Challenging times for veiled women in Europe & U.S.
(Continued page two)
Anti-veil sentiment in Europe
It has been particularly in France where an estimated eight per cent of the population is Muslim that the veil has provoked intense public debate.
France has passed two laws on the veil, one in 2004 banning the wearing of the veil in public elementary and secondary schools, and another in 2011 banning the wearing of full-face veils in public places, even though these are worn by only a tiny portion of the population. Many countries followed suite, including Holland, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Bulgaria and Austria, where prohibitions on religious symbols and full or partial bans on full-face veils were implemented.
The recent ECJ ruling allowing employers in the EU to oblige veiled women to take off their veils at work has been met with wide public acceptance in many European countries, including France where “83 per cent of French people” were in favour of the law, according to the UK Independent newspaper.
In an article entitled “French Muslims Say Veil Bans Gives Cover to Bias”, the New York Times said that in France “the head coverings of observant Muslim women, from colourful silk scarves to black chadors, have become one of the most potent flash points in the nation’s tense relations with its vibrant and growing Muslim population,” adding that “mainstream politicians continue to push for new measures to deny veiled women access to jobs, educational institutions and community life.”
“They often say they are doing so for the benefit of public order or in the name of laïcité, the French term for the separation of church and state,” the report went on. “But critics say these efforts, rather than promoting a sense of secular inclusion, have encouraged rampant discrimination against Muslims in general and veiled women in particular.”
Lean argues that the ECJ decision also “enforces conformity to so-called “Western values”. “But ‘Western’ values include religious freedom and individual civil liberties, which would mean that religious expressions of this sort should be encouraged, not discouraged,” Lean told the Weekly.
Critics of the law also wonder why politicians in France focus on the hijab when other issues related to women’s rights do not get the same level of public attention. According to a report published in the UK Independent newspaper entitled “Why is the Right of Muslim Women to Wear the Veil still so Controversial in France”, “in France, one woman dies every three days because of domestic violence, a woman is raped every eight minutes, the difference in pay between men and women is still 27 per cent, and some political parties would rather pay a fine than abide by the rule of gender parity in elections.”
“Why then waste all this energy on the hijab, a piece of fabric, a personal choice, that doesn’t harm or affect anyone,” the report queried. For Bleich, banning the wearing of the veil by women is a “risky step” because it “may increase integration in some instances, but it will increase feelings of isolation in others.”
Many veiled women living in Europe say that the focus on the hijab and the widening trend of enshrining anti-hijab sentiments into law on the part of politicians has not only affected them economically by denying them jobs, but has also made them targets of abuse by the public, ranging from looks of disdain, to being spat at, to incidents of hijab-pulling and even hate crimes.
The 2009 murder of veiled Egyptian pharmacist Marwa Al-Sherbini, who lost her life for no other reason than her religion in Dresden, Germany, at the hands of a Russian-German racist, will always be remembered as one of the most tragic hate crimes directed against veiled women in Europe. But these crimes seem to have increased since then.
“Following the terrorist atrocity in Paris on 13 November 2015, media outlets reported that the number of hate crimes against perceived Muslims had skyrocketed, particularly in France and Britain,” said a report by the United Nations University (UNU), the academic and research arm of the United Nations. “According to these media articles, the majority of victims were ‘visible’ Muslim women, particularly those wearing the veil.”
Tell Mama, an NGO which documents incidents of Islamophobia across the UK by collecting data independently and in collaboration with 15 police forces, also recorded a 326 per cent increase in anti-Muslim incidents on the streets of Britain in 2015. The organisation received direct reports of verbal and online harassment and abuse from more than 1,100 Muslims in the same year and collected details of a further 1,400 incidents recorded by the police.
Tell Mama said the greatest impact of anti-Muslim hatred was being felt by women, making up 61 per cent of all incidents recorded by the organisation. “75 per cent of all female victims had been easily identifiable as Muslims by wearing the hijab or the niqab,” it said.
The veil in the U.S.
Although there is no anti-hijab legislation in the US and freedom is deeply enshrined in the US constitution, Abdel-Sattar Ghazali, editor of the Journal America online magazine, says that anti-hijab sentiments are also on the rise in the US.
“No doubt the veil/hijab is provoking animosity against Muslim women,” Ghazali, who is also the author of Islam & Muslims in the Post-9/11 America (2014) and Islam & Muslims in the 21st Century (2017), said. “This animosity sometimes becomes violent.”
During Ramadan last June, veiled 17-year-old Nabra Hassanen of northern Virginia in the US was assaulted and killed as she walked home after prayers at a mosque near Washington. Police have charged 22-year-old Darwin Martinez Torres with her murder, but once again the murder shocked the local Muslim community which was still getting over the Chapel Hill hate crime in 2015 that claimed the lives of 23-year-old American-Syrian Muslim Deah Shaddy and his veiled bride 21-year-old Yusor Mohamed Abu Salha, together with Yusor’s veiled sister 19-year-old Razan. The three were shot dead in a “dispute over parking”, but their family has insisted that the murder was a hate crime motivated by the religious identity of the victims.
