OnIslam & News Agencies
Tuesday, 26 November 2013 00:00
Jaffary, the Concordia professor asserted that veil should remain as a free choice for Muslim women in Quebec.
CAIRO – Showing solidarity to the Muslim minority, two renowned Montreal professors have donned hijab in a protest against the proposed ban on religious symbols in the Parti Québécois’ secular charter.
“I wear it as a kind of sign of solidarity,” Concordia University history professor Nora Jaffary told CBC on Monday, November 25.
Recently, Quebec has been the home of religious debates since the proposal of the controversial Parti Québécois charter which claims protecting state secularism by prohibiting public-sector workers from wearing religious symbols in workplaces such as schools, hospitals and daycares.
Jaffary, the Concordia professor asserted that veil should remain as a free choice for Muslim women in Quebec.
The ban would affect everyone from government workers and doctors to teachers and daycare workers.
Rejecting the charter, Jaffary as well as McGill University political science professor Catherine Lu decided to don veil in protest.
While Jaffary is still wearing the veil to campus, Lu wore the veil for a week in September to stir discussion in her classroom.
The Concordia professor asserted that veil should remain as a free choice for Muslim women in Quebec.
She added that the proposed ban would target a group of minorities in Quebec, singling out Muslim women as a main victim of the charter.
Therefore, Jaffary decided to wear the veil to show her support, calling on more people to don veil to add more weight to the protest.
“If many people are wearing religious signs, it’s impossible to tell who’s wearing them for what reason and so it sort of muddies the waters.”
Muslims make around 2.8 percent of Canada’s 32.8 million population, and Islam is the number one non-Christian faith in the north American country.
Islam sees hijab as an obligatory code of dress, not a religious symbol displaying one’s affiliations.
A survey has showed the overwhelming majority of Muslims are proud to be Canadian.
In a recent poll, most for the Quebeckers were found not concerned about religious accommodations.
Though it has the second largest Muslim population in Canada, the east-central province of Quebec is one of the most Islamophobic provinces in the country, where Muslims are facing different kinds of discrimination and racism.
I have seen western educated Muslim women are in Burqa while their mothers never even covered their heads in Pakistan. I do not know whether it is due to western education or because they find themselves victim of racism. According to Lord Bartend Russell, western education makes a man stupid and selfish. The credit crunch in the world is due to the policies of blue eyed western educated elites. British schooling is also in a mess because of such western educated elites.
Burqa is not locking women, it is a buffer line between protecting chastity and exposing. Being naked and drunk is acceptable but being covered and modest is inhuman.
No body has the right to tell a woman how to dress, or worse, how to undress? Let her wear what she likes, especially if it’s part of her religion. I see the banning of headscarves or niqabs as an attack on both religious freedom and on the rights of women & girls. A veil ban targets very few women; it speaks to a fear of other who is Muslim. This is Islamophobia. In the United Kingdom, there is a social and economic pressure on Muslim women not to cover themselves with headscarf or a veil. The tiny minority of women are being blamed for all the failure of integration policies through out Europe. European Muslims are more worried about the economy, the cost of living, decent housing and racism than about a burqa ban.
French president wants Muslim women to be topless like his wife who posed topless in fashion shows. He has no right to ban the burqa because it is undemocratic and an unqualified attack on individual freedom. Burqa is not just a piece of cloth but a lot of ideological and cultural connotation to it. Women are just being exploited in the name of rights. Burqa protects women’s rights and treat each women like a princess. No one has the right to ban the freedom of choice in a secular and democratic country. The right to choice is a basic fundamental right the person should have.
French president’s interpretation of burqa as a symbol of subservience is false. It is a usual habit of western ideologists to twist history and distort the facts in order to project their culture as superior one. The president should be criminally tried for spreading such falsehood. To veil or not to veil should be an individual choice. Dress codes are for children, not for adults. Government legislated dress codes for the Taliban religious policy not western democracies. Women should be free to wear bursas. If women can get away with wearing cropped shirts and pants that show their panties, they should be able to wear Burqahs too.
Those Muslim women in Europe who want to wear burqa are being asked to migrate to another country, remind one of Shiv Sena’s suggestion to India’s Muslims to migrate to Pakistan or qubristan(graveyard). There is no difference of mentality between Hindus and Europeans. Both of them have no respect and tolerate those who are different.
People should understand that better than 90% of the women in France and Belgium (as also UK and Germany) who wear burqa, are young women who were born in those countries; they did not migrate from another country. In fact some of them converted to Islam from Christianity and Judaism. .
The lawmakers in Belgium and France are trying to target such a small population is pure irrationality. Unless the motivation is racial and sectarian hatred of the Muslims. The same as BJP and Sangh Parivar in India.
Equal rights, human rights, women’s; rights are not just nice topics of discussion after dinner; or to make women the plaything for men’s pleasure. They mean the right of each woman to determine her lifestyle as she so choses. The best thing to spread something is to outlaw it. If you outlaw burqas now in France, it will soon stand as a martyred symbol of ethnic cultural tradition in the face of racist oppression. Do you really want that? The fact is that western tradition of exposing female skin for the edification of the male sex is degrading. I think I’d rather walk around the street looking like a ninja than wearing what girls these days are expected to wear. If I dressed up like a ninja all the time in the street It wouldnt hurt any one. So why the big fuss? I see the argument for oppression, but how the heck are you gonna know if its oppression or if the woman really wants to cover up?
Human rights organizations have declared such bans to be illegal and a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as violating the rights to freedom of expression and religion. Lawyers for human rights and Islamic groups are preparing to challenge the bans in both national courts and eventually, the European Court of Human Rights.
One Muslim woman, Caroline Chaiima, writing in Lepoint.fr, said she wore a veil: “Let those most closely concerned speak. I am a French woman born in France, with French parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and I am a Muslim. I wear the full veil and I feel like saying: So what? I am happy behind the veil, I protect myself from depraved stares. Neither my father, nor my brother, nor my husband forced the full veil upon me; it’s a personal choice.”
Iftikhar Ahmad
London School of Islamics Trust
http://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk