Is banning the burqa compatible with freedom and democracy?

Monday February 1, 2010

We may not be comfortable with the choices people make, says Karen McTigue, but we must protect their right to make them

The war on the burqa continues with UKIP party leader Lord Pearson declaring that “We are not Muslim-bashing, but this [the wearing of the burqa] is incompatible with Britain’s values of freedom and democracy.”

Thus UKIP joins the debate (somewhat tardily), and not in the way one would have hoped for a supposedly libertarian, modern party. Whatever ones personal feelings about whether one is comfortable looking at a person wearing a burqa, surely an outright ban on an item of clothing is not a policy to be endorsed by any forward thinking citizen.

If the Sarkozy sanctions gain any further ground, it is rather our duty to berate our nearest neighbour, than follow doggedly in their footsteps. Historically of course the French political system is fiercely anti-clerical – as Dominic Lawson points out in The Times – and even the low estimate of five per cent of the French populace who wear the burqa presents too great an anti-citizenship notion for the state to tolerate.
 
“(The French) regarding religion as something that has no place whatever in the public realm. That is not the British way; we evolved — not least as a result of our own historical experience — a much more tolerant approach to open expressions of religious difference, which can be summarised by the phrase “live and let live”.
 
And yet, and yet – our own justice secretary has expressed his view that he is ‘uncomfortable’ meeting a constituent who is wearing the burqa. The discomfort, one assumes, is more that the interviewee perhaps wields the balance of power by virtue of being judged by speech alone, rather than appearance. How much the wearing of the burqa is a dictat handed down by paternal religious infrastructures, and how much is a personal bid for freedom from the Western obsession with the body beautiful is an incalculable measure.

However we can not accept that it is the state’s place to intervene into the private lives of it’s populace – our clothes, our headcoverings, our outward appearances, are most definitely our choices, and possibly (recalling some personal wardrobe misdemeanours) our mistakes to make.
 
Vicky Woods writes in the Daily Telegraph (22 January) on the continuing saga;
 
“The French National Assembly appears to be teetering towards an absolute ban on what the French call the “burqa. The French “burqa” is what we call a niqab, the nunlike skullcap and tight scarf over chin and neck, leaving a half-inch slit for the eyes. Niqabs are what Jack Straw notoriously complained about, in his Blackburn surgery.

“Masked faces made him uncomfortable, he said; he would have been more comfortable if the ladies slipped the veils off. Fair enough. But I’ve met a few men in my time who have wondered if perhaps I mightn’t like to remove items of clothing so we can all feel more comfortable. Mostly, reader, I kept ‘em on.”
 
Worryingly there are also words of support for the ban coming from further afield, Egypt and Turkey are debating the issue as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown comments in the Independent.
 
“Here, we are reassured, such a ban would be impossible. OK, the bonkers UKIP lot and rabid BNP bang on about it; noisy nuisances, easily ignored. Liberals say it just isn’t British to prohibit and limit the personal choices of freeborn citizens. Really? The British never accept any curtailment of individual preferences?

“So how has it come to pass that in this green and free land, we have more state surveillance and imposed restrictions and regulations than any other EU country ? Why, we can’t even take snaps in the streets without a hand of authority falling on the shoulder. Could it be that authoritarianism is not resisted because the British are naturally obedient, following social rules and legal sanctions?

“From queuing, to drink-drive laws, most of us do what is expected. We surrender personal autonomy, sometimes for reasons that are clearly for the greater good – the anti-smoking laws – and sometimes because our rulers, like all rulers, wish to grab more power.”
 
Egypt and Turkey are not alone. Suzy Jagger in the Times notes that “In Denmark, Conservatives in the coalition government have demanded a ban on the burqa and the niqab in public. In October 2009 the Muslim Canadian Congress called for a ban on the burqa and the niqab, arguing that they have “no basis in Islam”.”
 
We are still able to fight the case if an employee in the UK is asked to remove a Christian crucifix, a Kabbalah bracelet or other religious identifier, and we must still retain the ability to decry any further intrusion into what is not our, or rather – the state’s, business. We may not be ‘comfortable’ with the choices people make, but we must at all costs protect their right to make them.

As usual Orwell says it best – “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”.