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The Burqa of Fear, Terror and Subjugation

Even without the hijab, burqa, or any Islamic attire, North Africans, West Africans, Turks, or anyone who happens to look like them have a hard time in France. Even buying a French baguette, can be a frustra-
ting affair. While in St Michel during the early nineties, being a hungry 
tourist looking for a cheap eat, I walked into a patisserie and though there were two people behind the counter, neither of them heard my request for a loaf of bread. I had experienced the same 
feeling in the 70s while living in 
Baltimore, Maryland. Why won’t they just take my money? How irrational 
is racism?

I came across a group of ladies who meet every Thursday afternoon, in the park. All but three of them are French, not Francophone Arabs but Normans, Franks, French.

The women come together as Muslims and then as Westerners who speak French. A few of them wear the khimar (what is known as hijab) and some 
wear the niqab, but this being UAE, most of them wear the abaya. I ask them how they find each other and they joke about how loudly the French people speak, and how spotting them is therefore easy. “We love French (Muslims) but if we see non-Muslims, we run the other way,” they say. But, why? Because they will have to suffer the usual rude comments about hijab and Islam, all of which any self-respecting, liberal Westerner should never do.

A liberal, Western view is that everything is relative and one who adheres to a humanistic world-view should not be concerned with how a woman dresses. And this is where we find the hypocrisy of the burqa ban.

I’d hope French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s concern for Muslim women would extend to the creation of women-only parks, public pools, education centres and economic develop-
ment schemes.

These would, in fact, provide a safe zone for women.

But, Sarkozy is not concerned about women. He and those like him are primarily concerned about their own feelings of inferiority, insecurity and xenophobia, that, perhaps there is some secret within those folds of black.

Phyllis Chesler, feminist writer, pretends not to be so concerned with the ‘political questions around burqa’. 
She is clearly against it and many 
things Islamic.

Quoting America’s most vocal Islamophobes, Daniel Pipes, this is 
painfully apparent: “The sight of women in burqas and niqab is demoralising, frightening, to Westerners of all faiths, including the Muslim faith, as well as to secularists. First, their presence signals the visual subordination of women; 
the fact that these women acquiesce and collaborate in their own subordination is also alarming, a bit terrifying. 
One knows that the people who do 
this also publicly whip, cross-
amputate, hang, stone, and be-head human beings. And, if the ‘ghosts’ are here (my own name for burqa wearers) they are meant to remind us of just such practices.” 
(Daniel) Pipes’s ‘faceless, shapeless’ women are meant to terrify, to disturb. But I wonder, do women who wear 
the Islamic attire really have this 
intention? After Sarkozy comes Mona El Tahawy, who is not only a Muslim, but also a former ‘hijab wearer’ who took it off after getting into a debate with a niqab-wearing women on a train. So, does this make her an authority on Islam, women, and Arab issues? No, her only qualification is that she happens to be an Arab, a woman, and a self-proclaimed Muslim.

Yet, as an ‘expert’ she has jumped on Sarkozy’s bandwagon by writing, “I am a Muslim, I am a feminist and I detest the full-body veil, known as a niqab or burqa. It erases women from society and has nothing to do with Islam but everything to do with the hatred for women at the heart of the extremist ideology that preaches it.”

Well, this is quite the opposite of what Chesler was saying — that the burqa is for her terrifying. As far as feminism goes, both women, to me, are agents of Western patriarchy. But the oppression of force and perception of dominance into the affairs of others in a democracy is more oppressive. This notion that the age of liberalism has a never-ending life span is as damaging as it is ridiculous.

Last month, scores of Iranians thought they could Tweet their way to democracy, but who came to their rescue? No one. The fact is, the values of the French Revolution and the French democracy have been lost in the ship that Sarkozy and the ‘feminists’ sailed in. El Tahawy’s blog reveals that the 
average person has more sense than 
she does.

“Your position is blatantly hypocritical and completely devoid of substance. How can you call yourself a liberal if you believe in restricting a woman’s right to practice her religion as she sees fit?” says one of the responses. I 
rest my case.

Maryam Ismail is a Sharjah-based 
American sociologist and teacher. She can be reached at maryam@journalist.com