I think that Belgium is welcome to do whatever it wants. If this were occurring in America, however I would have a big issue with it. Maybe it’s because I’m an American, but I strongly believe that all people should be free to practice whichever religion they choose without any repercussions (unless the religion calls for actions that are harmful to others).
A woman wearing a burka is not harmful to me unless she’s using it to conceal a weapon of some sort, in which case the trench coat should probably be banned as well. From the feminist perspective, I can see how banning burkas may be considered harmful for women all over the world, but people are going to think what they want to about women regardless of whether or not someone is wearing a burka.
What should be banned, in my opinion, is mandating a religion and forcing people to practice it even if they don’t want to.
From an American perspective, this issue is the conflict between religious freedom and what I can only assume is the desire to ensure the safety of the public, as the cited article tells nothing of what the motivation for the bans are. I know nothing of how these concepts are protected and prioritized by the Belgian government and must use my primarily domestic knowledge for this response.
This conflict will exist with or without the presence of the burka or niqab in public. Banning these items may force those concealing items in public to change tactics, but it will most likely not cause them to turn away from their intended act. If you want to solve a problem, you need to locate and deal with the source of the problem, not its symptoms. If public safety and security is the goal, then banning types of clothing isn’t a solution, it is a stop-gap measure.
Naomi Ahsan ‘11
This is a violation of rights, regardless of how it gets justified and how many will be affected. I wonder if there exists a single crime on record in Belgium that was perpetrated by a woman who wears the burka. It is unfortunate that these women are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The symbolic value of their covering has only become threatening very recently, and not due to their own actions but those of radicals. If people feel uncomfortable around women in burkas, it is a backward and intolerant move to evict those women from public places — because if these women strongly believe in a need to cover (without anyone forcing them to), they are not going to expose themselves because someone passed a law. They might just restrict their movement instead. So those women can either leave the country or stay at home? Sounds like reinforcement of the negative stereotypes about women’s rights in Islam to me — “veiled” by supposedly secular and modern concerns.
This move on the part of a Western European government may seem outrageous to some, since it seemingly discriminates against religious traditions of a segment of its population. However, one has to wonder how many people will actually be impacted. Some estimate that the number of women who wear burkas in Belgium is as low as fifteen and figures for the niqab do no surpass 200. The ban is then more of a statement against a symbolic presence of a certain religious or cultural practice which are deeply misaligned with the dominant culture of both the Muslim immigrants of the country and the native Belgians.
Members of the Parliament argued that the ban is not an encroachment on religion but rather targets region-specific cultural practices, which have problematic implications in Belgian society since faces of individuals are completely obscured from outside scrutiny. Nevertheless, these logical arguments about why the burka is “dangerous” are moot since so few people actually wear them. Therefore the gesture is a sort of statement of the support of the government for Belgian cultural dominance within the country. Though this may be problematic from anthropological and culturally relativistic points of view, the statement is not a strike against religion and does not speak of a bigoted ignorance of Belgians. It’s a way for one European country, all of which are seeing a tremendous influx of immigrants from the post-colonial world, to remind everyone that at its core Belgium is Belgian, and that Belgian customs and values will always be at the basis of the nation’s legislature and policy decisions.
1 response so far ↓
1 Sanah Ali // Apr 7, 2010 at 12:07 pm
This is a really interesting debate. On the one side, it is reasonable to fear influence of any fundamentalist religious groups and the symbols that represent them. Yet, a common misconception is that the burqa is solely restricted to radical groups and that people are forced to wear them. In reality, the majority of women around the world that wear them feel liberated in doing so, and they do it by choice. In fact, many cultures in the world don similar attire. I agree with Naomi that the symbolic value has only recently been incorrectly attributed to only radicals. Thus, any country that sees the banning of what is religiously valuable to some is skewed in its security measures or its idea of national identity is one that is restrictive, rather than integrative. In essence, this is a modern form of Hitler’s ethnic cleansing.
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