France starts ban on full-face veil

[fallstuff]

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Muslim. Yes, of course. I think I saw an article somewhere that implied a 'political connection' to the ban. Heck, it may be only 200 Muslim women in a population of Muslims approaching 10% or more in France. A real tiny number.

But I want to get to an important point about this Forum and that in hope that the Moderators and Members would pay attention:
I have read various arguments between @Ephone and others. It pains me to see that that guy is made to prove his nationality just because he differs from some majority opinion. I have been in the same boat a few times here. So I know. Yesterday, a particularly shallow and obnoxious Pakistani member called me a ' dear covert Indian'. If that attack had come from some mature members then I would have noticed. But this was just some kid. I ignored him. But in this topic there is a lot of back and forth between @Ephone and others about Chinese language to prove who is the real Chinese or otherwise. It was all too childish. I started skipping messages.
As I see it, most Indians would not like me for supporting Pakistan on Kashmir. I really believe in that cause. It is not just some 'Muslim' cause. I can start believing some Baluch cause if there is enough critical mass, for example. Also, I did not mind Christian E. Timor or South Sudan breaking away from respective Muslim countries. It was the will of the majority. Similarly, most Israelis would not like me supporting the Palestinians. They would automatically think, being a Pakistani, it is some 'Muslim' cause, even though support for Palestinians is found almost universally outside of America and Israel....

Who knows the depth of human nature, really? We can't really be sure of some other person. There are stereotypes--with some merits--but only to some extent.

Let's not put each other to prove our national loyalties. We can be rabid this or that but disproving one's nationality does not serve any purpose here.

I respectfully disagree. In this international forum members are duly pointing the finger at someone who is not being consistent at all. His flags are changing like a chameleon, he has an intense hate for the Muslim folks inconsistent with the other Chinese members, his refusal to accept the fact that even French police are stating there are like 350 women in all France wear Burqa, and most of them do it on their own, a behavior commonly seen in the converts.

Lets take a look at some of his masterpieces,

with shallow minds muslim worlds current have, your dream back to glory is really impossible.

Your ancestors forced hundreds of millions people to convert to islam with knives

when in Rome, do as the Romans do.

You are telling me you can't smell the cur*y in those posts ?

Anyway dude, I respect your opinion, but the verdict on the cur*y stays !!!

[Majnun]

Can someone give the exact law?

[ephone]

I respectfully disagree. In this international forum members are duly pointing the finger at someone who is not being consistent at all. His flags are changing like a chameleon. he has an intense hate for the Muslim folks inconsistent with the other Chinese members, his refusal to accept the fact that even French police are stating there are like 350 women in all France wear Burqa, and most of them do it on their own. A behavior commonly seen in the converts.

Lets take a look at some of his masterpieces,







You are telling me you can't smell the cur*y in those posts ?

Anyway dude, I respect your opinion, but the verdict on the cur*y stays !!!

I stick to what I write here. They are the truth. The current islam is really way too much intolerant towards other religions.

[Abu Zolfiqar]

Nor should turbans be banned. Similarly, hard scarves like they do in Iran or Turkey should not be banned either. Show your face. Don't hide your identity when required. You are okay. Let's be sensitive to the security and the local majority population's sensitivities and fears. That should apply world-wide. Remember: There is no absolute freedom. Adapt or live elsewhere. The world is too dangerous and too immature for some ideals.

I am suspicious of Sarkozy's motives behind this ban. I have heard that there are only about 2000 women in all of France who don the burqah. And that Sarkozy is eying some political gains by appeasing far-right in this country. If true then it is unfortunate.

mehhh, that's politics for ya.........no new news

[Abu Zolfiqar]

I stick to what I write here. They are the truth. The current islam is really way too much intolerant towards other religions.

perhaps you are mistaking individual interpretation with the religion itself. If you are a fact-finder, consider picking up a Quran and reading it.

it's available in over 123 languages

dont take my word for it...just read it.

[Kaniska]

I agree with your analysis...becoz French gov have every right to ban based on the sentiment of their people...but they should be honest in their intent rather than telling to the whole world that becoz of security they are banning the burqa..

