To veil or not to veil

0Hazrul Azhar Jamari • 7th Feb 2008 • My Notes • ban on veils, higher education, hijab, islam, muslim, mustafa kemal ataturk, Politics, secularism, turkey, university

Americans have gone exercising their democratic right to vote on Super Tuesday, to elect the respective presidential candidates in the Republican and Democratic parties. While who becomes the final contenders to unseat George Bush at the White House is still anybody’s guess, elsewhere in the world, the Turkish parliament has voted with a massive majority to relax the ban on Islamic headscarves in universities.

In most Muslim countries, it is considered extremely sacrilegious to ban the headscarf. Go to any Muslim country in the middle-east and you will most likely find women who are dressed fully covered from head to toe. While it is known that women are required to dress modestly in Islam, it should also be said that just like women, men are also equally required to cover themselves up.

However, the parts of the body which are required to be covered by each gender is different. Women are required to cover their entire body, except their hands and face. Whereas men, are required to cover the parts from the navel to the knee.

This dress code if you would like to call it that, is not meant to protect women as it is widely reported. In many middle-east countries, covered women are raped as much as non-covered women are. In fact, a woman wearing a headscarf is more likely to get raped than one without just by the sheer majority of women in these countries who are veiled, which accounts for a lopsided statistic for the protesters of the lifting of the ban. The idea that a woman is more likely to get raped if uncovered is however debunked nonetheless, and the mostly credited reason behind this law is just mere excuse to encourage less willing women to cover up.

The misfortune for Muslim women is how clerics and practising Muslims place too much emphasis on women’s clothing, that men not covering up, is hardly discussed or debated. And in all that unproductive debate, no one ever speaks a word about how covered Muslim men are allowed in universities nonetheless.

The fact is men’s area of cover is so entwined in the norm, that it hardly becomes the topic. Every man wears pants! Thus, it is not regarded a religious symbol. But the veil is the one most recognisable garment in Islam that distinguishes a Muslim and one who is not.

That single piece of cloth, is so powerful, that a non-practising Muslim, or a non-Muslim for that matter, and in the case of Turkey, staunch believers of the Church of Secularism, fears it as if it could wipe out their entire belief system and the country that was built by this clear separation between the divine and that which is not.

For a country which is trying to get themselves recognised by the European Union, what is acceptable in secularism and what is not, is very misunderstood indeed. Let me tell you one thing my Turkish friends. If one day, a young Muslim veiled woman steps on university ground, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk will not crawl out from his grave and end this crime against the state.

To allow a practising Muslim woman access to higher education, will do more for Turkey than it ever will if Turkey intends to be a modern, industrial, European nation. Unlike their Arab brethren, their women get to become educated and help the nation thrive. Whereas in Arabia and Central Asia, their women have little or no access to higher education even if the school was opposite their homes, if they had any in the first place.

The middle east have been criticised for a decline in the quality of education, that it exacerbates the condition of their economy and high unemployment rate. And with 2/3 of Turkish women who don the veil, and who refuse to sacrifice their faith, their democratic ability to choose not to receive higher education in exchange for their freedom to practise their religion, the secularists are the ones to be blamed if Turkey does not accept this lifting of the ban on veils.

For members of the Turkish Constitutional Court, my advice for you if this matter is brought to court by the secularists is this: Would Turkey prosper by upholding an archaic secular value instead of democratising, and reforming this silly ban on a piece of cloth? Change is imminent. And even Europe has to face it one day.