Banning the Burqa
France's lower house of parliament recently approved a bill to ban the wearing the burqa in public. I've posted a bit flippantly about this before, but in fact it's an issue about which I'm genuinely deeply conflicted. I loathe the burqa with every atom of my being, the more so because I live in Turkey and can see exactly what the garment means, every day--not only for the women who wear it (very few, here), but for the women who don't. They, too--or perhaps I should say, "we, too," since I live here as well--are gravely affected the culture that gave rise to the notion that this garment is a terrific thing. But I just can't be insensible to the religious freedom arguments. Martha Nussbaum recently made what I think is the best case that can be made against the ban. She responds to her critics here.
Do you find her arguments persuasive? If not, why not?
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Comments:
May '10
Re: Banning the Burqa
The comparison to nuns in habits is interesting. A nun wears a habit both to be modest and to signify her marriage to Christ. It's much like a wife reserves the full beauty of her body for her husband and wears a wedding band to advertise her devotion.
A nun's habit reveals only her face. She is able to be social via facial expressions and be recognized as an individual person.
I have seen only a handful of women in burqas apart from picture, but I suspect that they can similarly be social via expressions even when only their eyes are revealed. The eyes are the most vital element of body language, and expressions like smiles can likely be seen even behind cloth. But I wonder how much recognition of the woman's individuality is hindered. Only people who know her well could recognize her by her eyes and voice alone.
Do we not want to recognize persons as individuals in ordinary circumstances, when a fingerprint scanner or signature comparison is not available? I acknowledge a person's right to be more communal than individualistic. I do not acknowledge a right to treat oneself as a faceless drone.
May '10
Re: Banning the Burqa
Claire speaks of both religious and political Islam. Do we ever speak of any other religion in that way? Even the "Jewish State" has a secular government.
Islam stands alone as a major faith whose stated goal is world theocracy and has special laws for those who practice another (or no) religion. We wish to treat them as our equals. They wish for us to treat them as our superiors. Can there ever be a compromise?
Re: Banning the Burqa
We certainly did speak of Christianity that way until the 18th century.
May '10
Re: Banning the Burqa
True. It took 1,800 years for Christianity to mature and divorce itself from the political. At that pace Islam should be ready to coexist with the rest of us in, say, 2432? I'm not sure that works in a nuclear world.
Yes, we want to live up to our own stated ideals. But that option should not include cultural suicide. Our Declaration of Independence originally condemned slavery, yet that sectioned was abandoned lest it abort America's birth. We believe in a multicultural society and yet imprisoned Americans of Japanese ancestry during WWII.
Barbarity must be called out and actively resisted. Civilizations to not fall to the more civilized. Freedom does not give way to the more free.
May '10
Re: Banning the Burqa
Not exactly on point, but my best friend works for the IRS in Philadelphia and they don't require Muslim women who wear the full burqa to remove their face coverings for their photo IDs. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that we won't have to worry about the US outlawing burqas anytime soon.
May '10
Re: Banning the Burqa
EJ, the explicit goal of a worldwide caliphate is only a concern of government if force is the explicit method of achieving that goal. Political dissent is acceptable in speech and in democratic efforts. It is only armed rebellion that is illegal.
Christians hope that all people will become Christian, even if we do not believe that will ever happen and our focus is on the afterlife. It's not a problem if Muslims hope all people will become Muslim. It's only a problem when people try to enslave others and enforce their worldview through brutality.
That said, you might have a point. If burqas are only associated with the branch of Islam that promotes conversion by force and dhimmitude for non-Muslims, then banning burqas could indeed be a defense of one's political system, albeit a circumstantial one. It would be like banning gang colors. I'm not sure that's sound policy, though.
