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Abstract
Following the successful campaign to have the burqa and niqab banned from public use in France, and the continuing advocacy to have these garments banned in other Western liberal societies, I examine whether the two strongest challenges to the burqa and niqab succeed in justifying a ban on these forms of veil. Although I argue that they both fail in supporting a ban, the fact that some Muslim women may be coerced into full veiling gives liberal states a moral duty to interfere. In the light of this, I propose a comprehensive approach, which is better suited to ensure that the necessary conditions are in place for Muslim women to be the authors of their own lives.
Notes
1. Although both veils conceal women's faces, they are of different styles and used in different parts of the world. During the essay I will use the word burqa to refer to both the burqa and the niqab. Veiling here will only refer to the garments that fully conceal women's faces. Hence, the hijab (or headscarf) will not be examined.
2. I write from the perspective of liberal states, and so will focus solely on whether these states have a moral case for banning the burqa. Illiberal states are outside this discussion not because their policies on women's clothing are morally irrelevant, but because at this stage the decision to have the burqa banned in France (and the possibility of similar restrictions in other European countries) strike me as being in direct conflict with the expected aims of the liberal state: to protect one's autonomy to profess their metaphysical commitments as they see fit. To question the illiberal state's ability to impose a dress code on its citizens is to question its very legitimacy, something which is outside the scope of this paper.
3. In this paper I refer to Muslims as those citizens of a liberal state who adhere to Islam. By focusing on their religious commitments, I do not mean to deny that they differ a great deal in other aspects of their lives, such as in their ethnicity, profession, level of income and so on.
4. In the quest for gender equality, some have endorsed Orientalism when engaging with non-Western women. This can be seen in the discourses around the hijab, polygamy, female circumcision and other non-Western cultural practices. Rather than understating the motivations behind those practices, some have adopted a discourse that assumes a moral inferiority on the part of non-Western men. For a discussion on gender and Orientalism, see Abu-Lughod (Citation2002: 783–790) and Hoodfar (Citation1992: 5–18).
5. It is well known that the Koran prescribes modesty, but not the actual burqa or niqab; see also Ruitenberga (Citation2008).
6. This point is important because debates on practices that negatively affect women often get diverted into empirical inquiries on whether a practice is prescribed by a specific religious narrative. The problem with this strategy is that it rests on the false assumption that a normative case against a religiously motivated practice is somewhat less legitimate.
7. I wish to thank the editor for calling my attention to this point.
8. Here I follow Haslanger in defining gender in terms of ‘women's subordinate position in systems of male dominance’ and oppression as a ‘structural phenomenon that positions certain groups as disadvantaged and others as advantaged or privileged in relation to them’ (Citation2000: 38–39). It is important to add that although women in general experience oppression in virtue of their gender, this system of male domination affects women differently depending on other relevant features of their identities (i.e. nationality, migration status, disability status, sexuality, marital status, HIV-AIDS status, profession and most notably race).
9. Important to note here is a distinction between erotica and pornography. While the latter involves the subordination of women, the former involves explicit and arousing sexual material where both men and women are portrayed as equally deserving of moral respect.
10. It seems plausible to argue that unveiling for the purposes of identification is a burden that society can reasonably place on women who wear the burqa. This is not because the needs of the citizenry outweigh the interests of Muslim women, but rather because everybody, including Muslim women, has an interest in the institutional apparatus of the state. Hence, while it would be certainly wrong for the state to (say) arbitrarily arrest Muslim women in order to provide security to the general public, it is not wrong to ask them to comply, just like everybody else, with the identification mechanisms in place. This is because one's choice of clothing for religious, cultural or aesthetic reasons can at times be overridden by a more pressing social concern. For instance, a general law that makes it obligatory that motorcycle riders wear a helmet imposes a greater burden on Sikhs than it does to non-Sihks, but it does not treat Sikhs as pure means to the ends of others – it treats them with respect because they too have an interest in road safety.
11. The effectiveness of this sort of negative communication in a liberal society is, of course, contingent on the intercultural relations in place. If other members of society have a more accurate understanding of Islam, then this communication would arguably be less persuasive.
12. Choices often involve costs; all social actors have to negotiate their place in the world by making choices that are burdensome. Coercion, however, involves a type of cost that is unacceptable, which is either to do something against one's will or to be punished. Now, none of this is to say that Muslim women incur no costs when ‘choosing’ to veil. Quite the opposite, gendered practices inevitably impose costs on women, regardless of what they ultimately choose. This is why one of the most important tasks of the feminist movement is to ensure that the world in which we live does not impose arbitrary costs on women, simply by virtue of their gender. But to argue that Muslim women are not autonomous because they bear costs either way is to confuse actual coercion with costs we bear by choosing certain things in life. Autonomy is about having the freedom to choose (even though there are costs to be born). To talk about autonomy only when costs are non-existent is to talk about a status quo that will never be realised, since it is part of human condition to negotiate competing interests, demands and societal/cultural pressures as we go about life.
13. The question of whether young girls have similar claims on the liberal state when they are forced by their parents into wearing the burqa is more complex, since young girls lack the cognitive capacity to make autonomous choices in such cultural and religious matters. This question is therefore outside the remit of this article.
14. Like with broader issues relating to domestic violence, the state must create the appropriate procedures to verify claims of coercion. I do not mean to deny that there are technical difficulties in establishing whether women are being coerced or not, but they are by no means insurmountable, and if the state is indeed serious about protecting women, it should do what it can to protect them from cultural coercion in particular and domestic violence at large.
15. Ability to choose is necessary but not sufficient for gender equality. For a society to truly empower women, we need them to be equally responsible for the civil liberties, social resources and public institutions that allow for choice to be made. And here we find an important caveat to this discussion; we need women's political participation to increase so that women's choices are made in a context that truly takes their needs and interests into account.