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A muslim's opinion-piece on the burkini-controversy: Both sides are wrong. (long article)
Last edited Fri Aug 26, 2016, 10:32 AM - Edit history (1)
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/25/both-sides-are-wrong-in-the-burkini-wars.htmlWomen should be able to wear what they want, without armed cops telling them to change. But let’s be clear: The ‘modesty’ of the burkini is dictated by men, too.
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The burkini is, in fact, a sad symbol of Islam today going backward on gender issues. France’s ban on it is a sad symbol of liberalism today going backward in reply.
Classical liberals of any religion or none would do well to remember that this does not have to be a zero-sum game. It is possible to oppose the French ban on burkinis while also challenging the mindset of those who support burkas and burkinis.
As a reforming secular liberal Muslim, I do not endorse the gender-discriminatory body-shaming and moralizing of burkas. I recoil, too, at the silly idea of a burkini. But I also believe that France’s ban on them is ridiculous, illiberal, and incredibly petty. It is also cynical.
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In modern Muslim-majority contexts and up until the 1970s, the female body was not shamed out of public view. As one Egyptian feminist asserts, this was mainly due to the social dominance of the relatively liberal, middle-class elite in urban centers.
But throughout the ’80s, theocratic Islamism began replacing Arab socialism as the ideology of resistance against “the West.” As is always the case with misogynist dogma, the war against the “other” necessitated defining what is “ours” and what is “theirs”—and our women, of course, were deemed “ours.”
Suddenly, women’s bodies became the red line in a cultural war against the West started by theocratic Islamism. A Not Muslim Enough charade was used to identity “true” Muslims against “Western” stooges. Religious dress codes became a crucial marker in these cultural purity stakes. Only the fanatic can ever win in this Not Muslim Enough game. Any uncovered woman was now deemed loose, decadent, and attention seeking.
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The more women succumb to this Not Muslim Enough charade, the more theocrats demand of them.
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But the assumption that “modesty” equates to covering up is a subtle form of bigotry against the female form.
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Just like any other practice rooted in religiously inspired misogyny, the burkini cannot be detached from the body-shaming tied to its origins. Aheda Zanetti continued to insist that her product is “about not being judged” as a Muslim woman, yet she is wedded to a practice that inextricably judges the female form as being “immodest,” as she, too, did in her own piece.
“I don’t think any man should worry about how women are dressing,” she argued.
OK. But it has only ever been conservative-religious Muslim men telling Muslim women how to dress.
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Let Muslim women wear bikinis or burkinis. Liberal societies have no business in legally interfering with the dress choices women make.
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I ask only that secular liberal Muslims are also supported in challenging our very own “Quran Belt” emerging in Europe.
This is the real struggle. It is intellectual and it is cultural, more than it is legal.
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As I tried to say here on DU: The burkini-controversy cannot be untied from the misogyny that this piece of fashion symbolizes.
How do you stop women from wearing fashion that was created by men who think of women primarily as sex-objects?
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