[huzihaidao12]

My attitude has always been the case, no one is qualified to conclusions about Islam, and also forced too tight. In addition to requirements of mutual respect and tolerance, the best Muslims handle their own problems . China also has the Boxer Rebellion a hundred years ago, Now what. Moreover, the Muslim extremist movement has an important reason for the West's aggression, so you can not say that there are internal reasons, there is also an external reason. This is the same and the Boxer Rebellion. Muslim countries have some problems in the modern Fusion, but to see the chaos of the world, clothing is just a trivial matter, as long as they like, I do not mind.

[Roybot]

You are telling me you can't smell the cur*y in those posts ?

Anyway dude, I respect your opinion, but the verdict on the cur*y stays !!!

Why do all the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis here pretend that they don't eat curry

[Mech]

Why do all the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis here pretend that they don't eat curry

i know right! Such hypocrites......anyway, i love curry

[Abu Zolfiqar]

we do too...but we have different dietary intake needs; herbs and veggies alone just dont cut it


to get back on topic -- in the end, the underlying point is the same. Their laws, their rules.....cant do much to change em. I'm not sure how much pull PDF forum will have on French parliament sessions.

[EjazR]

A good article on the Niqab debate

The Niqab ban: A Study in Stupidity

On the eleventh of April, it became illegal to veil one’s face in public in France.

This is something that seems to have made a lot of people happy, and they defend their being happy quite vigorously.

The arguments, if one can call them so, run along three fairly broad and predictable lines:

First, that the burqa, in whatever form (hijab, niqab) is against “French/European culture” and said culture has to be protected from it

Secondly, that the burqa is, by its very nature, oppressive to women; and

Thirdly, that the burqa is a security hazard.

Each and every one of these arguments is hollow and self-serving.

Let’s take the first argument first.

Now, I’m not denying that to people who aren’t exactly used to seeing masked faces, the sight of a woman in a veil may be momentarily unsettling. But that’s all she is…a woman in a veil. If a woman in a veil is a threat to one’s culture, I submit that said culture has problems far greater than can be cured by merely banning the veil.

Besides, while culture is of course a plastic item and changes, albeit usually rather slowly, over time, exactly how great is the threat to French culture from the niqab? Actually, we don’t have to resort to guesswork. France has roughly three million Muslim women. The French police did a survey to check how many wore the niqab. The answer? 367.[1]

Now you tell me what kind of culture is at threat from a miserable three hundred and sixty seven veiled women? And in Belgium, which is also planning to ban the veil, there are half a million Muslim women, of whom a humongous two dozen wear the veil [2]. Amazing.

I think, for the moment, we can put the culture issue aside as a shoddy excuse.

The second argument is the idea that being made to wear a veil is “oppressive” to women.

On the face of it this might seem a seductive notion, and it is…so long as you don’t ask those veiled women what they think of it. If you do, the reactions might be surprising.

This is what Kenza Drider, a French Muslim woman who wears the niqab and is determined to violate the ban, has to say [3]:

“This whole law makes France look ridiculous…I never thought I’d see the day when France, my France, the country I was born in and I love, the country of liberté, égalité, fraternité, would do something that so obviously violates people’s freedom.

“I’ll be getting on with my life and if they want to send me to prison for wearing the niqab then so be it. One thing’s for sure: I’m not taking it off.”

So here we have an “oppressed” woman prepared to go to prison rather than remove the symbol of her alleged oppression.

In fact, worldwide, the burqa or niqab can be seen to be an empowering garment rather than an oppressive one.

How so? In order to answer that, we must ask first this question:

Who, precisely, are the people who wear burqas, hijabs or niqabs? Aren’t they fundamentalist Muslims? They are.

Now, the burqa or other veil is actually not required wearing in Islam. It’s more a cultural thing, and it’s mostly a coincidence that those cultures which traditionally veiled their women also tend to have the more fundamentalist interpretations of the Islamic faith. But the fact remains that the veil is worn by women, primarily, in cultures where they have to wear it in public if they go out at all. Tradition, reinforced by their menfolk, ensure that they keep the veil.

Often, in fact, the veil is just a temporary garment, for wearing in public. Women in many countries will dress to kill, put on the burqa over their hip-hugging jeans and low-neck tops, and go to all-woman malls and discos, where they will dump the veil in the check-in and turn into birds of paradise for the night. You’d call that oppression?

For many women it’s much more of a necessity. I myself knew a dentist in Calcutta who worked in her clinic in the regulation white coat, latex gloves and face mask. But when her clinic hours were over, she would put on a burqa for the trip home. And this was a well-educated professional. There are many more who do the same, whose lives outside the home take place within the folds of a burqa.

