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Now
In line with the feminist bumper sticker
"Well-behaved women do not make history," Aishah Azmi,
a Muslim woman born in Cardiff and raised in Birmingham, is determined
to disobey the British male elite and make history. Azmi fully
veils her face in the public, including at the school where she
taught young girls and boys. No parents or female colleagues
at the school objected to her choice of dress. Over the complaint
of a British male colleague, however, Azmi was suspended from
the job. As the controversy grew, some parents joined the opposition
to the veil, complaining that students could not hear Azmi speaking
behind the veil. Azmi offered to drop the veil while teaching
if no male colleagues were present. The school declined the offer.
As a woman of will and determination, Azmi too has refused to
give up her identity in public spaces. She is in the process
of defending her rights through the British legal system. Though
she has lost her case in the first administrative hearing, she
intends to appeal to the higher courts.
Politicization
of Veil
Instead of allowing the system
to freely and fairly process Azmi's legal claim, the British
male elite wasted no time in condemning the veil as a profound
violation of the British culture. The debate is no more narrow
or legal. It is racial and religious.
All over the world, the law
permits employers to impose reasonable grooming standards on
employees. For example, the police officers may be prohibited
from donning hippie hair and the schoolteachers may not be permitted
to wear short skirts. Azmi will have a weak legal claim if the
school can show a factual linkage between veil and teaching inefficacy.
But that is not the point the British male elite, though known
for their love of legal formalisms, is making. Their argument
goes beyond the grooming standards at workplace. They wish to
assimilate immigrant women into a prototypical woman who caters
for male sensibilities and makes men feel comfortable.
British
Male Attacks
Former Foreign Secretary Jack
Straw (who loves to cook puddings in free time) cast the first
stone when he requested that Muslim women drop the veil. Straw
attempted to intellectualize his request by a louche admission
that he watches the facial expressions of women when he engages
in conversations with them. The veil prevents him, says Straw,
from fully understanding what Muslim women are saying---not because
he cannot hear them but because he cannot see their faces. (I
wonder if Straw listens to the radio or ever talks on the phone.)
While Straw flirted with unconvincing
logic, Mr. Phil Woolas, a local government minister, came down
on the veil with a hard hammer. Mr. Woolas minced no words in
issuing a forceful fatwa that the veil provokes "fear and
resentment" among the British people. Woolas tried to influence
the legal debate as well by openly suggesting that Azmi "can't
do her job" wearing a face veil.
While the case was still pending
before the tribunal, Prime Minister Tony Blair also entered the
furor, smearing the veil as a "mark of separation."
Wearing his familiar postiche smile, Blair argued that the veil
"makes other people uncomfortable." Fully exploiting
the office of the Prime Minister, Blair supported the school
's decision in suspending Azmi from the job. Another male from
the British ruling elite, higher education minister Bill Rammell,
added prejudicial perspective to his colleagues' crusade by reminding
the forgetful British public that Imperial College in London
had already banned face veils in class.
In this perfervid air of British
xenophobia, one important voice arose to protest. Trevor Philipps,
the head of the Commission of Racial Equality and a man of African
descent, warned that the debate over the veil had "turned
ugly" and could spark violence. What is needed, said Mr.
Philips, is a gentle and refined discussion. His warning came
true within hours when racially charged hoodlums attacked male
worshippers at a mosque in Greater Manchester.
Undeterred by these attacks,
the British elite continues to trash the cultural identity of
a fellow citizen from Cardiff. Meanwhile, history with its inexhaustible
ironies offers additional insights into the British resentment
against the Islamic veil.
Common Law
Coverture
For centuries, the British
male elite has served as hysterical vigilantes against assertive
women who, like Aishah Azmi, wish to maintain their self-identity
in public spaces. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England,
William Blackstone defines coverture as follows: "By marriage,
the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very
being or legal existence of the woman is suspended or consolidated
into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection and cover,
she performs everything." The law of coverture, though wrapped
in the romance of a delightful marriage (for man), drew its vicious
logic from colonization as the British male elite fictionalized
the household in terms of a small colony under the husband's
viceroyalty, a colony in which the wife's property came to be
vested in husband and in which she was disqualified from entering
into separate contracts. These female disabilities were considered
necessary to promote the "superior" British culture
at home and abroad. Women who refused to get married for fear
of losing personal and property rights were regarded as "redundant
women."
The common law coverture gradually
lost its grip over the British women. The British male elite
is now resurrecting coverture to subjugate immigrant women. The
new coverture turns the old coverture on its head. The old coverture
coerced white women to promote the Victorian vision of separate
spheres---homes for women and markets for men. The new coverture
compels immigrant women from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East
to abandon their unique identities in public spaces. For white
women, the old coverture created and enforced the separation
of gender spheres; for immigrant women, the coverture imposes
the fusion of gender spheres. In each case, some women must lose
their identity. In all cases, coverture forces women, white or
black, to constantly adjust their identities to make the British
men feel comfortable.
Obtuse Logic
There is yet another irony
in the veil controversy. In 1991, Fatima Mernissi's book Le
Harem Politique (1987) was translated into English with a
more descriptive title, The Veil and the Male Elite. Analyzing
sociological roots of the Islamic veil, Mernissi contends that
the Arab male elite of the first few decades of Islam concocted
the sacred sources to impose a controlling and oppressive headgear
on women. The Prophet was egalitarian, says Mernissii, but his
men were not. His men first solicited gender discrimination from
the Prophet; and after his death, they fell back into the pre-Islamic
days of ignorance and fabricated the Prophet's sayings to perpetuate
gender inequality and the veiling of women. True Islam, Mernissi
seems to conclude, would let Muslim women choose whether they
want to wear the veil.
Few scholars in the Muslim
world agree with Mernissi's theological or sociological theses,
even though the face veil (niqab) is far from a universal value
in Muslim countries. Ironically, the British male elite will
also hesitate to embrace Mernissi's book. Mernissi is a feminist
who wishes to expand the choices women may exercise in public
spaces. Mernissi criticizes the "oppressive veil" as
a male imposition. She would nonetheless allow women the freedom
to wear the veil.
In condemning the veil, however,
the British male elite is not making the freedom argument. They
are not quarrelling that women like Azmi are oppressed and that
they must have a choice. In fact, these men spurn the choice
argument. They are advocating gender integration for personal
convenience. Immigrant women must not wear the veil in public,
they say, because the veil is a mark of separation, the veil
makes British men feel uncomfortable, and the veil does not allow
British Jacks and Joes to watch Muslim women's facial expressions.
No self-respecting woman will accept this obtuse logic.
It appears that the British
male elite is determined to direct and dictate women according
to their personal preferences. They perhaps do not realize that
their forced unveiling of Muslim women is no different from their
forced domestication of Victorian women.
Ali Khan is a professor of law at Washburn
University School of Law in Topeka, Kansas. Send comments to
ali.khan@washburn.edu.
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