dialogue on a burka

Pamela Bone, doing the writer's choice with McKewan's book "Saturday", over at Normblog, touches on thoughts about the burka and made me want to write this.

The first time I saw a woman in a burka it made me feel sick. I was fifteen, maybe sixteen years old and it was in Birmingham city centre. I didn't know then what it was or why it was worn, but the sight of a women on a hot sticky day encased from head to toe in several thick billowing layers of black cloth, with even the eye slit covered in gauze, genuinely shocked me. I remember being unable to shake the feeling of upset for the rest of the day.

I continued to see her over the years, although I haven't seen her for a long time. She was always with a man, a young man who wore shorts in the summer and who walked along with his hands in his pockets looking quite jolly and approachable. I'd watch their kids getting older, a boy and a girl, always dressed in western gear, the girl once in a Mickey Mouse top. I still had little idea of why the woman wore a black shroud, but I guessed obviously it had something to do with religion and oppression of women. But the fact that the man and kids she was with didn't truss themselves up in disturbing garments made me begin to think that wearing this thing must be totally her wish, and that as the man looked so modern and amiable that perhaps it was even a case of him "supporting" her in this bizarre choice of clothing, no matter how embarrassing he might actually find it. Fair enough, I found myself eventually thinking, each to their own.

Then September 11th. I had been a firebrand atheist, my complete ignorance of all religions often employed as a deliberate insult. Being so closely caught up in events in New York however, I didn't want to be ignorant anymore so I started to become more informed; the Middle East, Islam, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, everything, as world events unfolded after the US terrorist attacks I made an effort to educate myself.

And now I understood about this lady and her burka. And the message from a lot of female Muslims was not that Muslim dress was repressive, but that it was an empowering expression of their tribal loyalties. A lot of the female Muslims I worked with covered their hair and you couldn't call them meek and mild, and so did a couple of the female doctors at the hospital I attended. Again, each to their own I thought. Many religions require many things of their faithful. Just because it isn't something I would want to do, doesn't make it wrong.

But the burka. I couldn't get over the burka. The burka isn't about modesty or religious expression, it's about obliteration of the self; a complete eradication of individuality. It is about making yourself a non-being. I will say it now, I still feel ill when I see a woman in a burka, not because I am racist, not because I have anything against Islam, but because any abuse of the self shocks and upsets me.

If that lady I saw down the years in Birmingham wore the burka of her own free will then the last thing the rest of us should do is support that decision. She is attacking herself every bit as much as a woman who cuts her arms with razor blades, or starves herself in anorexia is attacking herself.

And if she wasn't wearing the burka out of her own free will, then she was being attacked every bit as much as if her husband was dragging her along the street beating her.

There can be no more reason to deny a woman the feel of the sun on her face, or her ability to see the world she walks in, than there can be reason to deny her food and water. These are the most base things any human being has a right to.

To me headdress, no problem. Burka, human rights abuse.

Then Shabina Begum. I was friendly at the time this case came to court with a couple of Muslim females who had plenty to say about it. They had never been pressured to wear any headdress and had never done so, but they saw around them a growing pressure on women in their community to start doing so. Something that had been rare here, they said, was becoming common, and was running the danger of becoming compulsory. And it wasn't just the men in the family putting the pressure on, it was the women too, worried about their daughters being compared less favorably with other more "devout" daughters, and how it might affect their prospects. And worse it wasn't even just the mothers, but the daughters themselves, fired up with a desire to appear devout, enjoying the approval it got them. But how devout is devout enough? What's right, the Hijab, the jalib, the burka?

Now this is my position. I am not interested in having dialogue with a man who thinks that a woman should cover her hair, I am interested in dialogue with women who think they should. I do not feel any sense of antipathy towards any female who wears Muslim headdress. I don't pity her, or revile her, or think she's anything strange or unnatural, or someone that needs a talking to, or someone that needs rescuing or liberating.

But nor do I think she's special. Nor do I think her headdress and why she wears it is outside the realms of that which can be discussed.

So if a woman says she wears it because it stops her being exploited by men, like STWC's Salma Yaqoob did recently, then I assert my right to be offended at the inference that I am being exploited. If she wears a designer hijab, I'd like to ask her how that is consistent with modesty. I'd like to know her opinion of the fact that I wear make-up, short-sleeved tops, and skirts. I'd like to know if she would defend a woman's right not to have to wear any kind of headdress. And if she doesn't wear a burka, I'd like to ask her what she thinks of women that do, and assuming she thinks the burka too strict, then what has she ever done to highlight the issue of burkas in her community? There could and should be no objection to posing questions like this.

But there can never be any defense of the burka. On the proposed Dutch ban of the burka I am in full agreement, and I don't see why Britain could not and should not do exactly the same thing.

It would be too late to give that lady I used to see around Birmingham a chance to feel the sun on her face, but perhaps we could stop the same harm being done to her daughter? Stop that little girl who grew up wearing pig tails and pink dresses from having to spend her adult life walking around in a death shroud.

Also

Interesting discussion following this post at Pickled Politics.

And if anybody has a copy of the Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's Evening Standard piece on the Burka that's mentioned would you kindly get in touch? I'd really like to read it and it's not on-line. Thanks.