Guest Post: Back to the burqa
Dissecting the complexities of banning burqas
In his May 1st post, Jake brought our attention to the plans under way in France to ban the full-face veil, or burqa and I’d like to take a deeper drive on the issue.
One obvious concern has to do with the rationale and scope of the law. A key justification of a modern democracy’s legal system is that it meets a certain standard of generality and applies to all citizens equally. Legislation that targets a specific subset of a population might be seen as violating this principle.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports on how the recent ban on burqas in Belgium was justified on the general ground that they contravened a citizen’s duty to be identifiable in public. But we need to distinguish between the theoretical aim of a law and its concrete effects. Legislation making it illegal to sleep under bridges might apply to all, yet it is the homeless –not the rich– that will feel its effects in practice. The question then becomes whether, in a European context, laws that are seen to specifically target Muslims may not end up creating resentment against a political system from which they are largely excluded.
A second, related problem is that of the political under-representation of minorities within modern democracies. Theorists such as German philosopher Jürgen Habermas insist on the importance of free and inclusive deliberation as one of the cornerstones of a democracy. It is striking, though, that one voice conspicuously missing from the debate over the burqa has been that of the veiled women themselves. We all need to think hard about why political institutions founded on democratic ideals have often been exclusionary in practice, and how groups that appear to shun political participation can be brought to the discussion table on issues that affect them directly.
Thirdly, many commentators have argued that the backdrop of the burqa controversy in Europe is the threat that Muslim populations allegedly pose to national identities. But things are more complicated. For one thing, the concept of a national identity is an ambiguous one: should identities be left to develop spontaneously or must the state forcefully create or sustain them? What would be a desirable degree of homogeneity within a population? A certain amount of diversity is necessary and perhaps inevitable, but is there a cutting off point beyond which the “identity” of the whole vanishes?
This is likely to be a charged issue moving forward, but that doesn’t make it any less complex. It’s time for Europe to come to grips with the real questions at stake.
-Daniel
Related posts:
- Burqa continued…
- Banning the burqa
- Burqa continued: response to Jake
- Guest post: Majority rules?
- Liberalism and the burqa
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