An opportunity to dip her toe in the water
Mahnaz Nadeem has an excellent piece on the burkini ban at Sedaa.
She looks back to a time when Muslims weren’t under relentless pressure to demonstrate their religiosity.
Before then Islam was cultural and spiritual and no-one was publicly over-preoccupied with proving how puritanical they were; they were more concerned about the day-to-day and making the most of their arrival to this land of opportunity. Iranian Fatwas, Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine issue, 9/11 and Wahhabi funding changed our psyche so that we came to adopt religious positions by default on absolutely everything under the sun.
Which is a bad trend, because the religious position isn’t always the best one, to put it mildly.
Muslim women who wear the costume are paradoxically rejecting the confines of their home and are wanting to participate in the liberating activity of enjoying the outdoors. They have not decided to envelope themselves in an all-concealing burqa to ensure they go undetected and unrecognised.
Rather the wet-suit provides a Muslim woman an opportunity to dip her toe in the water literally and metaphorically which ordinarily she may not entertain were she required to expose more of her body. It is the first step toward the Muslim community appreciating that the Muslim woman can be part of the outdoors as much as the indoors.
There may be a multitude of other reasons a Muslim woman or any woman for that reason wishes to wear it: she may not want to be sun burned; she may have a skin-complaint, she may want to keep warm; she might be body conscious for non-religious reasons; it just might be more comfortable.
Here’s a surprising thing: bikinis actually aren’t comfortable at all for most women. You have to be truly flawless to feel ok wearing those things where people can see you. Beach anxiety is a running joke and has been for decades.
‘Creeping Sharia’ has had its day and if we want to survive in Europe we need to have a far more intelligent strategy, where we can keep hold of our Islamic faith yet not offend the dominant population’s sensibilities. It is going to be a very tricky task indeed, and will need some intelligent thinking rather than a defensive victim approach. Our conduct and a secular attitude is going to speak much louder than any attempts at religious PR.
In short the “burkini” ban is the cumulative result of years of tolerance towards Islamism encroaching into the public sphere, but this recent attempt to deal with it has resulted in unfairly targeting Muslim women. Instead, the pulpits and criminal elements need to be taken more seriously by French authorities and Europe at large, even perhaps reflecting on our relationships with countries that espouse extremist ideology.
Encroaching on the civil liberties of Muslim women’s rights to enjoy the sun and water is not the solution. Equally Muslims need to appreciate the honeymoon period of encroaching Sharia is over.
Muslim men could wear burkinis in solidarity. That would make the whole thing seem less targeted at women, and less calculated to put them in the wrong no matter what they do.
But but then they’d be uncomfortable :(
I wish I had read this before posting on the other thread since it makes my point far better than I did.
One thing I didn’t talk about there is the futility of the ban anyway. While I’m against religious exemptions to requirements such as showing your face in certain places (motorcyclists must take off their helmets in some places in the UK, for example, why shouldn’t everyone else have to do the same) the security benefits are at best negligible and in any case highly dubious. It’s just more security theatre from the mindset that prevents Richard Dawkins from eating his beloved honey on planes.
Worse, it’s also from the mindset that advocates mass, oppressive, surveillance and broken encryption as a defence (which won’t work anyway) against unspecified threats.
Making women wear fewer clothes doesn’t protect anyone from anything and causes lots of harm. But as Ophelia often says: it doesn’t really matter, they’re only women.
This is an excellent point about women feeling comfortable participating in life outside the home. If the burkini enables them to feel comfortable about that and be active then surely this is exactly the sort of thing that should be encouraged? Women out in burkini’s paddling with their kids (or swimming, or surfing, or snorkling etc etc) are out rubbing shoulders with other women. This is the kind of thing that opens minds, creates relationships and tacitly challenges preconceptions on both sides. Women forced to strip at gunpoint are more likely to feel forced to withdraw into their home and cultural milieu and become more religious, more Islamic oriented, and less outward facing. Totally counterproductive.
I’ve said this many times. I loathe the burka and similar garments and wish they did not exist (I have no strong feelings about the hijab) but another law telling women what they may and may not wear is not a good or effective solution.
@Steam:
That’s the point I tried to make on the other thread. I think you’re right on all counts.
When ‘Freethinker’ ran a blurb about this, the stock image they used turned out to be Nigella Lawson, on a beach in Australia, sheltering from direct sunlight.
Just BEING at a beach could be considered a violation of Islamic Modesty. It would be nice to think the ‘burqini’ was a set of training wheels rolling towards greater participation in the world. But, like all the other forms of veiling, there’s such an issue of coercion and threat from male relatives that its hard to believe.
There are plenty of Quranic modesty injunctions for men too. Fully covered from navel to knee in most versions. No speedos. But I haven’t seen a hint of any Prophet -approved swimwear marketed to men. It may be out there, but under the radar for dumb French politicians.
The inventor of the burkini claims that she invented it to give (Muslim) women more freedom, It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/24/i-created-the-burkini-to-give-women-freedom-not-to-take-it-away
Just BEING at a beach could be considered a violation of Islamic Modesty. It would be nice to think the ‘burqini’ was a set of training wheels rolling towards greater participation in the world. But, like all the other forms of veiling, there’s such an issue of coercion and threat from male relatives that its hard to believe.
Coercion and threats are just part of what this is about. It’s also about normalizing veiling…sharia-compliant clothing… in the public sphere. And it’s about women wearing and advertising Islam’s ‘gang-colours’ for all to see; a passive-aggressive display of supremacy, a push for “turf”. Finally, it’s also a means by which non-Muslim women are gradually made to feel ashamed of and self-conscious about their bodies.
And it’s interesting to note that this incident ( orchestration?) in France took place on the beach just yards from La Promenade des Anglais where 85 people were killed last month.
I’d be perfectly happy to wear a burkini – it isn’t just muslim women who hate their bodies being ogled when they wear the scraps and bits of string that pass for ‘acceptable beach clothing’ amongst many Western societies.
As the OP says, the truth is that it is men who are deciding what women should wear in a turf war between muslim men and Western men. Women are just pawns to them, and don’t have a say. The feelings of a woman forced to strip by armed police are irrelevant – they know she has no power, so the message they are sending isn’t to her, it’s to her ‘owners’: “We can make your property do whatever we decide she should do. Yah boo, sucks to be you!”
Women, as always, are left trying to negotiate something of a life for themselves without angering the men of either side.
Of course it has nothing to do with ‘modesty’ or religion per se, or the solution would be to blindfold men.