The Nation‘s Katha Pollitt weighs in on the issue of Muslim women’s rights in the context of Obama’s Cairo speech, the protests in Iran, and Sarkozy’s support of a burqa ban in France:
The title of [Algerian-American human rights lawyer Karima] Bennoune’s article, “The Religionizing of Politics,” points to another problem: the tendency in the West to treat majority-Muslim countries as a single cohesive entity—“the Muslim world”—rather than as Asian, African and Middle Eastern nations that are as different from one another as the majority-Christian lands of Britain and Mexico. The term itself promotes the view that Islam tout court is what these countries are all about, thus marginalizing other ways of understanding them and rendering invisible the non-Muslims and seculars who live there.
The current election struggle in Iran came as a big surprise to those who take the simplistic view of Muslim nations as our antagonists in a clash of civilizations. Who knew that our arch-enemy, member in good standing of the Axis of Evil, had all these hip young people, these tech-savvy Tweeters, these ordinary citizens eager to go into the streets day after day and risk beatings, arrests and death at the hands of the feared Basij? Who knew it had so many women who, however devout they may or may not be, don’t want to be denied ordinary human freedoms in the name of religion, thank you very much? The energetic and massive participation of women in the street demonstrations has received much comment in the Western media, but it’s only surprising if you think Muslim women really are as weak and passive as the mullahs imagine.
That impression of Muslim women appears to be shared by Nicolas Sarkozy, who has thrown his support behind a proposal to ban in France the all-enveloping burqa and the niqab, calling it a “question of women’s liberty and dignity.” The most vocal French feminists support the ban, as does the French Muslim women’s group Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores nor Doormats), for whom it’s a necessary counterweight to family and community pressures on women. While it may well be true that some of the small number of French women who wear burqas and niqabs are forced into them, it’s hard to see how a ban will help liberate them. Instead, it will permit the French to publicly humiliate them and feel good about it, ratify the Islamists’ claim that the West is out to get Islam and give more proof that Muslims are unwelcome in France.
Read the full piece here.