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November 02, 2006
The politics of veil
David Cameron, the British Tory leader, wants to ‘ban Muslim ghettos’, and the former Labour foreign secretary Jack Straw, wants Muslim women to remove their veil when they come to see him in his constituency. Seen as a direct assault on their culture and religion, what should the British Muslims do? Remove the veil and become as much British as would be allowed by their Caucasian genes? If only assimilation and integration into the British society were as simple as the removal of the ‘veil’ and disbandment of ‘ghettoes’.
Fatima Abidjan, a second generation 21-year-old resident of Brick Lane, East London, explains her hijab predicament as a direct consequence of the 10 Downing Street propagation of Islamophobia. “They talk about integration which is not possible when you are making every woman wearing a veil a prime terror suspect,” says Abidjan, who is a student of Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
“My mother didn’t wear a veil when she moved here with my father from Bangladesh in the `70s. Were they accepted? Of course not! Did the British government want to integrate them into its British-centric society? No! They lived on the periphery and faced racism. Now I’m not willing to let go of my identity. Yes, I’m British, but I’m also a Muslim and by that definition have a right to cover myself in whatever manner I choose. I don’t care how Jack Straw feels about our veils and now David Cameron wants to de-ghettoise us. Sorry gentlemen! You’re a generation too late,” spews out an enraged Abidjan.
In early October, Jack Straw, the leader of the House of Commons, put his foot in a place where it did not belong –– his mouth, and went on to make an inane statement about the veil as, “a visible statement of separation and difference between Muslims and non-Muslims.” He felt uneasy talking to a woman in a veil when she came to see him in his Blackburn constituency in Lancashire, consisting of nearly 30 per cent Muslims.
Straw was quoted in the local British press to have stated that, “communities are bound together partly by informal chance relations between strangers …. That’s made more difficult if people are wearing a veil…” His statement was backed by several British MPs, getting an endorsement even from the politically quagmired British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who as usual was ready to grant concessions to all those in favour of declaring an open house on British Muslims suspect patriotism.
Muslims are 1.6 million (2.8 per cent) of the total population of the United Kingdom, of whom 50 per cent were born there. Most of them believe that the comments made by Jack Straw about integration, and backed by Tony Blair, are not a priority with the government. The Afghan muddle, followed by Iraq, is a conscience call ignored by the Blair government, and validated through the organised use of Islamophobia.
The February 15, 2003 public demonstration against the war in Iraq, the biggest march ever in British history, unnerved the Blair government against the dangers of Islamopathy and urgently needed to be replaced by Islamophobia if the British troops were to continue operation in Iraq or elsewhere dictated by the US.
Analysed on an objective level a veil could be an apparel oddity in a country like the United Kingdom deliberately divided demographically on ethnic and religious lines. Jack Straw’s sortie on the politics of veil is directly linked to the British government’s attempt to negate ethnic diversity rather than tolerate it.
If the veil is so much of a communication barrier, why then were Fatima Abidjan’s parents never invited to an all-white British lounge? For 30 years her mother worked in a shop owned by her husband in Slough, London, wearing a loose shirt and trousers. At the end of that time she can conclusively draw a list of her friends none of whom are white British. “I speak their language, wear their clothes and am still not integrated,” says Fatima’s mother.
The 1997 Human Rights Watch report noted that ‘the UK has one of the highest levels of racially-motivated violence and harassment in Western Europe, and the problem is getting worse.’ By criticising symbolic diversity Jack Straw is only reinforcing the widely held belief of several British Muslims that uneasiness does not lie in the veil but the intolerance of post colonial societies.
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