Danish election campaign heats up amid headscarf controversy
By Slim Allagui
COPENHAGEN: With a headscarf elegantly draped over her hair, Asmaa Abdol-Hamid, a Palestinian-born Dane, has sparked a heated debate in Denmark by declaring that she would wear her veil in parliament if elected in 2009.
A member of the ex-communist Unity List, Abdol-Hamid has a good chance of becoming what could be the first veiled Muslim in Europe to be voted into parliament.
The 25-year-old social worker and former television host from the Danish city of Odense is known for her commitment to politics and equal rights, as well as her headscarf and her refusal to shake hands with men.
But the prospect of a woman in parliament wearing the traditional headscarf, or hijab, has further disrupted sensibilities in Denmark, a country still shaken by last year’s row on cartoons that swelled from a domestic Danish affair into a worldwide crisis pitting Muslim values against Western ideals.
Muslims make up 3.5 per cent of Denmark’s population of 5.4 million.
A recent poll showed 48 per cent of Danes believe Muslim women have the right to wear a headscarf in parliament but the same number are opposed to the idea, with four percent undecided.
A spokesman for the far-right Danish People’s Party (DPP), Soeren Krarup, was among the first to react to Abdol-Hamid’s pledge, calling her headscarf a “totalitarian symbol” similar to “the Nazi swastika”.
And a DPP member of the European Parliament, Mogens Camre, said Abdol-Hamid “needed psychiatric treatment”.
But harsh words have not deterred Abdol-Hamid, who moved to Denmark at the age of five with her Palestinian parents. She has rejected her critics’ view that she is an oppressed woman and defends her “right to be different”.
She was recently designated by her party as a candidate for the Copenhagen constituency ahead of the February 2009 general election, and polls show she is well-placed to win a seat in the national assembly.
Although other Muslim women have won seats in European parliaments – in Belgium and Bulgaria – none have worn the veil.
In secular Turkey, which straddles the Western and Muslim worlds and hopes to one day become a member of the European Union, parliament was thrown into an uproar in 1999 when a member of a now-defunct Islamist party showed up wearing her headscarf to take her parliamentary oath.
She was prevented from doing so as lawmakers protested loudly, and shortly thereafter she left Turkey.
Abdol-Hamid is confident that things will turn out better for her; she is used to breaking new ground.
A poised young woman with a broad smile, she made Danish headlines last year when she became the first television host in Denmark to wear a Muslim headscarf.
But the head of the Danish People’s Party, Pia Kjaersgaard, whose anti-immigrant party has grown into a political force to be reckoned with, is not convinced by Abdol-Hamid’s self-assurance.
Kjaersgaard said she “feels pity” for a woman who “tries to make everyone believe that the veil gives her freedom”, adding that the headscarf is “often imposed on very young innocent girls by authoritarian men”.
Abdol-Hamid insisted that is not the case for her.
“I am free with this piece of material on my head. It’s a choice that I consider to be right. And I prefer to greet men by placing my hand on my heart. But I would never insist that others do it,” she said.
For her, winning a seat in parliament is “a way for a Danish Muslim woman to show what she is capable of, and to fight for her ideas such as the struggle for equality between men and women”.
She said she believed firmly in “the separation of religion and politics”, and has said that she would not ask for a prayer room in parliament if elected.
While criticism of her has been harsh, she does have backers.
Several Danish imams have called on Muslims to vote for Abdol-Hamid but most of her support comes from ethnic Danes on the left-wing.
Elsebeth Gerner Nielsen, a member of the opposition Radical Party and a former culture minister who was scandalised by far-right attacks, recently greeted journalists and press photographers wearing a headscarf.
She insisted on Danes’ “right to be different” and stressed the importance of freedom of expression and the need to counterbalance the “nationalist and closed-minded” far-right which “demonises Muslims who wear headscarves”.
“What’s important is not what we have on our heads but the opinions we express,” she said.
Gerner Nielsen has, however, been criticised by a former party colleague, Naser Khader, a moderate Muslim who accuses her of “playing into the hands of Islamists” – a point of view shared by Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen.—AFP