Jul '10
Re: Banning the Burqa
When women wear burqas while in the public space, they are stating that they are NOT citizens, they are apart, they should be within their home only. When men allow their burqa-clad women out into public, they are showing the rest of us that they - Islamic MEN - are superior to those black objects around him, because THE MEN alone have a legitimate right to be in public, while the black objects do not. Make no mistake, burqa-clad women are a political and aggressive statement that the Islamic State is superior to the West and everything it stands for, including the 'freedom' it accords women. As a woman, this makes me very very angry
It is very important that Islam within the West learns to assimilate in basic ways. So long as women (who raise the children, remember) are explicitly defined as not-citizen by their families, they will continue to remain apart from the surrounding society. Islam will continue to be an outsider, but an aggressive outsider, within the West. And a very dangerous 'outsider' I might add.
May '10
Re: Banning the Burqa
When I think of this struggle between the West and the dark side of Islam, I recall my favorite quotation from Churchill. It is from a speech he gave at Harvard in 1943 and is not one that has been widely cited in recent years:
We do not war primarily with races as such. Tyranny is our foe, whatever trappings or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal, we must forever be on our guard, ever mobilised, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat. In all this, we march together. Not only do we march and strive shoulder to shoulder at this moment under the fire of the enemy on the fields of war or in the air, but also in those realms of thought which are consecrated to the rights and the dignity of man.
Re: Banning the Burqa
One place to begin thinking about the burqa: the 1878 case Reynolds v. U.S., in which the Supreme Court upheld a ban on polygamy:
Personally, I'm not at all certain I find that form of words particulary satisfying. "Mere" belief? Could the Founders even have conceived of putting it that way? Why would they have included freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights if they considered it a matter of only tepid concern? Yet even as it bumbles, the Court makes a compelling point. Our government, it argues, has a duty to enable us all to live together--to ensure that our society functions. It therefore has the right--it must--to outlaw practices that prove incompatible with American life.
Re: Banning the Burqa
As the Court argued:
Grant the Court's point here, and a ban on the burqa becomes, I think, a matter of context and circumstances.
At present? When only the tiniest smattering of American women wear burqas? The very notion of a ban seems ludicrous. But what if we were to become more like France? What if, that is, more than ten percent of our population were Muslim? And increasingly drawn to radical Islam? What if the wearing of the burqa could very reasonably be interpreted as a political act--a defi against the very principles--the rule of law, the separation of church and state--that enabled our country to function?
I'm not sure how to answer these questions. But I am sure they're hard.
May '10
Re: Banning the Burqa
And the oft quoted story of Englishman Charles James Napier about the Hindu practice of Sati:
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
Re: Banning the Burqa
I no sooner hit the "post" button that I realized I'd left my little argument incomplete. If the wearing of the burqa were only a political act--a defi--then it would certainly be protected under the First Amendment. The tricky question: What if it represented not merely a political act but something close to an incitement? That is, what if the wearing of the burqa represented not merely speech, but speech from which action, intended, in one way or another, to undermine American life, were more or less certain, sooner or later, to follow?
Re: Banning the Burqa
Peter raises a hard question that has long bedeviled the Supreme Court -- what happens when society passes a law prohibiting conduct that impacts a religion's core practices. The short answer is that a 5-4 majority, led by Justice Scalia (who is pretty accommodating to religion on most other questions), says that a generally applicable law that does not discriminate against religion on its face will not be held to violate Americans' right to free exercise of religion.
In English, religious belief does not amount to a get out of jail free card.
The Court's answer comes from a 1990 case: an American Indian religion used peyote (an illegal drug) in its ceremonies. Justice Scalia held that the defendants who used the drug could not claim an exception from the criminal laws. He worried that to give free rein to this claim would effectively create an individual right to ignore general laws (what Peter here sees as the laws that allow us all to live together in one society).
The answer would be different in the law were not neutral or generally applicable, but were obviously designed to suppress a religious group.
Re: Banning the Burqa
Next question, John, if we may turn from discussing a bedeviled Court to spending a little time bedeviling you: Can you imagine circumstances--any at all--in which the Supreme Court would uphold a ban on burqas? Or--just to bedevil you a little more imaginatively--can you imagine circumstances in which Mr. Justice Scalia would uphold such a ban?
May '10
Re: Banning the Burqa
The comment approaches are three: 1) Individual freedom (leave the burqa alone); 2) national security (ban to prevent suicide bombers): and 3) cultural defenders (expunge all toxic Islamism elements). I believe the right answer is a common-sense compromise of #1 and 2, modeled on the Sikh approach.
