Image via sriks6711.
The burqa is back in the spotlight on both an international and local scale this month. The French Lower House has passed a ban on the wearing of the full Islamic niqab and Heard and not Seen, at the Birmingham Musuem and Art Gallery, sparked controversy in the Daily Mail and Telegraph for its experimental approach to the issues of community integration, Islam and violent extremism.
In The Guardian, Madeleine Bunting points out that there is something disproportionate about the response of the French government to the burqa and niqab, which they perceive as a threat to national culture. It’s only worn by approx 2000 women in France, it’s not advocated by most Muslims and the idea that it is forced on women depends largely on Western theories of choice and liberation. The issue of course is not clothing – it is the symbolic weight that the burqa and niqab bear. The values of the wearer are positioned opposite to the particular breed of French secularism that the country holds dear.
There is, as the cartoon above shows, a lack of complexity in public discourse about Islamic dress. It is framed either as a totally free choice (though there is rarely such a thing) or as an imposition by men/religion/culture. In France the government has based their decision on the latter (It’s harder to justify liberating somebody who already thinks they are liberated.) This just seems wilfully ignorant. Yes there are women who wear it to disengage from public life, but there are more and more young women who wear it as a positive statement of their identity – as a way of inhabiting public space as a Muslim woman, an identity that has typically not been seen/heard. For Western, secular democracies such as France, the idea that a woman might not want to be looked at, checked out, subject to the gaze of men or others, runs counter to the ideal of sexual/religious/ethnic equality that form the backbone of public discourse.
With Heard and Not Seen, Friction Arts tried to engender some kind of self-reflection and questioning. They invited visitors to step inside a small installation draped in black fabric with a small window to see through, surrounded by a soundtrack of women explaining why they choose to wear a burqa. But using conceptual art installations as a medium immediately takes this issue out of the realm of the everyday and risks alienating the very people they are trying to reach, who are already dismissing the project as a waste of public money. Take for example this indicment of the show by John Midlgley, co-founder of the Campaign Against Political Correctness, who said: “The exhibition is a patronising waste of public money. This is going to do little to tackle extremism and bring about social cohesion within communities across Birmingham, and it has been done in the name of political correctness it seems to be potentially counter-productive.”
If people like this were willing to engage perhaps it would go some way to bringing about mutual understanding (or at least critical debate), but there is a saddening lack of outreach work and genuine attempts to engage people in everyday conversations about this topic. Rather than debating whether we should ban the burqa/niqab or whether or not it is oppressive, better starting points for our conversations would be questioning why women choose to wear them, what would make them feel that they didn’t need to, whether there can be a compromise regarding public and private space. This kind of consultation doesn’t seem to have happened in France, and the recent ban is damning evidence of it.
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