France’s Burqa and the Taliban’s Burqa

On the occasion of what French President Nicolas Sarkozy said about women wearing the burqa in his country, many in the Arab world have flared up with rage. They began yelling, on satellite television and in articles, denouncing the conspiracy against Muslims and the assault on their liberties. “Directors” of fictional and satellite television-based “research centers” were brought forth, instead of people with PhDs whose title no longer carries any meaning, to discuss liberties, democracy, women’s rights, etc… in a manner that almost literally reiterates, and in a stereotypical fashion, the statements of fundamentalist movements and their offshoots. Moreover, they confirm their ignorance, not just of sociology and the study of cultures, civilizations and the civilized world, but also of that which they are supposed to be experts in, i.e. Islamic women’s dress.

There is an issue among the French regarding outward display of religious identity, such as wearing the veil for students in public schools, as well as the skullcap for Jewish students and large crosses for Christian students. The French administration had been unfortunate in dealing with this issue, which aroused considerable debate, penetrating the French political class on both sides of the argument. Yet this issue, which at the time had been exploited by fundamentalist Islamic movements and organizations, remains a matter of internal French debate. And that is a different issue.

What we are concerned with here is the meaning of these responses and its impact on our reality. For these movements themselves to confuse, purposely or out of ignorance, the hijab with the burqa, a term which Sarkozy specified, that is the great tragedy of those who work as facades for fundamentalist movements. Indeed, they did not differentiate, and perhaps their conscious minds fail to differentiate, between the hijab, the niqab and the burqa, and the implications of these types of dress. Thus they mix them up, purposely or out of ignorance, in order to confirm the “conspiracy” against Islam, and to inflame provocation, hatred and mobilization against the other. It is this very strategy which represents the breeding grounds in which grew the seeds of the terrorism that struck in the West, as it did in Muslim countries. It is this very strategy that justifies the persistence of terrorism.

The “directors” of fictional and satellite television-based “research centers” have flared up to condemn the ban on the burqa in France, pretexting that such a ban infringes on the freedom of Muslim women. Those great scholars have ignored the fact that the burqa is the dress that the Taliban and their offshoots have imposed in the regions which they control by force of arms in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, as well as in safe zones in other countries. Along with the burqa being imposed, women have been deprived of their primary and basic rights. They have been forbidden to receive education, their schools have been destroyed, their faces burnt with acid and they have been violently flogged in the streets. We have not heard these great scholars defend the rights of Muslim women under the tyranny of the Taliban and their offshoots, nor condemn the violation of their humanity in such a barbaric manner. Women are still being subjected to these practices to this day in regions controlled by the Taliban and their offshoots, without any of those experts finding that this violates the freedom of Muslim women or their right to a decent life!

Here lies the core of the problem of fundamentalist movements and their mouthpieces, from satellite television stations to writers and researchers of fictional “centers.” It is this blunt use of double standards at every level, where fundamentalist and extremist movements have an absolute right over women and the absolute freedom to destroy their humanity, but where any attempt at drawing attention to such practices becomes a conspiracy against Islam.

The matter might be that of a mere point of view, repeated by some of the branches of fundamentalist movements on satellite television and on the internet, but the greater disaster is that they are addressing a broad audience which, by virtue of the reality of things, receives information without any ability to distinguish, especially as those who claim to defend Islam carry titles that cannot be disputed. Indeed, it is sufficient for one of them to add a word such as “research,” “studies” or “strategy” to the name of his fictional “center,” for listeners or readers to imagine that this “director” indeed enjoys a minimum of the qualifications of research, science, objectivity and intellectual openness, and not that he is a mere mouthpiece “produced” by his organization or movement to feed the ideas of hatred and spite which we hear in statements from the Taliban, from its main branch and from its additional branches spread out in satellite television channels. Defenders of the burqa in France are only a façade for those who forcibly impose it in Afghanistan and Pakistan.