For three years, the guy in the next office was an Indian Punjab who was a devout Sikh- turban, etc. I would help him select a PA system for his temple (he was a Board member) or make him a CD of his daughter's violin recital. His security badge picture was sans-turban, and he explained that the religion was central, but for photo-ID purposes, it was obvious that a good picture was necessary.
There is no reasonable justification for blocking people from practicing their religion in freedom (compatible with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Division_v._Smith, of course), so I reject #3.
Let them wear what they want, as long as they will take a modest ID photo for security purposes, and are willing to be privately exposed in airport security lines, etc.
From Mrs. David Frum: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danielle-crittenden/islamic-like-me-does-this_b_75583.html
Re: Banning the Burqa
My bet if that the law were written in the way that the French have done it, it might have a chance. As I understand it, the French law does not mention or ban burqas specifically. It prohibits people from wearing masks in public, with certain exceptions for costumes (this being France, where people wander the streets of Paris eating eclairs and dressed up as characters in Dangerous Liasions, I suppose). If a law like that were passed in the US, it would be neutral toward religion on its face, as opposed to a law -- like one that banned animal sacrifices, but with an exception for killing animals to eat them -- that obviously targeted religion (that too, was another Supreme Court case).
Jul '10
Re: Banning the Burqa
Peter and John might mention women within their arguments. Polygamy is ALWAYS associated with woman's secondary status to men. It wasn't only a Victorian distaste for sexual frolicking that forced the Mormons to reject polygamy: it was also a very active Women's Movement that fought Utah joining the Union while it acquiesced to polygamy.
The burqa is an overt statement that women wearing that bag are NOT CITIZENS of the country in which they live. This is an outrageous insult to any country boasting an electoral system.
Re: Banning the Burqa
Ban the Burqa? Should that be a cause or a concern? The issue is indeed, tough, as Peter Robinson says. And Reynolds v. United States is the worst place to start in thinking about it. Reynolds had to address the extent to which a government ban on polygamy could be imposed consistent with the view that Congress could make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. The presumption is thereby set in favor of religious liberty. The question is what can overcome it. Killing third persons is easy, because that prohibition is part of the standard definitions of freedom, which cover only those actions that do not threatened the lives and property of others. Change that rule and the religious autocrat puts us all in the position of kill or be killed. But polygamy threatens no such risk. Within the libertarian calculus the most obvious source of harm is the offense that others take of the practice, and that type of harm rates very low on the scale of public justifications to intervene because it allows worked-up majorities to gain their way by their common sense of indignation. So we want something more... [1/3]
Edited on July 17, 2010 at 11:03pmRe: Banning the Burqa
What could that be? Well we could try to show that the children of these unions turn out badly, which was not attempted in that case, and against which there was a wealth of evidence that did not require us to be viewers of Big Love. Worse still, the illegality was the pretext for forfeiture of Morman properties. People can refuse to associate with polygamous couples, deny them access to their own churches and clubs. But the social sanctions don't justify the legal ones. And they can be met by others who go out of their way to aid polygamous families. Think of the antimiscegenation laws for a comparison.
So how does this put the Burqa? The restrictions are uneasy if the objections to them are symbolic about the place of women in society. There is no reason why a majority of people could make the world seem unanimous by banning the Burqa. But, for one thing, were these decisions made by autonomous women or forced upon them by husbands or religious leaders who are prepared to force women to wear Burqas? At this point the law would be an effort to stop coercion, not encourage it. [2/3]
Re: Banning the Burqa
But how true are the assumptions, either way, on this question? Next, in other places, Burqas could easily pose a security risk, for it would be easy to conceal a gun or a bomb underneath its folds. Here we are back to force prevention -- that is close to standard libertarian concerns. But again how true, and where? A market in Jerusalem is perhaps one thing, but one in Detroit is perhaps another. So the question boils down to tough assessments of competing risks of over and underenforcement of anti violence norms. No wonder the question is hard. [3/3]