Now, suppose you ban the burqa. Will those veiled women suddenly gain the freedom to go out without their enveloping garments? Of course they won’t. Instead, they will find themselves confined within the four walls of their home, prisoners of their inability to put on the veil that set them free.

Pretty strange way of enforcing female emancipation if you ask me!

Then, the third excuse is the “security” one. In these days of Islamophobia and terrorism-mongering, this strikes a raw nerve. In fact it’s so clearly designed to strike a raw nerve that you know right away that it’s a fake argument.

Let’s think about a veiled woman in the street. Sure, she could be hiding a bomb under her niqab’s folds. Hell, if it’s winter, any guy or gal in a heavy jacket could be hiding a bomb under said jacket. Do you ban jackets?

Then, in a world where Al Qaeda has already produced and used intestine bombs [4], a burqa-clad suicide bomber would be rather…obvious, no?

But let’s not even go to all that. A burqa-clad woman stands out in a crowd, instantly. If you are in a situation where you need to check her identity, just ask a policewoman to do it. It’s a system used in India, for example, where a large number (yet very, very far from a majority, let alone all) of Muslim women are veiled, and so far it’s worked more or less perfectly.

In North India, a lot of Muslim women,who are otherwise poor, semi/illiterate,and from fundamentalist families,wear the veil. They go shopping,work,even drive,wearing it. I’ve treated veiled Muslim women many times. You ban the veil,and what happens to them? Answer-they’re, instantly, disempowered.

The irony is that the nations banning the veil have almost no veiled people,while nations full of veiled women don’t seem to have any problems with them. You’d think India might have more problems than France with the veil,wouldn’t you, assuming of course that said problems exist?

Right.

But of course all this veil-banning has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the three “arguments” advanced. It has everything to do with scoring cheap political points in an environment where Muslim-bashing is an easy way to popularity, so long as you don’t openly call it Muslim-bashing. The fear of Muslims has seeped so thoroughly into modern Europe (replacing the fear of Jews) that anything that targets them will get electoral support, no matter how ridiculous it is.

And of course this veil-banning is counterproductive. Leave the veil alone, and it’s fairly certain that the children of the veil-wearing generation will abandon it for what their friends and colleagues are wearing, or their children will. But ban the veil, and wearing it becomes an instant act of defiance, a badge of resistance against cultural diktat. I’d be very surprised if non-niqab-wearing Muslim women in France don’t now start wearing it as a mark of protest.

And since populism and tokenism aren’t the prerogative of any one party, the Islamic Right will (in case it hasn’t already done so) instantly leap on the ban as yet another proof of the evilness of the Crusader West, and use it as a tool to further raise anti-Western hatred. It suits their agenda perfectly.

In fact this kind of thing (like Switzerland’s banning of mosque minarets, another ludicrous bit of stupidity) is so tailored towards cleaving societies asunder that I’d be astonished if those responsible weren’t doing it deliberately.

Clashes of civilisations can be created in inventive ways.

Sources:

[1] French Parliament to Investigate a Possible Ban on the Burqa and Niqab - NYTimes.com

[2] BBC News - Belgian committee votes for full Islamic veil ban

[3] Why I will defy France's 'burqa law' | World news | The Observer

[4] http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sout….1002 56280.html

Further reading:

The French Ban on Niqab and Burqas: An Exercise in Empathy - Technorati Politics

[Bhim]

Why do all the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis here pretend that they don't eat curry

Forum pe ye Angrez bane hui hai..

Ye to kacha ghost khate hai,

Koi identity to hai nahi in becharo ki, kabhi kuch to kabhi kuch...

Atleast India has made curry international dish.

[Abu Zolfiqar]

you log in to a Pakistani defence forum then talk about Pakistani's identity.

who sounds more insecure?

[AstanoshKhan]

A rich Muslim man in France -Rachid Nekkaz- has put aside 1 million Euros and has vowed publically to use it to pay the fines for all those Muslim women in France who choose to hold on their burkas and niqaabs.

Rich Muslim vows to pay all French burka fines | News & Politics | News & Comment | The First Post

[Abu Zolfiqar]

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A+ for effort and dedication

why not spend it for a social program or pay for the tuition of some poors