Daily Times EDITORIAL: Muslims must weigh the veil carefully

Tuesday, October 17, 2006



The British press has quoted Phil Woolas, the Race and Faith minister, as demanding that Aishah Azmi, a Muslim Teaching Assistant, be fired for refusing to remove her veil at work and “in the presence of fellow men workers”. This remark is bound to pour more oil on the fire of the debate over the rights of Muslim women to wear face-veils in Britain. The opposition Conservatives have also joined the Labour minister, with one of the party’s top officials accusing Muslim leaders of encouraging a “voluntary apartheid” that could help spawn “home-grown terrorism”.

Most Muslim organisations in the UK are outraged. They believe that the powers-that-be are exploiting Muslim support for the rights of a lone woman to wear the veil as pretext for conducting intrusive inquiries into Muslim lifestyles. Normally, it wouldn’t have much mattered if a Muslim woman had been asked to change the way she looked at a school, but in today’s charged political environment the question has become extremely sensitive. It no longer matters if Muslim women walk in the streets in England wearing their hijab while a whole lot of other Muslim women don’t; what apparently matters is the right of a Muslim woman to freely practise her religion and choose to dress according to her perception of what her religion ordains.

As if this isn’t a big enough crisis for British Muslims, the news from Tunisia, a Muslim country, is that the Tunisian government is actually taking action against women walking around wearing the veil in public. What Tunisia is trying to do is what the British are not thinking of doing, although if the present alienation of the expatriate Muslim community continues in Europe, that day may arrive too. Tunisia is not democratic and doesn’t care for human rights, but the British do. However, it would be a sad day if and when cultural policies in Europe depart from their past tolerant multiculturalism. But there is another side to this “multiculturalism” which warrants attention.

Should the expatriate Muslim community take note of the new tendency among the host countries and adjust itself accordingly, or should it continue in the groove of multiculturalism that has effectively separated and ghettoised them? In Pakistan, those who dislike the treatment meted out to Ms Azmi should take a good look at the edict of hijab before asking the Pakistanis — who form a majority of the Muslims of the United Kingdom — to be aggressive and defy the bipartisan consensus forming in the host country’s parliament about passing new cultural laws in tandem with the rest of the European Union.

We have always had the burqa in Pakistan. It is still around, as if “marking” our movement towards a more liberal and “liberating” society. There is tolerance of the burqa here and of the other forms of hijab that have cropped up in recent years. Indeed, from the shuttlecock to the two-piece burqa, we have all of them without people thinking much about it. But when the ladies of the Jama’at-e Islami appear on TV in their burqa with only the light shining from their eyes we know this doesn’t point to our evolution to a progressive historical stage but to our possible future in the opposite direction. We know that if and when the clerical alliance of the MMA comes to power it will enforce the hijab and deprive our women of the freedom of choice they have today.

Tunisia may be reacting to developments of the recent past in the Islamic world. In 1994, the Islamists of Turkey, after winning the municipal elections in the cities of Ankara and Istanbul, tried to use force on the streets to impose the Islamic veil on Turkish women. Then we saw the Islamic warrior Juma Namangani beating up women in the Ferghana Valley in Uzbekistan for not wearing the shuttle-cock burqa, and we saw Mulla Umar beating up women in Kabul for walking alone even when wearing a burqa. We also know that Mr Namangani’s Islamist ally, Tahir Yuldashev, is somewhere in Waziristan today, and if he and his friends in Pakistan had their way, Pakistan would also go the way of Afghanistan.

Two developments have taken place in the last two years that are significant. The expatriate Muslim community in the UK and Europe has shunned local culture and gone into its cocoon. Before that for many years it was slowly changing its dress code and taking up religious pieties defensively against the process of multiculturalism leading to ghettoisation which allowed and enabled the expatriates to live separately and do whatever they wanted to do without asking for equal opportunity. Then 9/11 happened, changing perceptions of Islam abroad. This was followed more lethally by October 7, 2005, and the Heathrow plot this year. Meanwhile, the British police have taken action but not always fairly and cleanly, and innocent Muslims have suffered as a result. This has exacerbated the situation

The Muslims of the US were best integrated, followed by those of the UK, but both communities are now under pressure from the new laws. Britain wants to increase its coordination with EU in respect of the culture policy to be followed vis-à-vis the Muslims in the future. France has an anti-veil policy and applies it not only to teachers but pupils as well. Thus while democracies in Europe may embolden the expatriate Muslim to seek remedy under law, the Muslim must remember that new legislation can change all that; and legislation is the result of politics and how the host white majority feels.

Expatriate Muslims in the UK must therefore think of ways of assimilating local culture and being at par with the other non-Muslim religious communities who have integrated well and face fewer problems. The question of the veil is emblematic of what might come. It should not be treated simply as a matter of freedom of choice in a civilised world. *

SECOND EDITORIAL: Is Benazir coming?

The leader of the opposition in the Senate, Mr Raza Rabbani, has called upon the workers of his Pakistan People’s Party to get ready to accord a “historic welcome” to PPP chairperson, Benazir Bhutto, who he says may return “any time in the near future”.

Mr Rabbani is one of the bright leaders of the PPPP and is greatly respected among his colleagues in the Senate. Why should he fall back on a political device that the supporters of the PPP have learnt to ignore over the years? Many colleagues of his have faced the workers and told them about the imminent return of their great leader. Now they do it less and less. Even if the “return” is for real this time, Mr Rabbani should have been more discreet and resisted the temptation to once again prove to everyone that the PPPP is a one-person party. The PML-N has stopped doing this. The PPP should let the “prediction” policy fall into disuse if it doesn’t want its workers and voters to believe that an underhand “deal” has been done with a military dictator. *