8 years ago
6
Fear Unveiled: Why Banning the Burqa Makes No Sense
Calls in Germany to ban the burqa are misguided and the move would do little to liberate Muslim women. The fight for emancipation must come from inside the religion.
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http://www.spiegel.de
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This is a well thought out editorial. One of the things it could touch on is the concept of defiance. The Burqa can be seen as an act of defiance against a government or political theater, and indeed, I think this is where the idea of stripping that defiance off is coming from. As the writer rightly ascertains, banning will only further the defiance, as witnessed in Iran and other places.
I don't hold out much hope for Islam changing it's male dominant positioning any time soon though.
The purpose is usually to demand people to show their faces in public spaces. How would you feel if you worked in a store and ten people wearing masks came in?
But at least it legitimizes a fear of outsiders.
It legitimizes fear of extremists...a full Burka is extremist and fucking weird...in any sense of it.
I don't think being weird is a terribly good reason for banning something. Amish people are extreme, but there is no need to ban overly long beards
Namus
In the Muslim world, preventing women from being seen by men is closely linked to the concept of Namus
Namus is an ethical category, a virtue, in Middle Eastern Muslim patriarchal character. It is a strongly gender-specific category of relations within a family described in terms of honor, attention, respect/respectability, and modesty. The term is often translated as "honor"
It is oppressive. The comparison of a beard to a cloth prison is not the best one.
EDIT: source wiki