An example of ignorant pseudo-feminist Islamophobia

Islamophobia Watch pointed up this stupid article which appeared on the Irish Independent's website yesterday, by one Martina Devlin. I'm not all that familiar with Irish newspaper columnists as I rarely read the papers, so I do not know what profile she has in Ireland, but this piece would not be out of place alongside the writings of Carol Sarler or Minette Marrin in the UK's right-wing mid-market press. Perhaps Ireland is a bit behind the times and so the long since refuted, outrageous generalisations which appeared in this piece can still get an airing there. (Update: a Muslim woman's reply is now up on the Irish Independent's site.)

Let's begin with a laugh:

Here's what banning the headscarf is about: the State demonstrating our belief in gender equality. It's about removing a symbol of repression and submission. Showing we don't condone marks of separation — either between men and women, Muslim and Christian, or native born and immigrant.

Well, the last time I went out, I did not find that women need any marks to distinguish themselves. They are distinct enough from men that I can tell who they were, regardless of what colour or what they were wearing. The same applies to most immigrants to western countries, particularly Ireland which had no colonies and therefore did not get the waves of immigrants we had in the 1950s and 1960s. They are mostly dark-skinned people and cannot hide it short of putting on a latex disguise in the style of Lenny Henry in True Identity. Any Afro-Carribean of a certain age can tell you how pointless it is for a person obviously of an ethnic minority to fit in just by dressing native (as they did anyway).

The article is accompanied by a picture of a group of women in black chadors in a mosque in Iran. In fact, the vast majority of women who wear that awkward type of garment do so in Iran, which makes up a small fraction of the world's Muslims, and they are mostly Shi'ites at that, so their religious authorities have little influence on the rest of the Muslim world. She alleges:

And it's about refusing point blank to make allowances for anything which could lead to a creeping erosion of women's rights.
Today the hijab which covers the hair and shoulders, tomorrow the niqab or full-face veil, the day after the burqa hiding everything from tip to toe — described as a mobile prison by women obliged to wear it.

Anyone who has travelled in the Muslim world knows that, in many countries, women still do not wear niqab, let alone the Afghani burqa which is only worn in Afghanistan and neighbouring districts of Pakistan, mostly by Pashtun women and not even all of them, and this centuries after the population became Muslim. Some women wear it of their own choice, some because it's the tradition in their family, but the idea that niqab will become widespread once hijab becomes acceptable is baseless.

The rest of Europe is wrestling with the same issue, often in courts and employment tribunals, but France broke new ground four years ago by outlawing the headscarf and other prominent religious symbols in state schools. I say let's take the bull by the horns and follow the French lead.

France actually banned it after a hysterical, heavily-skewed debate in which opponents of a ban were shouted down, as recent work by Joan Wallach-Scott demonstrates. One might also take into account the composition of the Muslim community there, in which (unlike in the UK) the conservatively but moderately religious were weak, while Islamist ideologues and the irreligious are much stronger than in the UK or Ireland – i.e. the extremes were much more prominent than the centre. Similarly, she uses Turkey as an example, but Turkey has been able to ban it because elements hostile to religion have a stranglehold on institutions of state. Furthermore, the "feminist" arguments cited in France infantilised Muslim women by denying that they might have chosen to wear it themselves, or were in any case happy to wear it because it is part of their religion and what their female elders wear, or because it is what women, rather than little girls, wear. Devlin displays this same arrogant, infantilising attitude when she says, further down:

Of course, some nuns wear veils but that's of their own volition as adult women — not a custom they are railroaded into as children.
Muslim women are under huge social pressure to cover up — it can't truly be called freedom of choice. Nor do I buy the counter argument about equal social pressure on western women to dress seductively. Some do, some don't, but there isn't the same level of coercion.

The fact is that religious orders are contracting and dying in Ireland, much as in so many other western countries; when the Catholic church dominated Ireland in the past, doubtless the pressure on some young women to join religious orders was that much greater (much as some young men were pressured to join orders or the priesthood). Of course, if a woman joins an order, she usually does not have a choice of whether to wear a veil or not; if the order retains the habit then she wears it, even if it is ridiculous as some of them were, and if it does not, she does not. Among young girls, in the UK if not in Ireland, there is notoriously high peer pressure to dress according to the trends, which may not be what is most becoming and may not be what is most affordable for their parents, particularly when it involves buying the "right" brands.