“The veil is rarely used by American Muslim women, but simply using the headscarf makes them the target of hate attacks,” Ghazali noted.
Ghazali further referred to another tragic incident occurring last May when two men were murdered while trying to stop a white supremacist from abusing two young Muslim women, one of them wearing a headscarf, in Portland, Oregon, as a case in point. He also referred to a series of chilling incidents of scarf-snatching across the US in public places and in schools.
According to the Pew Research Centre, a US public-opinion survey organisation, “rates of physical attacks on Muslims reached post-9/11 levels” in 2015 in the US, which it said were “spurred at least in part by the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who called for a ban on Muslim immigrants and tapped into a current of Islamophobia running throughout the country.”
A 2016 report by the newspaper USA Today revealed how over one week three women in one location in the US had been targeted because they were wearing the veil. “To protect themselves, some women are uncovering their hair,” the report said. “Others are buying pepper spray, applying for concealed carry permits, or taking self-defense classes.”
WHY ON THE RISE: According to the second annual European Islamophobia Report for 2016, a survey across the continent, “Muslims are seen as the enemy ‘within’. Thus, physical attacks and political restrictions can often be carried out and even defended in an atmosphere of wide distrust and enmity” in Europe.
Analysts mention the rise of terror attacks carried out by the Islamic State (IS) group in Europe and the US and the recent influx of immigrants from war-torn countries like Syria into Europe following the Arab Spring as reasons behind the rise of anti-Muslim sentiments. Others blame the rise of the right-wing groups in Europe and US President Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric for boosting anti-Muslim sentiments.
Some observers stand in the middle, suggesting that extremism is generally on the rise and is turning bloody. It can be blamed on both some Muslims and some non-Muslims who are turning to the right, and in both cases ignorance serves as the greatest enemy. Whereas non-Muslims may have misconceptions about Islam, some Muslims, mainly jihadists, also misinterpret Islamic teachings in their own way.
Religious scholars insist that militant jihad, for instance, has strict conditions in Islam and should take place only on the battlefield or in the case of a country that has been militarily invaded. But jihadists, they say, have violated that strict condition when they have expanded the battlefield to include the streets of Europe and the US.
The terrorist attacks committed by the Islamic State (IS) group across Europe, particularly in France, Germany and Turkey, have provided an excuse for right-wing politicians to exacerbate their anti-Muslim rhetoric.
The Western media, for its part, has tended to focus on terror attacks in order to portray Muslims as the “enemy”, ignoring the fact that these terror attacks are carried out by small groups and are rejected by mainstream Muslims. The Western media also often only mentions Islam in the context of negative news.
“Islamophobia is on the rise because of a variety of factors, but chief among them today is the degree to which politicians in the United States and Europe have intentionally represented Islam and Muslims as an enemy ‘other’ in the service of advancing their political agendas,” Lean said.
According to Bleich, “Islamophobia rises in times of uncertainty, feelings that core national identities are being challenged, and in the light of political leaders taking advantage of these situations.”
“Politicians like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Marine Le Pen in France (among many others) are tapping into a sense that the world is changing in ways that make some individuals and voters in Europe and North America vulnerable,” Bleich elaborated. “Organising Islamophobia is a way for those leaders to gain power, and for their followers to feel more powerful, too.”
Ghazali quotes US journalist Reed Richardson as saying that “fuelled by the president’s nativist agenda and a new alliance with the alt-right, the professional anti-Muslim industry has never been stronger or more dangerous” in the US. Ghazali agrees with Richardson that “like the US military-industrial complex, which wields influence and makes money under the banner of ‘national security’,” there is now also an “anti-Islam industrial complex” at work in the US.
“The Islamophobia industry likewise exhibits interwoven subsidiaries, joint ventures and lobbying groups, which enrich themselves while ostensibly promoting ideals like freedom of expression, women’s rights and national security,” Ghazali told the Weekly.
One recent report by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) has highlighted “how ‘big money’ is channelled to the ‘industry of Islamophobia’ in the West, which revolves around a fear-mongering demonisation of Arabs and Muslims intended to legitimise both US and Israeli bellicose machinations in a region with highly coveted resources.”
“But the problem of Islamophobia is not a Muslim problem only,” Lean said. “It is not the responsibility of Muslims to solve it. It requires everyone’s efforts, and all people who value equality and peace should stand up and reject such bigotry anywhere and everywhere it is present.”
Muslims can also do their bit to fight bigotry. “Muslim communities and individuals can respond effectively by making their case that veiling is an act of piety, not an act of rejection of European values,” Bleich suggested. “They can certainly organise politically and pursue legal cases where needed. The more Muslims can show they are committed to other values that Europeans (and North Americans) recognise as common values, the less veiling can be used as a symbol that Muslims have diametrically opposed values. Building bridges with other faith communities and with non-faith based organisations will help as well,” he said.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/23432.aspx
Online Magazine launched in 2003
Executive Editor: Abdus Sattar Ghazali
