Asa feminist what do you think about the burkha/niqab, liberating or oppressive?

Anne im trying to not justify myself and leave myself out of the conversation....

am i failing miserably?

i would say leering at either sex is disrespectful.

LWR Read again Riven's comment about there being 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide. You can't just quote an article by one women as if to say "See, that proves my point (or rather justifies my prejudices)".

There is always a dynamic to these threads that I find deeply unsettling. The demands for Muslim women present to explain/justify themselves, the then finding excuses to discount what we have to say anyway, the cherry picking of quotes to bolster previously held prejudices, the fact that they always end with the non-Muslim women congratulating themselves on how enlightening they are...

Sorry - meant sleeveless.

There are loads of Mn threads about women leering at underdressed men. Is that disrespectful? There was a thread about a shirtless man at the school gate - he was variously mocked and reviled, though a few people said 'chill out'.

oh and long wearing niqaab invites more criticism then it prevents, it is not the norm in the majority of muslim communities and many south asian families find it embarassing and hard to accept or understand, and constantly criticize their dds for wearing it.

i can recognise sisters in niqaab walking down the street.

long im talking about in the uk environment amongst other youngish people ie teens to mid 30s, so im not sure that would be considered an environment where women conventionally dont speak up? and in south asian communities women dominate a lot of the affairs, although , as in the majority of societies, they also face culturally specific oppression.

toot whatever way you look at it, those leering men are disrespectful and that is not justifiable.

slug i wouldnt agree that women in uk wear niqaab as a response to leering male behaviour? and why cant you wear niqaab and at the same time confront? like i said the niqaabis i know are very vocal, and are likely to stand up for a women they see being made uncomfortable by men around them on bus/train/ road etc, and challenge the behaviour with words?

TootAndCommon I live in Morocco, I wear short sleeves (tho not sleeveless) most of the year round. Enough Moroccan women do the same for me to feel that I am not under-dressed by local standards. Being leered at by some (not all!) men here has less to do with what individual women wear, than with a very skewed view on the part of some men, regarding women in general, and assumptions about the sexual freedom supposedly enjoyed by western women in particular.

slug Exactly!

Slug - Yes, that is true.

And she may well feel liberated but true liberation will depend on easily accessible contraception, equal opportunities in all sorts of arena, an equitable justice system - and cultural factors. Just as it does for a woman not wearing a veil. And if those other wider and genuine freedoms are available, the bit of cloth itself, when worn according to free will, ceases to be oppressive per se.

I was interested in a thread a few weeks ago from a woman wondering what clothing to wear in Morocco. Lots of posters said how awful it was when they wore short sleeves etc to be leered at, and talked a lot about the disrespect of men looking at them. Nothing about the disrespect of appearing under-dressed accordong to the cultural norm.

TootandCommon my only problem with this comment

If a woman is forced to wear a bit of cloth, she is being opressed. If a woman chooses to wear a bit of cloth she may well feel herself liberated against other behaviousr - leering etc.

is that if she chooses to avoid unacceptable male behaviour by hiding from it, then it reinforces the idea that male bad behaviour is the norm and not something to be challenged. Surely it is far better in the long term for all of us to confront inappropriate behaviour and change it rather than to hide from it and let it continue?

nailak Thank you for your reply.

many of the women i know who wear niqaab are very active in the public sphere, and many muslim men, mostly the younger ones dont think of sisters who wear niqaab as invisible, as they still have a voice and are not afraid of using it.

Does the fact that they are wearing niqab by any chance actually give them more "authority" to speak up, at least in an environment where women have conventionally not had much of a voice in public? Are they in some way placing themselves beyond criticism by making their commitment to a certain view of religion so visible?

The burkha is a bit of cloth. It is attitudes, behaviour and laws which are oppressive, not a bit of cloth.

If a woman is forced to wear a bit of cloth, she is being opressed. If a woman chooses to wear a bit of cloth she may well feel herself liberated against other behaviousr - leering etc.

nailak, all of these niqab-wearing women you talk of may be active in the public sphere, but no matter how active they are, they are still functionally invisible if they are unrecognisable as they walk down the street. I know you will protest otherwise, but it is extremely hard to recognise someone when you cannot see their face, and their body shape and gait are concealed by clothing designed for that purpose.

