Ban the Burqa?

Claire Berlinski has a thoughtful post in the National Review online about the evolution of her thinking on the veiling of women. She lives in and reports from Turkey. This was her thinking when she moved:

One woman here told me of her humiliation in childhood when her family was ejected from a swimming pool because her mother was veiled. I believed her. All stories of childhood humiliation sound alike and are told in the same way. It was perverse, she said to me, that she should be free to cover her head in an American university but not in a Turkish one. It seemed perverse to me as well. It would to any American; politically, we all descend from men and women persecuted for their faith. I was, I decided, on the side of these women.

...The argument that the garment is not a religious obligation under Islam is well-founded but irrelevant; millions of Muslims the world around believe that it is, and the state is not qualified to be in the business of Koranic exegesis. The choice to cover one’s face is for many women a genuine expression of the most private kind of religious sentiment. To prevent them from doing so is discriminatory, persecutory, and incompatible with the Enlightenment traditions of the West. It is, moreover, cruel to demand of a woman that she reveal parts of her body that her sense of modesty compels her to cover; to such a woman, the demand is as tyrannical, humiliating, and arbitrary as the passage of a law dictating that women bare their breasts.

This is her thinking now:

There are already many neighborhoods in Europe where scantily dressed women are not safe... Parents in these neighborhoods ask gynecologists to testify to their daughters’ virginity. Polygamy and forced marriages are commonplace. Many girls are banned from leaving the house at all. According to French-government statistics, rapes in the housing projects have risen between 15 and 20 percent every year since 1999. In these neighborhoods, women have indeed begun veiling only to escape harassment and violence. In the suburb of La Courneuve, 77 percent of veiled women report that they wear the veil to avoid the wrath of Islamic morality patrols. We are talking about France, not Iran.

...The debate in Europe now concerns primarily the burqa, not less restrictive forms of veiling, such as the headscarf. The sheer outrageousness of the burqa makes it an easy target, as does the political viability of justifying such a ban on security grounds, particularly in the era of suicide bombings, even if such a justification does not entirely stand up to scrutiny. But the burqa is simply the extreme point on the continuum of veiling, and all forced veiling is not only an abomination, but contagious: Unless it is stopped, the natural tendency of this practice is to spread, for veiling is a political symbol as well as a religious one, and that symbol is of a dynamic, totalitarian ideology that has set its sights on Europe and will not be content until every woman on the planet is humbled, submissive, silent, and enslaved.

...Veiling cannot be disambiguated from the problem of Islam’s conception of women, and this conception is directly tied to gender apartheid and the subjugation and abuse of women throughout the Islamic world, the greatest human-rights problem on the planet, bar none. Nor can the practice of veiling be divorced from the concept of namus — an ethical category that is often translated as “honor,” and if your first association with this word is “honor killing,” it is for a reason: That is the correct association. The path from veiling to the practice of killing unveiled women is not nearly so meandering as you might think.

It could be that I am stretching here, but I couldn't help but read this and think of the Church of the Brethren tradition of women having their heads covered. It is mostly gone but still practiced in some parts of the Brethren world. The argument for it, of course, is that it is scriptural. But the deeper question is how much is this scriptural argument in its context and in its present day practice is tied up with a patriarchal view of women that sees them as either inferior or dangerous?

I am sympathetic to the women who argue from whatever religious tradition that veiling is an act of liberation or personal religious choice. The problem is that there are often men who are a part of these traditions who see it as a woman's appropriate duty to God and religion. And they too often have the power in families and religious communities. Our free choices are rarely as free as we think they are.

There are Martyrs and then...

there are martyrs.

The cable news and even the once respectable network news has been going on non-stop about the failed attempt of Abdul Mutallab to blow up a plane in the hopes, I imagine, of being greeted in heaven by 27 virgins.

Meanwhile the Times of London has nominated for person of the year a real martyr, Neda Soltan:

Neda Soltan was not political. She did not vote in the Iranian presidential election on June 12. The young student was appalled, however, by the way that the regime shamelessly rigged the result and reinstalled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ignoring the pleas of her family, she went with her music teacher eight days later to join a huge opposition demonstration in Tehran.

“Even if a bullet goes through my heart it’s not important,” she told Caspian Makan, her fiancé. “What we’re fighting for is more important. When it comes to taking our stolen rights back we should not hesitate. Everyone is responsible. Each person leaves a footprint in this world.”

Ms Soltan, 26, had no idea just how big a footprint she would leave. Hours after leaving home, she was indeed shot, by a government militiaman, as she and other demonstrators chanted: “Death to the dictator.”

Arash Hejazi, a doctor standing near by, remembers her looking down in surprise as blood gushed from her chest. She collapsed. More blood spewed from her mouth. As she lay dying on the pavement, her life ebbing out of her, “I felt she was trying to ask a question. Why?” said Dr Hejazi, who tried to save her life. Why had an election that generated so much excitement ended with a government that claims to champion the highest moral values, the finest Islamic principles, butchering its own youth?

A 40-second telephone clip of Ms Soltan’s final moments flashed around the world. Overnight she became a global symbol of the regime’s brutality, and of the remarkable courage of Iran’s opposition in a region where other populations are all too easily suppressed by despotic governments.

Freedom is on the march right now in Iran. Young people are in the streets facing down a brutal, despotic government. The government is Muslim. And so are the protesters who want to be Muslim and free. If they succeed it will be because of the bravery of people like Neda Soltan.

BTW, it strikes me that Neda Soltan was "not political" in the same way that Jesus was not political. Being not political like Jesus and Neda can get you killed.

The Love of God

Do Muslims and Christians have a different perspective on God's love? Christianity Today reports on the first full day of the “Loving God and Neighbor” conference that is bringing together Christian, Muslim, and (a few) Jewish leaders on the campus of Yale University.

One of the Muslim speakers was Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia:

Dr. Ceric preached the value of forgiveness. Having witnessed the terror and brutality of the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, he has had much to forgive. He told the Yale gathering of Muslims and Christians that “the human being has the right to ‘an eye for an eye.’” But the right to revenge is balanced by Islamic teaching: “If you forgive, you will be forgiven in the world to come, and [here my notes are a bit shaky] it will be your propitiation.”

But Ceric startled several evangelical listeners when he suggested that not everyone was worthy of love all the time. While he talked about love for widows and orphans, for example, he named “the arrogant” as an example of those who should not be loved. This contrasts sharply with Christian notions of love, in which we are called to love unconditionally “because he first loved us.” And the difference between the two notions of love became a point of discussion.

Yale theologian Miroslav Volf made a point of explaining the Christian view of love in his panel presentation just before lunch. Contrasting with another Muslim cleric’s assertion that we cannot speak of love as being of the essence of God, but only of love as God’s actions, Volf read the locus classicus from 1 John 4:7-21, with its famous sentence, “God is love.” Because God loves (among the persons of the Trinity) before the world comes into existence, said Volf, God’s love is not reactive, but is of his essence.

Nothing to comment on, just an interesting point of difference.