On veiling

Ex-foreign minister Jack Straw's comments on veiling last week continue to kick up dust in the UK. To those who have missed the tea-cup storm, he said that he would prefer veiled women to uncover their face when they meet him. The first thing to be said is that his comments will almost certainly do more harm than good. Al Qaeda-types will love the idea of a Westerner attacking veiling. Still more will they love the fact that it came from a Jew. It would have been better if he'd kept his opinions to himself. This doesn't mean that he isn't entitled to his own policy regarding uncovering the veil in meetings; it just means he shouldnt really have gone to the trouble of writing an article in a local newspaper and then repeating his comments on radio and tv in recent days.

That said, the issue of veiling (especially the wearing of the face-covering niqab) is troubling from a Western perspective. Liberal progressive sentiments, fuelled by a hundred years of energetic feminism, entail that whether one calls oneself a feminist or not (I do), one instinctively responds negatively to any manifestation of patriarchy. Whether a minority of muslim women have actively chosen to wear the niqab (rather than being coerced by their menfolk) is therefore besides the point. The niqab covers the face and removes the woman further from the public realm. It therefore offends liberal sentiments and acts in collusion with patriarchy. Ally this argument to the idea that one should respect local customs (witness Western journalists on assignment in the muslim world wearing a hijab), and that therefore muslim women should adapt to a liberal anti-patriarchal humanistic society rooted in the idea of the political and cultural freedoms of the individual, and one starts to see the beginnings of an argument against veiling (specifically against the niqab) in the West. A further strand of an argument in this direction is the increasingly vehement desire to resist Islamic fundamentalism with a trenchant defence of Western values and freedoms. A key strategic component within this desire would be the promotion of a moderate, non-literal, tolerant and pluralistic version of Islam. That's to say, to promote an Islam where the niqab is frowned upon.

Finally, those embroiled in the debate in the UK should look up and realise this is an age old argument repeated in many places at many times - a few years ago France banned headscarf wearing at all state schools, creating a cause celebre in Lyons. More volatile still is the long-running battle between secularists and fundamentalists in Turkey, so powerfully depicted in the novels of Orhan Pamuk. Since the time of the heroic moderniser Ataturk, explicit codes of muslim expression (such as dress) have been banned, only for religionists to counter-attack sporadically.

The real issue in all this for those who believe and will defend eternally Western humanism and the deep value of human rights is to engage with the causes of fundamentalism, not its effects (such as the growing adoption of the niqab). Jack Straw's intervention threatens to destabilise and de-centre the debate away from core issues. Western progressive humanists need to continue to find ways to support moderate muslims, rather than push Islam further away.

The problem is most acutely focused on the post-industrial towns of the North-West (Blackburn, Accrington, Bradford etc), where disaffected working class youth have been waiting for any opportunity to express their marginalised rage at the world. The roots of the problem lead back to Thatcher, and her destruction of the manufacturing bases in the North. White flight and the creation of minority ghettos, which once seemed the preserve of a peculiarly American system of apartheid, now seem to have consolidated themselves in the UK. Instead of superficial remarks, Jack Straw would do well to roll up his sleeves and start thinking through strategies for integration in his own backyard.