It's a shame that so many look to God to dictate how they behave, that sexuality (all) is shameful and men cannot be trusted. Makes me think that people believe in a God that has no faith in people.

where i live you get competitive 'my daughers are more pious than yours' so they have to cover up even though they are 4/5 years old

darling, all the muslims in the uk that i know that wear niqaab, convert or not, did so against the wishes of their families and communities. in south asian cultures, which make up the most muslims in the uk, it is not a normal thing to do.

i do not wear niqaab. i do not see the necessity.
i think that if the school girl felt that strongly and she wasnt allowed to wear it at school, she should have considered alternative schooling such as home ed, there are large muslim home ed networks.

there are different intepretations of Quran and hadith.

long way i would accept your last point to be true. some muslim men do make unfounded and ignorant assumptions about those who do not cover, and stupidly can think that the commandment to lower their gaze doesnt apply.

lets consider secularization as a response to modernization. initially, due to secularization religious observance declined, but then due to consumerism and market choice which also applied to the realm of spiritual beliefs, religious or spiritual adherence stopped declining but took on different forms, so we observe a rise in paganism, wicca, celtic or new age religions, which followers would say are a continuation of an ancient, or older belief system, we see a rise in pentecostal and evangelical christianity, and we see an islamic revival.

this islamic revival could be seen as similar to celtic, aspirational indianism, or paganism as these women choose to adhere to a historical spiritual tradition of their region?

as for the invisibility of women once they enter the public sphere, i agree this has been the case, but i dont think it has to be. many of the women i know who wear niqaab are very active in the public sphere, and many muslim men, mostly the younger ones dont think of sisters who wear niqaab as invisible, as they still have a voice and are not afraid of using it. the older generation traditionally dont listen to anything the younger generation have to say, if it be about niqaab, or if their daughter/son wants to marry a different ethnicity etc and uses islam to demonstrate the permissibility of this, they still think they know better.

Thanks for that, Cote D'Azur.

I take your point about competitiveness. So it basically boils down to typical human nature. Muslims I have known in real life have told me that the quran is a clear book, so you would have thought god would have included the detail if he wanted to! It also makes me wonder how it can be so open to interpretation if it is such a clear book, but that is another issue entirely.

If I remember correctly, you are of Turkish origin? I bring it up as I notice that the Muslim women in this area, all ethnic Turks, have been wearing the headscarf more and more. When I first came here, you hardly ever saw a veil, now it is commonplace. Has this become a trend in Turkey too?

On your last point, I am rather tempted to hope that no religion will survive that much longer with all the trouble they cause!

CoteDAzur I love the expression "competitive subservience". I've seen it in operation among DH's nieces. Though not all of them, thankfully. Some of them actually read the religious texts and ask where the others are getting these ideas from. :)

LWR. Completely agree, I fear for my DSs when they enter secondary school, instantly some of the girls will have prejudice against them as white males.

This morning I read an op-ed piece in a Moroccan weekly by a woman journalist who was worrying about the increasing number of teenage girls wearing the headscarf. This seemed to her to be negating the progress made by Arab women, in which rejection of the veil or headscarf played a large part: think of the symbolic force of Huda Shaarawi removing the veil on returning to Egypt from a congress of the Women's International Suffrage Alliance in 1923, or Lalla Aicha, daughter of Sultan Mohamed V of Morocco, appearing in public without her hair covered to give a speech on women's education in Tangiers in 1947.
So women like this journalist are afraid that their own daughers will find themselves back in a way of life that women have only recently escaped from, just in the past couple of generations. If women are supposed to be invisible as soon as they enter the public sphere, it is easy to refuse to take them seriously.
So for many older women, who were themselves delighted to get rid of the restrictions of headscarf or veil, it is hard to understand why girls should choose now to adopt these clothes. There seem to be several reasons. The religious reason is one, but it is actually very dubious, given that neither the Quran or the hadith provide clear indication that women should cover their hair or their face, and very many believing Muslim women feel no need to do so. Another is that it simply a fashion copied from the Middle East. And finally there is the perception that girls and women who wear the headscarf or full veil are less subject to insults from men in public.
Which brings me to the reason which I feel uncomfortable about the veil and headscarf: what does this say about men? What are women thinking about men if they feel they need to cover up so much in front of them? And what assumptions are men making about women who do not cover their hair and even their face?

alexpoli - re "If the quran doesn't require it..."

Quran definitely doesn't require covering faces. There are such detailed instructions on this subject, that God wanted women's faces to be covered, he would have just added it to the list.

"...then what makes these women think that god will look on them more favorably if they cover their faces?"

It's competitive subservience a la "He says modesty is good. He says covering head and bosom is better. Therefore I will be bestest if I cover up everything"

" I thought that stoning (for adultery?) and the amputation of the hand for theft was an accepted punishment in Islam."

Stoning is definitely not part of Islam, for the simple reason that it is mentioned nowhere in the Quran and even contradicts the punishment for adultery in the Quran (100 lashes).

Cutting hands for theft is unfortunately in the Quran so part of Islam, but this practice has thankfully been abandoned in many Muslim countries.

All this is like the Inquisition of Christianity in the Dark Ages. Bible has a single sentence saying "Suffer not a witch to live, and tens of thousands of women are executed for having a cat or a mole on their faces. Christianity survive the Dark Ages and Islam will survive these days of fundamentalist interpretation of the Quran.

I don't think native English converts' views & choices are representative of the majority of female Muslim population in the UK.