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Restrictions on Face-Coverings & Religious Symbols
Posted By jean.meslier On 2018-02-22 @ 09:01 In | No Comments
In recent years, several countries or regions have adopted laws restricting the wearing of face-coverings or religious symbols. (See Table 1.) Probably the principal concern motivating such legislation is security, as face-coverings are obviously useful as disguises. However, that is not the only reason. Stemming the tide of Islamist fundamentalism and its extreme misogyny is also a major concern. Certainly the main face-coverings targeted by such laws are the most extreme versions of the Islamic veil: the niqab, which leaves only the eyes exposed, and the burqa which obscures even the eyes behind a concealing net or grille.
The ban on religious symbols in Turkey dates from the early 20th century, corresponding to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate, and the founding of the Republic of Turkey. This case is not only the oldest such ban of which I am aware, but it also stands out as a case of conscious and concerted modernization, part of a major effort, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, to end centuries of religious obscurantism in that country. The fight against Islamic misogyny was a major component of that effort.
Table 1: Laws Restricting Face-Coverings and Religious Symbols [1] (separate page)
The other bans listed in Table 1 are much more recent, most from the early 21st century, and the issue of security probably dominates as a motivating factor. This corresponds to the rise of political Islam and its aggressive campaign to extend its influence as widely as possible. However, terrorism, with the concomitant concern for security which it generates, being the most spectacular of Islamist strategies, is only the tip of the iceberg. The simple promotion of the Islamic veil, attempting to impose it and normalize its wearing anywhere and everywhere, is just as important in this campaign. Again, Turkey is a bellwether in this regard, because its modernization efforts, begun almost a century ago, have recently been compromised by the election of an Islamist political party to the national government and, in particular, by the repeal in 2013 of the ban on hijabs for public servants.
There have been court challenges to various religious symbol bans. For example, in December 2012, Belgium’s Constitutional Court ruled that that country’s ban on the full veil did not violate human rights and refused to invalidate it.
In July 2014 the European Court of Human Rights rejected a complaint from a French Muslim woman of Pakistani origin, thus upholding the French ban on the full veil. In July 2017, the same Court upheld the Belgian ban on face-coverings, considering it necessary in a democratic society to protect the rights and freedoms of others.
In March 2017, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on two cases, involving two hijabis working in the private sector, one in France, the other in Belgium. The Court decided that an enterprise may legitimately adopt an internal rule forbidding the wearing of political, philosophical or religious symbols by its employees. However, in the absence of such a rule, an ad hoc restriction could be considered discriminatory.
The above decisions validated bans in Belgium and France. However the situation in Canada is very different. Only weeks ago (2017-12-01), responding to a request by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) in collaboration with the National Council for Canadian Muslims (NCCM), Quebec Superior Court suspended legislation which (weakly) bans face-coverings in public services.
Clearly, any legislation which restricts dress must endeavour to strike a balance between personal freedom and the state’s duty to protect its citizens and its institutions from the toxic influence of aggressive ideologies such as religious fundamentalism.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights [2] is not a perfect document—there is no such thing, unless one is so irrational as to believe in the divine origin of certain scriptures—but it is a good starting point for a discussion of human rights. For example, I have my doubts about Article 26(3) which guarantees parents’ rights over their children’s education, because it opens the door to the religious indoctrination of children. Nevertheless, the Declaration represents a wide consensus as it was “drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world.”
Article 18 of the Declaration guarantees everyone’s “freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” However, Article 29(2) declares that “everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others.” In other words, the rights of each individual are limited by the need to respect the rights of others. Your rights end—or at least may be subject to some restriction—where mine start, and vice versa. We recognize in these two Articles the poles of personal freedom and collective responsibility, mentioned above.
To achieve an appropriate balance between the two poles, it is important to understand the nature of the article most often targeted by the legislation. The Islamic veil in its various forms (hijab, tchador, burkini, niqab, burqa, etc.) can be described as:
Furthermore, the niqab and burqa are extreme versions of the veil and thus extreme forms of Islamofascist propaganda, proselytism and misogyny, better characterized by replacing the word “subordination” by “enslavement” in point 2 above.
