Random Variable

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a debate on formally entitled “is the burqa a threat to freedom,” with staffers from the Quilliam Foundation (speaking in a personal capacity in a devil’s advocate role), although the debate largely centred on the merits of banning the item of clothing.

Naturally, I took the position of being against a ban on the burqa, and in my mind, this definitely seems like the easier case to make from within the liberal tradition. Of course, the easy argument is to privilege the understanding of liberty based upon non-interference from the state. However, this simple framing doesn’t adequately deal with the internal minority problem – that of the interference with the lives of individuals from parents, community, cultural moirés etc… I wanted to take more seriously this issue, and for that I turned to Cecile Laborde’s Critical Republicanism. Her starting point is a more vigorous understanding of freedom as a state of non-domination.

Olivier Roy lays out the case made against the Anglophone liberal position on the veil:

“A young girl wearing a veil is necessarily manipulated, and the paradox is that we repress her the better to liberate her: since the veil is a sign of enslavement, a woman could not possibly choose it voluntarily. The same reasoning drove the French Revolution to prohibit religious orders, because a free person could not voluntarily alienate his own freedom.”

For Laborde, such a position is too paternalistic, and is in itself a violation of freedom. Laborde relies on Philip Pettit’s two types of freedom to make the case – freedom from domination by the state, imperium, and freedom from domination by other collective actors, dominium. Only the individual can emancipate themselves from conditions of domination. They may be empowered to emancipate themselves, but in the case of the veil, at least if we buy into the concept of self-emancipation, we cannot simultaneously justify coercing girls into behaving “autonomously”.

The other major problem with the above hard-line secularist approach, is that it ignores the consequences of banning the burqa, which in France has meant excluding Muslim girls from schools. Although exclusion remains the sanction of last resort, this forms a rather cruel and unusual punishment for what is essentially the wearing of an item of clothing. Scores of otherwise well-behaved, studious pupils are now having to learn at home, a sign that the very gender inequality that the ban sought to combat is perpetuated by the very act that is done in the name of women. Hard-line secularists don’t pause to consider that although the burqa is a religious symbol, making rules regarding it affects actual people.

The core of the opposing argument seemed to rest on the issue that those who wear the burqa come from communities who wilfully choose not to integrate with the mainstream, and want to live in ghettos. This seemed to me a complete internalisation of white majority concerns about ethnic minorities, and perhaps more importantly, that of the growing visibility of Muslims. It’s built on the myth that we live in a non-discriminatory “post-racial” society, the falsity of which has been drawn into sharp relief by the controversy over the “ground zero mosque.”

Again, Laborde refers to civic virtue and Jerry Cohen’s idea that citizens can only act justly in a just society, and asks how can we force Muslims to reform when the underlying structural conditions of segregation continue to exist. We can’t separate ghettoization from issues of white flight, poor and/or inappropriate public service provision, and socioeconomic class. Furthermore, Olivier Roy argues that by making secularism into a repressive device, we put religion at the centre of the debate and make it an effective alternative to the entire political order. As the agenda setters make Islam the dominant marker of disaffected youth, secular Muslims get left aside. Islam is then seen as a post-cultural transcendent ideology that affirms a sense of identity and protest at social injustice.

Another key argument of the opposition was that the burqa is necessarily a means of oppression. But is it? For example, Saba Mahmood’s anthropological study of the Cairo women’s piety movement found that women don the veil as part of a constructive project to develop an assertively Muslim identity that is often set against the wishes of wayward husbands and often abusive families (even in a country where there’s a lot more pressure to wear the veil). Yet hard-line secularists equate the hijab with forced marriage – one is an obviously non-voluntary practice, the other is not obviously so. Secularists may then argue that women who nevertheless voluntarily wear the veil do so because of oppressive social norms that have been internalised. But why single out the veil in particular as a form of false consciousness? Muslim women are right to assert that media-driven norms of the sexualisation of womanhood represent equally oppressive norms.

So, what to do?

We shouldn’t ban the veil, since this an intervention that is paternalistic, and cannot be justified on the grounds of autonomy. At most, all we can do is to further the autonomy of individuals in order that they can make choices that they can lead authentic lives commensurate with their deepest held beliefs. And the best way to do this is through an education system that maximises the ability of children to gain the skills to lead an autonomous life. In this sense, as Laborde points out, an outright ban would be self-defeating. Forcing girls who wear the veil out of schools takes them away precisely from the institutions that are best able to equip them with the skills by which they may choose to emancipate themselves from the effects of patriarchal norms. As Carl Packman said on the day, citing Alain Badiou, criminalising women who wear the burqa is much like criminalising victims of rape.