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State intervention in womens clothing, whether it involves promoting the burka or banning it, achieves the same purpose: subjugating womens bodies to the dictates of men.
By Rafia Zakaria
ACCORDING to seismological surveys, Iran is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world. The last major earthquake there, which occurred in the town of Bam, killed tens of thousands of people. Some days ago, conservative Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sadeghi blamed Irans women for the occurrence of earthquakes.
During a televised prayer sermon, he said that women who did not dress appropriately were spreading promiscuity in society and that this was the cause of the increasing number of earthquakes.
Meanwhile, a few thousand miles away in Calais, French President Nicholas Sarkozy ordered members of his party in parliament to prepare legislation that would ban the burka from public spaces in France. The French announcement came a day before the Belgian parliament was set to pass a ban on the full-face veil in public spaces which would have made it the first European nation to do so.
While the Belgian ban failed to pass be cause the government collapsed following unsuccessful coalition talks, the increasingly heated debate on burkas continues across the globe.
In the United States, a little-known blogger heard the statement made by the Iranian cleric and started her own protest, asking all women offended by the pronouncement to dress immodestly on Monday, April 26, to see if it would cause any earthquakes. Finally, in Pakistan, theatre group Ajoka claims that the Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) has imposed restrictions on the staging of its play Burqavaganza, because it discusses burka-wearing women.
These politicised screaming matches over the covering and uncovering of women span the world and traverse varied political contexts. These have specific complexities and nuances. Yet the resounding theme that emerges from the recent outcry over the burka in particular and womens dress in general is that women continue to ultimately be defined by their bodies and the squares of flesh they choose to cover or uncover.
If they choose to shroud themselves in a burka in France, they are labelled as repressed and unwilling to integrate with French culture and society. If they do not cover themselves in conservative places, their bodies and sexuality are considered the cause of divine punishment in the form of natural disasters. In socio-cultural paradigms where womens bodies symbolise familial and national honour, as in Iran or Pakistan, their covering is seen as corresponding directly to the piety and righteousness of society. Consequently, there is a brutal and obstinate disregard for womens autonomy and their status as human beings equal to men.
Conversely, in western societies, a similarly reductionist calculus construes the exhibition of the female body as a sign of liberation, with an equally stubborn blindness to how such sexualisation debases women. Both versions are replete with untruths perpetuated by men. And just as a woman in a burka is com plicit in the lie that the female form is the source of discord, so is the woman who displays her body complicit in demeaning it to a mere sexual object.
The burka has been reborn in the new millennium as a political symbol. French and Belgian politicians can use it as a convenient rallying cry to highlight the otherness of an immigrant minority that suffers deep discrimination and is largely blamed for all the ills facing the French republic. Focusing on the so-called ghastly barbarity of the burka even if few women actually wear it becomes a convenient means to demonise an already beleaguered minority that has repeatedly been described by members of Sarkozys parliament as lazy louts living off the labours of the French people.
On the other side in Iran, where the regime is beset with an insurgency that is gaining power and support, it is easy to amass political support by insisting that arguments that support the autonomy of women to choose their own dress will enervate the pious and supposedly pure so ciety created by the revolution. Control over women, the invisibility that the chador or burka impose, becomes a convenient proxy for the power of the Islamic republic which, if challenged, will lead to divine punishment.
If the Taliban and the Islamic republic in Iran rely on forcing women to be invisible as a sign of political control, the move to get women to expose themselves as a sign of protest against the Sadeghis pronouncement demonstrates just how dead, mute and reductionist the feminist movement in the West has become.
With pornographic images of women easily accessible on the Internet and women undergoing surgery to alter their physical appearance, perceiving exhibitionism as a form of protest against the deliberate subjugation of women promotes the erroneous idea that only the forcible covering of women is a product of patriarchy. Western feminists are similarly silent on the fact that US/Nato forces are complicit in supporting in Afghanistan certain re-tribalisation strategies that entail subjecting women to child marriage and honour killings.
In the Pakistani context, the restrictions al legedly imposed by a state institution on a play satirising burka-clad women portray another dimension of the controversy: state authorities intervening to prioritise the rights of women who wear the burka over those who refuse it. Such taking of sides uses state legitimacy to confer moral superiority on those women who wear the burka as the good women worthy of support and makes others out to be the bad rebels who must be silenced.
The Burqavaganza controversy, in the covert appeasement that it affords to those who believe that all women should indeed be covered by burkas, is thus as repugnant as that raging in France and Belgium. In sum, state intervention in womens clothing, whether it involves promoting the burka or banning it, achieves the same purpose: subjugating womens bodies to the dictates of men. ¦ The writer is a US-based attorney teaching constitutional history and political philosophy.