Devlin diverges into the question of whether hijab protects women against sexual attacks, which some Muslims believe, and attributes this to the World Islamic Network without providing a link (and there are at least two so-called World Islamic Network websites, both of them rather amateurish), but a Google search traces the quote to an unattributed article which appears on various Shi'ite websites including this one. I made my views on female dress (or the lack thereof) and sexual attacks in this article in 2006 after the Shaikh Hilali controversy. Devlin says "Islam says …", but in fact, whatever some Muslims who are not used to seeing women in miniskirts say, even if not all women they see wear hijab, the opinion she cites is that of people, not a view promoted by Islam. It is also not true that a woman who does not cover properly is solely responsible for things other people might do as a result. Men, be they "cool" northern Europeans or hot-blooded Italians or Lebanese, are not incapable of restraining themselves; they do it every day.

Of course, other aspects of a woman's clothing are more sexually-charged than her hair-covering, and many observers have noticed a trend in the Muslim world towards clothing which reveals the figure, although not the body itself, accompanied by a headscarf; the fact that some of the young men found on the urban streets of some Muslim countries are not put off propositioning and otherwise harrassing women by their hijabs is attested to by many women who have lived and travelled there. However, many women who do wear the headscarf have mentioned an important advantage, namely that it saves them having to worry about the style of their hair in the mornings when going to work or school. (In some parts of Africa, girls are required to keep their hair short while at school, to save the competitiveness and wastage of time on hair braiding and styling.) It is also said that a man who can only see a woman's face will not notice, and therefore judge her on, parts of her figure which he cannot see, and which are irrelevant to the business at hand; the covering clearly indicates to men she meets that she is there for business and is not available to him.

However, the distraction presented by a woman dressed in a revealing fashion is something many of us men can do without, particularly in the workplace and particularly when we have not had much sleep, which is usually the case with manual workers who often start work earlier than office workers. I accept that many men display bits of themselves that others do not want to see, but for the most part, men cover themselves up more than women do, and it is not uncommon for men to be buttoned up to the neck while women display their cleavages and most of their legs in the office. People complain about "builders' bums", but the fact that not all men want to be looking down the fronts of their female colleagues whenever they have to look down to talk to them goes largely unsaid. The guilty parties, by the way, are not just young women.

In the last few paragraphs, she trots out the familiar baseless claim that the Koran does not, in fact, demand the wearing of headscarves and alleges that women are adhering to a "male-imposed dress code". In fact, the Koran is not the only primary source of Islamic law, as anyone with a basic education in Islam can tell you, but even so, there is a direct command in the Koran to "draw their veils over their bosoms" (33:59), which is precisely what the headscarf that is known of does. (The word translated as bosoms is juyoob, which I have heard interpreted as breast pocket, as breast itself or as the curved neckline of a woman's dress, but they all necessitate drawing the headscarf down so that it covers a woman's front.) This, in short, is why women wear hijab. It is not a badge of identity, or a symbol of anything.

Devlin's article joins between the arrogance of assuming that Muslim women are less able to make decisions for themselves than women like her with that of assuming she, with her farrago of generalisations about what "Islam says", knows our religion better than we ourselves do. Her claim that "it is not discriminatory to ban the hijab in a country that is culturally Christian" is baloney, because discrimination, when used in this context, means refusing to tolerate difference, a problem Europe has demonstrated amply in the past. Men refused to tolerate women in their workplaces other than as secretaries or cleaners, white people refused to tolerate black people in positions of anything resembling dignity or authority, Protestants refused to tolerate Catholics in their schools or colleges or companies (and, earlier, Catholics had refused to tolerate anyone else at all anywhere), and when these overt forms of discrimination became illegal, there was still the problem of perfectly harmless customs being banned because they looked out of place. In the USA it was braided hair for Black women; now, in Europe, it is headscarves for Muslim women.

It is not only discriminatory against Muslims, but also ironically specifically targets women by banning their dress by requring them to choose between their religion and their education or career, an obstacle not put in the path of Muslim men, an irony to which many of these so-called feminists seem blind. Muslim women very clearly want education and they want the same opportunities as their menfolk and as other people; if they really were content to be housewives and make babies, the place of the hijab in the workplace, if not in school as well, would not be an issue.