab simply doesn’t strike as being remotely in the same league.
Can anyone really make a free choice to wear hijab? Or are there less obvious social forces at work? Maybe no-one is sticking a gun in their face (at least not in France), but “free choices” come in degrees.
And the hijab may not be as obviously unfair or harmful as FGM, stonings, etc, but it is a symbol of the same set of ideas which gives rise to those actions. In essence, the hijab represents the idea that women are responsible for men’s sexual responses to them, which is the same idea underpinning women getting punished for adultery, having their genitals mutilated, etc. It’s the other side of the double standard we find in the West, except for the fact that in the West, women have fought for – and won – a great deal more rights and respect than our Islamic sisters are yet to enjoy.
Why not also ban the exposure of cleavage and the wearing of high heels and make-up?
@hanmeng – that thought went through my own mind! I suppose at some level I’m ‘coerced’ by society’s expectations to wear make up and heels, and I’m certainly ‘coerced’ by my husband to have blonde highlights (in that he has expressed a preference) but I’d rather still have the freedom to keep on doing those things. I was also, now I think about it, ‘coerced’ as a teenager to wear a skirt when my granny came round for lunch.
I do take Rose’s points but all societies have slightly different ways of deciding what is or is not acceptable dress for both sexes. Perhaps it’s unreasonable that it’s more acceptable for men to go topless than women in the West.
There’s *such* a huge difference between the hijab and say the burka – the latter completely prevents people from playing a normal role in society whereas the former clearly doesn’t, however irrational and indeed sexist the thinking behind it.
No one ‘banned’ the hijab in France; they applied, or rather reapplied, a very old law about the secular nature of the state school system, and its incompatibility with conspicuous displays of religious allegiance. Whether they did it in an entirely culture-neutral way is a debate you can have, but only when you acknowledge what the actual situation is and was.
France did not “ban the hijab.”
Let’s repeat that several times.
France did not “ban the hijab.”
France did not “ban the hijab.”
What France did was to ban all overtly religious dress and signs in public schools. There is a huge difference. It does not even boil down to the same thing.
Yes; thank you Dave and David. That overstatement is so often made – and I put it sloppily in the post, myself.
Ooh, OB, you’re in Private Eye! Friends in high places indeed…. [No. 1238, p. 27, for the pedants among us.]
Sarah and Hanmeng: Girls are NOT allowed to wear high heels, cleavage and make-up to school, or at least to any of the schools I have come across. And personally I think that’s a good thing, because I think there is too much focus on girls’ bodies from too young an age. Young people should be protected from being sexualised by society, as well as protected from the misogyny / misanthrope of the Abrahamic religions, and able to safely explore their sexuality when age-appropriate too. Like I said already (read my original post again), it’s the other side of the same coin.
Also, when we are talking about adults, to say the hijab is the same as cleavage, etc is ridiculous. Hijab is about submission, control and self-effacement. As far as I am aware there are no countries with laws or cleavage police making sure everyone is showing their cleavage, yet Islamic theocracies tend to make laws about women’s attire, so I think that is fairly indicative there is a very pronounced qualitative difference between hijab and cleavage display.
Oooooh, Private Eye!
“But you are also limiting the freedom of women who make an entirely free choice to wear it.”
Schoolgirls, not women. Basically the idea is to create a free space for those who would otherwise be forced by their families (ironically often brothers and peers, their parents and grandparents most often remember the mullahs all too well…) to wear what is in THEIR eyes a symbol of the subjection of women. So yes, what Dave and David said. It also give all the children the occasion to reconsider and challenge what has been hammered and drilled into their heads at home.
Two logical fallacies there, Sarah and Hanmeng: nobody here pretends that the western world (or France only for that matter) is an ideal place when it comes to women’s rights and equality. Better is a relative term.
Same for equating the hijab with FGM, acid attack stoning and the like. Sexual harassment in the workplace is not as bad as that either, we still ban it…
But you know all that, you wouldn’t put quotation marks on ‘coerced’ otherwise…
And yes, Private Eye! Read it today! Calls DGHW a “powerful book” and make a parallel between the Sunday Times item and the Jewel of Medina “controversy”.
Cool about Private Eye!
Hey if anyone is about to toss that issue into the recycle bin after reading it, do feel free to send it to me instead.
I could scan the page and email a jpg, would that do?
I fully agree with much on this site and I particularly dislike the tendency (among certain elements of the left in particular) to cosy up to violent/intolerant Islamists. I also completely take the point that dress code transgressions are barely penalized at all in the West whereas they are penalized ruthlessly in some Islamic countries.
I agree with Rose that the hijab ‘represents the idea that women are responsible for men’s sexual response to them’. But someone else might think the fact I wear a wedding ring symbolises the fact I’m a man’s property. And there are all sorts of things I don’t personally like or approve of – but I don’t necessarily want them banned – and I’m still not fully convinced that limiting the use of the hijab is desirable. (I’m fully aware that it wasn’t *banned* as such, but in some countries I believe it is outlawed, not just in schools, but in other contexts. The Wikipedia entry ‘Hijab by country’ outlines such restrictions.)
I don’t think I agree with the sexual harassment analogy. Sexual harassment is by its definition, always unwelcome. Whereas I fully accept that *some* women, particularly but not exclusively in other countries, are bullied into wearing the hijab, surely other women do choose it freely. Then you could still say that their choice is to do with having internalised social pressures – but then it does, I think, become more or less comparable to other women internalising pressures to wear make up or whatever.
This issue seems to be a case where incompatible goods are in conflict – as with the smoking in public places or fox hunting ban I’m torn between a (moderate) libertarian impulse and recognition that sometimes liberty is outweighed by something even more desirable. Here I suppose it’s more a case of one sort of liberty (to wear the hijab wherever you want) against another (support in resisting pressure to wear the hijab).
I’m definitely not immovable on this issue – I’ll have to wait and see how I feel after reading OB’s new book! – but I have to say I prefer what seems to be the more British route of accommodating the hijab – having a police uniform hijab etc.
Thanks Dave, no need, someone sent me the content. I’d quite like to have the issue itself if anyone is about to recycle it and feels like sending it to me instead…but not otherwise.
I’ll send it to you if you like – do you want to email me your address?