By Rafia Zakaria
ACCORDING to seismological surveys, Iran is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world. The last major earthquake there, which occurred in the town of Bam, killed tens of thousands of people. Some days ago, conservative Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sadeghi blamed Irans women for the occurrence of earthquakes.
During a televised prayer sermon, he said that women who did not dress appropriately were spreading promiscuity in society and that this was the cause of the increasing number of earthquakes.
Meanwhile, a few thousand miles away in Calais, French President Nicholas Sarkozy ordered members of his party in parliament to prepare legislation that would ban the burka from public spaces in France. The French announcement came a day before the Belgian parliament was set to pass a ban on the full-face veil in public spaces which would have made it the first European nation to do so.
While the Belgian ban failed to pass be cause the government collapsed following unsuccessful coalition talks, the increasingly heated debate on burkas continues across the globe.
In the United States, a little-known blogger heard the statement made by the Iranian cleric and started her own protest, asking all women offended by the pronouncement to dress immodestly on Monday, April 26, to see if it would cause any earthquakes. Finally, in Pakistan, theatre group Ajoka claims that the Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) has imposed restrictions on the staging of its play Burqavaganza, because it discusses burka-wearing women.
These politicised screaming matches over the covering and uncovering of women span the world and traverse varied political contexts. These have specific complexities and nuances. Yet the resounding theme that emerges from the recent outcry over the burka in particular and womens dress in general is that women continue to ultimately be defined by their bodies and the squares of flesh they choose to cover or uncover.
If they choose to shroud themselves in a burka in France, they are labelled as repressed and unwilling to integrate with French culture and society. If they do not cover themselves in conservative places, their bodies and sexuality are considered the cause of divine punishment in the form of natural disasters. In socio-cultural paradigms where womens bodies symbolise familial and national honour, as in Iran or Pakistan, their covering is seen as corresponding directly to the piety and righteousness of society. Consequently, there is a brutal and obstinate disregard for womens autonomy and their status as human beings equal to men.
Conversely, in western societies, a similarly reductionist calculus construes the exhibition of the female body as a sign of liberation, with an equally stubborn blindness to how such sexualisation debases women. Both versions are replete with untruths perpetuated by men. And just as a woman in a burka is com plicit in the lie that the female form is the source of discord, so is the woman who displays her body complicit in demeaning it to a mere sexual object.
The burka has been reborn in the new millennium as a political symbol. French and Belgian politicians can use it as a convenient rallying cry to highlight the otherness of an immigrant minority that suffers deep discrimination and is largely blamed for all the ills facing the French republic. Focusing on the so-called ghastly barbarity of the burka even if few women actually wear it becomes a convenient means to demonise an already beleaguered minority that has repeatedly been described by members of Sarkozys parliament as lazy louts living off the labours of the French people.
On the other side in Iran, where the regime is beset with an insurgency that is gaining power and support, it is easy to amass political support by insisting that arguments that support the autonomy of women to choose their own dress will enervate the pious and supposedly pure so ciety created by the revolution. Control over women, the invisibility that the chador or burka impose, becomes a convenient proxy for the power of the Islamic republic which, if challenged, will lead to divine punishment.
If the Taliban and the Islamic republic in Iran rely on forcing women to be invisible as a sign of political control, the move to get women to expose themselves as a sign of protest against the Sadeghis pronouncement demonstrates just how dead, mute and reductionist the feminist movement in the West has become.
With pornographic images of women easily accessible on the Internet and women undergoing surgery to alter their physical appearance, perceiving exhibitionism as a form of protest against the deliberate subjugation of women promotes the erroneous idea that only the forcible covering of women is a product of patriarchy. Western feminists are similarly silent on the fact that US/Nato forces are complicit in supporting in Afghanistan certain re-tribalisation strategies that entail subjecting women to child marriage and honour killings.
In the Pakistani context, the restrictions al legedly imposed by a state institution on a play satirising burka-clad women portray another dimension of the controversy: state authorities intervening to prioritise the rights of women who wear the burka over those who refuse it. Such taking of sides uses state legitimacy to confer moral superiority on those women who wear the burka as the good women worthy of support and makes others out to be the bad rebels who must be silenced.
The Burqavaganza controversy, in the covert appeasement that it affords to those who believe that all women should indeed be covered by burkas, is thus as repugnant as that raging in France and Belgium. In sum, state intervention in womens clothing, whether it involves promoting the burka or banning it, achieves the same purpose: subjugating womens bodies to the dictates of men. ¦ The writer is a US-based attorney teaching constitutional history and political philosophy.