Given its meaning and purpose, the Islamic veil, especially the niqab and burqa, deserves to be banned in any situation where it constitutes a threat to the dignity of women and humans in general, or infringes on the freedom of conscience of the citizenry. Allowing a representative of the state—police, judge, public service employee, etc.—to wear a partisan religious symbol while on duty is unacceptable because it violates the freedom of conscience of users who must interact with that representative. It would be unthinkable to allow commercial or political advertising on, for example, police uniforms; to allow religious advertising is just as improper. If the face is obscured, then even allowing users of public services to wear it inadmissible, for why should public resources be wasted by adding to security and communication costs in order to deal with a barrier whose purpose is to promote an ideology contrary to the public interest?
Various arguments, or rather pseudo-arguments, have been advanced in an effort to rationalize a total refusal to ban religious symbols or face-coverings.
The very nature of the Islamic veil as described above constitutes sufficient reasons to ban it in several circumstances. Let us review and complete those reasons:
For the last three considerations, any workaround (i.e. accommodation) which may be provided in an attempt to mitigate problems caused by veils is an unacceptable waste of resources. The solution is to ban the veil, not accommodate it.
Total tolerance of the Islamic veil does not help Muslim women or anyone else. On the contrary, it harms everyone, and in particular it harms Muslim women because it abandons them to the pressure of their family and community to conform to the increasingly aggressive demands of fundamentalists.
In particular, non-Muslim Western women who occasionally don a hijab or other Islamic veil in so-called “solidarity” with Muslim women are in reality doing them serious harm. They betray women in Muslim-majority countries who are forced to wear the veil. In Muslim-majority countries, the pressure on women to conform to religious practices which the fundamentalists claim to be required of them is severe and those women who resist that pressure and go out in public without a veil often risk arrest, imprisonment, acid-attacks or worse. As Headscarves and Hymens author Mona Eltahawy points out, “Western women who wear the veil contribute to the subservience of women elsewhere in the world for whom wearing the veil is an obligation.”
In Western countries, the harm done by this false “solidarity” is more insidious but just as real. It contributes to the normalization and spread of the veil, it facilitates the fundamentalist mindset which promotes the veil and it blurs the distinction between fundamentalism and modernism. Furthermore, it makes it more difficult for Muslim women to free themselves from the clutches of their religious milieu. For example, if such a women seeks a public service job and if religious symbols are banned for employees in the public sector, this gives her an excellent reason to remove the veil at least while on the job. But if there is no such ban, she is deprived of a major tool against religious coercion.
As for those women who wear the Islamic veil purely by choice, completely voluntarily, they can choose not to wear one if they seek employment in the public sector. If removing the veil for the sake of employment is so repugnant to them that they refuse to do so, that simply indicates that their religious fanaticism is stronger than their desire to integrate into the work environment. Such a person is a very poor candidate for the job.
No discussion of banning religious symbols would be complete without denouncing the foolishness and irrationality of those who systematically oppose any ban on the Islamic veil. Such individuals and organizations are guilty of a cowardly capitulation to Islamofascism and an unconscionable betrayal of Enlightenment values. They represent what has become known as the “regressive left.” The CCLA mentioned above and anyone who supports their campaign against the recently adopted Quebec face-covering ban fall into this category. Even such a feeble ban is too much for them.
Do not forget Turkey and the dangerous recent developments in that country: the deterioration of its democracy, the deepening influence of Islamism, the erosion of the Republic’s secular foundations, the re-introduction of the hijab in state institutions. Those who oppose all bans on the wearing of religious symbols, some of whom even claim, hypocritically, to be secularists, have much more in common with the Islamist President Erdogan than they do with the atheists and secularists of, say, Charlie Hebdo.
This article is also available as a PDF document [4].
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URLs in this post:
[1] Laws Restricting Face-Coverings and Religious Symbols: https://www.atheology.ca/laws-restricting-face-coverings-religious-symbols/
[2] Universal Declaration of Human Rights: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
[3] Bill 62 and Dress Codes: https://www.atheology.ca/blog-090/
[4] available as a PDF document: https://www.atheology.ca/pdf/other/restrictions_face_coverings_long.pdf
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