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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 18, 2004
The hijab
The French president Jacques Chirac recently took it upon himself to vindicate the secularizing or (more accurately) "laicizing" traditions of the French Revolution by banning religious insignia from French state schools. His main target seems to have been the hijab or headscarf worn by Muslim girls and women as an assertion of their modesty. But the measure extends to Sikh turbans Jewish yamulkas or skullcaps and visible Christian crucifixes. It also applies to signs and symbols of political affiliation -- but more nebulously leaving school principals with broad powers to decide what is or isn't "apolitically correct". Mr. Chirac's measure is according to polls supported by two-thirds of the French people. His aides referred to a French court ruling of 1989 which established that religious symbols should be removed from state schools if they were deemed by administrators "to put pressure to provoke to proselytize to propagandize". Mr. Chirac himself managed to antagonize every Muslim within hearing of the media by describing the hijab as "a sort of aggression". (F?licitations monsieur.) It is the sort of measure that could be taken in France but not until recently in Canada and not for the foreseeable future in the United States where constitutional protections for freedom of expression and religion would be invoked immediately. France will be France after all; though let me say I preferred that country before 1789. But also the spirit of the Revolution exported itself and the political significance of religious dress is something that has since been made an issue all over the globe. In largely Muslim Indonesia for instance the hijab was banned from public schools until a decade ago because it was thought to offer a challenge to the secular state. Now however it has become compulsory in most girl's school uniforms and not only for Muslims -- as part of the state-imposed Islamicization of everyday life (designed apparently to defeat radical Islam by surrendering to whatever it might demand in advance). One of the generic arguments against banning anything by law is that it sets a legalizing precedent. Later the same may be imposed by law simply by taking the word "not" out after the word "must". My own views on this subject for the little they're worth are caught in the middle. Between the Western feminists who insist the hijab represents oppression of women and the Muslims who insist it upholds the dignity of women I don't want to be. Perhaps I'm lucky not to have a daughter who has converted to Islam. If I had one I'd tell her to do what she thought right -- and neither intimidate nor intimidated be. What interests me is not the hijab per se but the meaning of it. It comes closer in meaning to the Jewish tradition than to the Christian. The basic idea separately interpreted for men and women seems identical to the Talmudic one: "Cover your head in order that you should have the fear of heaven upon you." That strikes me as a noble thought. As for the Christians I have found among the ordinances of St. Paul to the Corinthians the instruction that men should not but women should cover their heads in church. What they wear in the street is not his concern but he believes it is comely for women to be covered and notices that the woman 's much longer hair gives the effect of a natural covering. (He was impatient with long-haired men.) The idea that women whose heads are uncovered must be immodest is thus not particular to Islam. From what I've seen it seems to be shared by almost all cultures in almost all times though not in our own. St. Paul perhaps captures the good instinct best in that word comely . It exposes our own conscious and unconscious rebellion against any idea of a natural order: for the very fact that something may be thought comely in a woman puts our necks up against it. Our women are raised to reject being women as our men are raised to reject being men. We may even forget that women used to cover their heads in our culture too. The coif the bonnet and the mantilla are among Christian equivalents to the hijab. In fact men also covered their heads until quite recently -- so that according at least to George Gissing a man could no more walk out in society without a hat than without his trousers barely a century ago. But that wasn't because there was a law. I am no expert on hats and headgear; I'm really just some postmodern dweeb who never got into the habit of putting anything on his head and who forgets even to wear a toque when it's 20 degrees below zero. I think perhaps people ought to wear hats though I realize they give no protection against meteors or lightning and only limited deflection of hail. They would make sense if everyone wore them for otherwise they become a fashion statement. So with the hijab. Such female headcovering passed without notice in the Lahore of my childhood but doesn't pass without noticing on the streets of say Ottawa today. Which means that quite apart from any intention of the woman what was meant as a gesture of modesty is turned into a gesture of personal assertion. I think we might therefore train ourselves to look upon the woman wearing the hijab as none of our business. And thereby also disarm the woman who really does wear the hijab as "a sort of aggression" to be "in your face". The best thing to do with a provocation is usually to ignore it. Drawing the attention of the law to it only makes it more contentious. An even better response might be if Christian and other non-Muslim women adopted the habit of dressing modestly. For there are two ways to respond to what might appear as a Muslim challenge besides ignoring it. One is positive the other negative. The negative response is to try to stop it the positive is to go one better. For if a comment is being made the sort-of-aggressive in-your-face message of the hijab to non-Muslim women is that they are immodest. It's not just the headgear it's everything else: they think our women look trashy. It is part of a larger complaint about the decadence of our Western society. Surely I am not the only person who has noticed that the complaint is valid. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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