Burqa & prejudice

“Dusassana and Bros.: Second-hand Saris”
From The Signboards of Despair by Bachchoo 
 
One has always thought of the French as tolerant people — give it some consideration: pretentious émigré Spanish painters, pop-singers with massive inferiority complexes about Americans, armies that have perfected the art of retreat, preposterous definitions of “intellectual”, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de... and so on. Plenty to tolerate. Now a sudden burst of Continent-shaking intolerance aimed again, as with Joan of Arc, at women of faith. (To be fair, the French did blame that barbecue on cross-Channel influence and to this day maintain that the best thing the British ever cooked was poor Joan.) This time it’s burqas. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has set his mind on banning them from public places in the Republique.
No more will women of the faith, whose traditions and menfolk interpret the injunction to modesty in the Quran as an order to hide one’s body and face from the public, be allowed to venture abroad wearing burqas.
Mr Sarkozy’s prejudice will undoubtedly encourage other nations in the European Union to follow suit and come out, so to speak, against the cover up. I refer to it as a “prejudice” rather than as a judicious measure because I don’t buy Mr Sarkozy’s argument that banning the burqa is a blow for freedom from male oppression. It may very well be that the women of Paris, Marseilles or Aix who want to walk about in burqa have not been coerced by anyone and have chosen to so do. Mr Sarkozy’s feint is prejudice wearing the blind burqa of progress.
England stands firm. And so it should. The minister for the environment (who better?) in the new coalition government of liberal conservatism, one Caroline Spellman, has said she rejects the idea that the burqa oppresses women. On the contrary, she asserts, it can, when it is what they want to wear, be a symbol of and factor in their “empowerment”. She will, as a consequence, work within the Cabinet to resist any move towards the banning of the burqa, even though a newspaper poll has this week said that 67 per cent of the British population would go with the French and favour its outlawing.
On balance, I think there is merit in Ms Spellman’s argument, even though I find that the concept of “empowering” is difficult to understand. I have always thought that armed bodies of human beings with a common purpose or with uniform brainwashing were the “empowered”. The rest of us have to rely on conscience and not being caught.
But even if the idea that the burqa “empowers” women by allowing them to cover their faces in public if they so choose, or because their husbands would beat them with a stick if they didn’t comply, were not true, it is surely part of British tradition to allow people to cover their faces as and when they have or want to.
Think, for instance, of the Phantom of the Opera. This poor gifted individual was maimed for life by being caught up in a fire in a theatre. Where would he be without the mask that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s designers suggested he wear? Could he go about stalking sopranic virgins from the rafters of opera houses without it? We do not have to believe, with the gullible musical theatre-goer, that Phantoms of the Opera exist and stalk the empty playhouses, but we must surely, in a democratic society, fight for these disfigured folk to wear masks?
Unlike the French, we in Britain don’t publicly denounce and reject everything American while sneakily adopting it. We have a much more sophisticated attitude to fattening food and destructive culture.Think of the person called “Batman”. You and I and perhaps a billion others know that he is really Bruce something or other.
Can you in your wildest dreams imagine an American statute, applicable in Gotham City, which bans people from wearing Batmasks? Or his very good young friend (sic) Robin from hiding the shape of his eyes behind the masquerade mask?
US President Barack Obama, whose middle name is Hussein, giving rise to the idea some Americans hold that his sympathies lie with the faith of his forefathers, would never dare to ban Batmasks or the Robin masquerade ones, would he? There’d be bigger riots than the ones against the Vietnam War. Go on Mr Obama, make my day!
Hiding one’s flaws is a fundamental human right. Hiding one’s true identity from state agencies is, arguably, not. If, for instance, a terrorist were using a false passport to get into a country he or she was about to bomb, that wouldn’t be right and if the state against which the atrocity was to be perpetrated, penetrated the falsehood and discovered the forgery, that would be fine and dandy. Mr Sarkozy would argue that people with wicked intentions could hide their identity in a burqa. Possible, but surely today there are ways of detecting who’s who from eyeball tests?
My suggestion is that if a policeperson is posted at every corner of every city with an eyeball-detecting machine connected to a central computer of eyeball identities and he or she asked every burqa-nashin to stare into the above-said machine, the problem would be solved. (This idea is copyright, please note!)
The problem would arise when the more fundamentalist women demanded that even the slits of the burqas be closed, so no light can pass in or sight can look out. That could very well be the wish of the burqa women who want to empower themselves even further. Being deprived of sight in public places they would have to resort to guide dogs on leashes who would be trained to walk them around.
But in today’s Britain that would pose another problem. In a northern town this week “devout” Muslim bus drivers refused to take guide-dogs and the blind people they were guiding onto public buses. Dogs, they said, were unclean. There is a case to be made for blind people not being allowed on public transport and thereby walking the streets with their dogs, getting exercise and working off the excess weight they put on by eating cheap fast foods. It’s a sort of blind slimmers’ “empowerment”, I suppose.