The niqab debate: Is anxiety being exploited in la belle province?
It's perfectly clear by now that we wouldn't be having the debate over how far Muslim women should be allowed to go covering up their faces, if there wasn't a federal election on the go.
- Niqab ban for public servants would be considered: Stephen Harper
- Why Zunera Ishaq fought for her niqab - and became an election issue
- HUMOUR: If eyes are windows to the soul, what's the big deal with the niqab?
And it's no coincidence that Quebec has become the hot spot.
Quebec is the province where Stephen Harper and his Conservatives have little to lose and much to gain. After all, Quebec voters abandoned their own Bloc Quebecois for the NDP in the last federal election. They just might be convinced to do a repeat and abandon the NDP for the Conservatives. All it takes is to find and push the right button.
Campaigning on their economic performance obviously hasn't worked. On the other hand, Quebec has already had its own hijab debate and gone where the Conservatives said they wouldn't go but now promise to go after all: banning the niqab from some aspects of public life.
Questioning the right of Muslim immigrants and refugees to bring their more extreme hijab traditions into Canada has turned into the Conservatives' latest strategy for gaining support in Quebec.
Calgary's mayor Naheed Nenshi, a man often held up as a spokesperson for the nation's conscience, has called it playing with fire. Other critics have been blunter and called it denounced it as the politics of fear and loathing.
Fear and loathing may be harsh. Still, nothing challenges Western values, with their emphasis on exposing everything from skin to soul, more than the spectre of dark eyes lurking behind a narrow gap of cloth with God knows what intent.
How did the niqab become the enemy?
Ever since the age of its own enlightenment, Western tradition has striven to give the world and all of its complexities the benefit of the doubt. No more. The niqab, and everything it hides, has become the enemy of the day in an age where the word "terrorism" is never far from the conversation .
Hijab is the Arabic word for "screen" or "curtain." It also refers to the cloth with which Muslim women cover their head.
More extreme forms of the hijab include the niqab, a garment which covers the head and the shoulders with only a slit for the eyes; and the burka, a sack-like dress which covers the wearer from head to toe with even the eyes behind a grill.
The burka, in particular, evokes a cage behind whose bars a female soul paces powerlessly to and fro while its male master struts freely, face uncovered, bound only by a voluntary code of modesty.
Even some Islamic scholars explain the more extreme forms of the hijab as a backlash to the egalitarian teachings of the prophet Muhammad in a part of the world where misogyny had already enjoyed a long history.
Mesopotamian, Persian, Greek, Jewish, even early Christian women wore veils to lower their sex appeal long before Muhammad founded Islam.
And, lest we forget, it didn't stop there.
Old prints of respectable women across medieval Europe invariably represent them as bundled up like nuns. As late as Victorian times, ladies weren't allowed to show a whole lot either.
Many modern historians see the resurgence of the hijab in recent times as yet another backlash, this time in response to a century of crass and inept Western meddling in the affairs of the Middle East.
The Qu'ran doesn't prescribe the hijab and its more severe cousins specifically, but it does stress modesty as a virtue to be observed and admonishes women to cover their bosom in public.
How a debate can be both opened and closed
The niqab and burka may have taken this much further than the prophet Muhammad intended. If so, he wouldn't have approved of the boob-strutting so prominent in modern Western culture either.
These are complex cultural issues.
You can close the debate by banning the more severe versions of the hijab, as Quebec has done; you can leave it open and hope for mutual understanding, as most other Western countries have chosen to do.
Harper's Conservatives went half-way first, banning the niqab and burka from the citizenship ceremony but not from citizenship itself. Their latest promise to go at least as far as Quebec has gone, despite previous assurances that they wouldn't, brings to mind the old saying that all is fair in love and war — and what is politics if not the two combined.
If Canadian values are the issue, then what, pray, is the essence of those values, if not tolerance of and respect for cultural differences.
If safety and security are the issue, it's worth noting that 2,158 Canadians died in motor vehicle accidents last year.
The number of people killed as a result of home-grown terrorism was two.
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