The storm over women’s heads
Posted By Steven Lewis on July 9, 2009
In The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen, author Michael Ruhlman mentions a sociologist attached to the Culinary Institute of America who was working on a theory that all religion exists to control the sexuality of women. That religion could rear its head so vividly even in a book about something as secular as American cooking is a reminder that religion is pervasive in a way we can sometimes forget. This is particularly true of women in religion.
The hijab has hardly been out of the news for years. Men’s headwear outside the mainstream (baseball caps) confronts in a unique way for an item of clothing; but it has nothing on the storms that circle over women’s heads. Men’s religious headwear seldom raises much more than a murmur. Sikhs, for instance, are catered for by even in many uniformed professions around the world. (Where they are not, it seems to be mostly around safety concerns — turbans not stopping bullets as well as helmets).
Right and wrong?
In the west, nuns escape scrutiny with barely a wimple (ho, ho); meanwhile, teenaged Asian muslim girls are having to lobby for changes in basketball rules to allow them to wear their hijabs.
How can we decide that muslim women in the west are forced to wear the hijab? We can legislate against abuse, we can legislate that everyone should have the freedom to choose what they wear, but what constitutes “forced” when there is no overt compulsion? As one journalist for France Soir put it, who’s to say that “wearing a thong”, or other uncomfortable lingerie, isn’t a free choice for French women but “an example of bowing to men’s deisres”. Or, back to religious compulsion, are Jews (and muslims) unacceptably prevented from eating pork because it is forbidden by their leaders?
But what French president Nicolas Sarkozy has come out against is the niqab (full veil), which I think is a different matter. Sarkozy told the French parliament that face coverings threatened the republic’s secular values and sexual equality.
Those are not the arguments to me. Sexual equality is already protected: provided a woman makes the choice herself, she should have the liberté to wear a veil. The question of choice needs to be decided on individual cases, not a blanket assertion that every woman who wears a niqab has been forced to do so.
I am also squarely behind secular values but there must be tolerance: is a veil more offensively religious than a Jesus fish on a car, a shtreimel, or a steeple towering over a neighbourhood? If religious attire threatens secular values then surely so do religious symbols and, even more so, buildings. This is something Sarkozy would need to take up with the Pope also, not just the tiny minority of niqabi.
The question to me is around the freedoms of those of us not wearing a veil. More than half of human communication involves body language, much of it in the face. It is confronting, even frightening, to try to communicate with a mask, hence the place of hockey and other masks in films like Friday 13th, Scream and Silence of the Lambs. Humans are animals and many of our responses are hardwired. We know, for instance, that a person’s blood pressure will rise if they’re seated with their back to a door — because they can’t see possible danger approaching. Similarly, we scan faces for aggression and signs of danger. You can’t do that if the face is covered.
The other day I took a flyer from a man on the street wearing a mask with a smile on it. I took the flyer because the man smiled at me. It wasn’t until I’d gone a few steps past that I realised he hadn’t smiled: I had responsed to the mask and I had no idea of the real emotion behind it. Our interaction was unequal and false.
Senior judges in the UK have said full veils should not be worn in court. Judges have to assess the credibility of witnesses. How can that be done behind a veil? Jack Straw, a British MP, currently Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, asks female constituents to remove their veil when visiting his surgery. He spoke to the BBC about the impact he thought veils could have in a society where watching facial expressions was important for contact between different people.
“What I’ve been struck by when I’ve been talking to some of the ladies concerned is that they had not, I think, been fully aware of the potential in terms of community relations,” he said. “I mean, they’d thought of it just as a statement for themselves.” — Jack Straw, MP.
I, too, feel that’s something that must be borne in mind by those who exercise a freedom to wear the veil. Their choice affects others and those others should have an equal freedom, a freedom to decline to interact with those who are not openly communicating with them because they are masked.
If we are respecting choice, we must at best give as much weight to secular choices as to religious ones.
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