Photograph by Christopher Furlong for Getty Images (MSNBC, “Dutch government seeks to ban full-length veils”, November 17, 2006).

The Muslim Canadian Congress, led by prominent author and the organization’s founder Tarek Fatah, have called on Ottawa to ban the wearing of the burqa in public. They believe that the freedom to wear it as guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms contradicts the inherent right to gender equality. This organization is not to be confused with the Canadian Islamic Congress, a religiously strict group best known for frequent Human Rights Complainant Mohamed El-masry, the past President there.

“The burka has absolutely no place in Canada,” said Farzana Hassan, of the Muslim Canadian Congress. “In Canada we recognize the equality of men and women. We want to recognize gender equality as an absolute. The burka marginalizes women.”

Although some Muslims argue that the full covering of the face is a personal choice, others believe that it’s being coerced by their family members. This becomes essentially a denial of their Charter Right to equality in Canada. The Muslim Canadian Congress argues that there is no compulsion within Islam or the Qu’ran to wear the burqa, which has become more a political symbol of oppression than a piety. They are asking for a ban of what they call “masks”, in either form of the Niqab or the Burqa. This follows a Fatwah issued recently in Egypt calling for the same thing.

As Tarek Fatah explained in his op-ed in the National Post, the burqa has a troubled tradition within Islamic society. Its associations with the religion only seem to originate from Saudi Arabia, which has since exported the extremist “Wahhabist” sect of the religion. For proof of this, Mr.Fatah goes directly to the source, the grand mosque in Mecca, pointing out that for 1,400 years women have been prohibited from covering their faces there.

Some would argue that the burqa is a cultural aspect that a tolerant nation like Canada should accept. But if the burqa can indeed be deemed a symbol of political and religious misogyny, is that not like condoning polygamy and slavery as well? Mr.Fatah questions why some immigrants would want to come to a socially liberal nation like Canada, yet continue to live as though they still existed in a Wahabbist society where they would clearly be more comfortable.

My own belief is that a concentrated effort to ban the burqa and niqab could not only fail, but even backfire. Young Muslims in Canada will be more likely to be exposed to our socially liberal society to such an extent that they will eventually shun such garments, and this likelihood increases with each successive generation. Some young Muslims may even choose to wear the burqa as a form of “rebellion” against western calls for a ban, instead of allowing them to come to their own conclusions about how socially restrictive and alienating it can be to them.

Ultimately, however, it is a good thing that it is Muslims who are discussing these changes within their own circles. It brings far more credence to the call to ban the burqa than having people like myself, a Canadian-born non-Muslim, try to impose these decisions upon them.

Related

While searching for the obligatory Burqa photograph, I stumbled across this rather brilliant short essay on “unveiling the human“. It should be read in it’s entirety, but some snippets that resonated with me :

It is so elemental, so purely visual, that language seems completely unnecessary. We see a woman seeing, with almost every other thing about her obliterated to blackness. We see only her eyes, the “window of the soul,” and that through a slit, as if she were looking out of a crack in a prison wall. She looks out intently, as if seeing through that narrow aperture were as necessary as breathing.

[...]

There are many uses for a photograph, and images of the burqa are proliferating in the mainstream media. The easy point to make is that they are fodder in a propaganda war in a supposed clash of civilizations. I think more is going on, not least the visualization of interesting problems within liberalism.

[...]

I think the value of the [burqa] is not how it reveals anything about a particular woman or women behind the veil, but how it challenges those looking in.

Posted in canada Tagged: burqa, islam, Muslim Canadian Congress, Tarek Fatah, Wahhabist