A Question of (In)Security?

A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Islam, in the shape of the veil.

Mehdi Hasan, of the New Statesman, argues that nothing seems to provoke more suspicion of Europe’s 15 million Muslims than the face veil worn by a tiny minority of Muslim women.

In recent months, several European governments have begun to legislate restrictions on the niqab, a face veil that leaves the area around the eyes clear and is usually complemented with a full body covering.

The widely regurgitated argument by policymakers is the “national security” card and then the vacuous use of assimilation is quickly bandied around to help mobilise support for this policy.

However, one can easily see this is more a question of identity, of the self and of the nation, and the unanswerable questions and insecurity that emanate from this. As Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe, how else can Christian Europe stem this 'scourge'?

In April of this year Belgium, despite the political upheavals afflicting the country, found the time to become the first European country to pass through legislation that imposes a nationwide ban on anyone wearing a full face veil in public.

In real terms, less than 0.01% of Belgium’s 600,000 Muslim population wear the veil, out of a total population of just under 11 million people. The chances of the average Belgian bumping into a niqab-clad woman is virtually zero.

So where’s the logic behind the ban?

The French security services estimate that 2,000 out of around 2 million adult Muslim women in France wear the full face veil, of which a third of whom are thought to be converts to Islam.

Yet despite these lowly figures the French government have acted swiftly to impose bans on the face veil and have been extremely vocal in expressing their vitriolic sentiments, with President Nicolas Sarkozy declaring the burqa is “not welcome” in France and denouncing it as a symbol of female “subservience and debasement”.

In France, the fine for those that flout the new law will be €150 for a first time offender and a man who is found to have forced a woman to wear a full-length veil by “threats and/or violence” will be punished with a €15,000 fine and could face imprisonment.

This and Sarkozy’s comments are particularly revealing.

The idea that millions of Muslim women are being forced into wearing a piece of cloth to cover their faces is nothing but an erroneous belief that is not supported by a shred of empirical evidence.

However, the idea that the white man, and only the white man, can save and liberate the mysterious exotic woman from the depraved heresy of the barbaric savages and the uncivilised primitively-minded men of the East, with their fine clothes and enlightened beliefs is nothing more than an extension of colonialism. As this is consistent with traditional imperialist thought.

Then we come to the contradiction of punishing and criminalising women for choosing to maintain their modesty with a single piece of cloth to cover their faces. Which is, indeed, ironic and paradoxical, using the threat of prison to free women from the seemingly imprisonment of the burqa is illogical and lacks reason.

In Britain, numerous parliamentarians have publicly stated that they would refuse to see women wearing a face veil within their respective surgeries.

One M.P. went as far as to say that he would tell the woman to go home and correspond with him via another medium. Despite tending to ones constituents being a parliamentary duty.

So much for secular and pluralist societies safeguarding the wants and needs and protecting the rights of minority groups.

The champions of fear and hate within Western societies argue that Islam is, and has always been, a threat to enlightened democratic societies of this world. The dominant fallacy is that practitioners of Islam are nothing more than divisive misogynistic parasites hell-bent on destabilizing freethinking liberal Western democracies from within.

Note the type of language used to describe either group. Which is, of course, nothing new. They can easily be found in the much-lauded works of Lewis, Naipaul, Huntington and Hitchens to name but few.

One could argue that this pervasive fear of Islam is merely notional. If Islam was this monolithic beast blinded by rage and feeds on the blood of non-Muslims, namely Westerners, where was this beast in the 50 years between the end of the Second World War and the collapse of the Berlin Wall?

Broadcasters and human rights organisations the world over have denounced the policy of banning of the veil as being fuelled by the ignorance of racism and Islamophobic by design. Which go against the norms of a supposed progressive society.

Unfortunately in this post 9/11 era these attitudes expressed of Islam and Muslims have become commonplace.

In spite of this, the ‘straw man argument’ put forward by proponents of this ban must be debunked in order to preserve the tolerant nature of our society.