For those who are interested in this controversy...
INDEPENDENT online:
"There’s a big fuss in Britain because government minister Jack Straw said that he doesn’t feel comfortable talking to his women constituents, in his office, when they are wearing a full veil. He didn’t mean that he doesn’t like the full veil because he doesn’t like Islam. He meant that he doesn’t like conversing with people whose faces he can’t see. One person commented to the BBC: “Talking to a woman wearing a full veil is like talking to someone wearing a crash-helmet or a balaclava.”
All hell broke out, as has become the custom, now that Europeans have chosen to see extremists as being the representatives and spokesmen of Muslims in general, which they are not. Mr Straw is right, of course – nobody likes talking to people whose facial expressions they cannot see, leaving them at a loss to interpret emotions or gauge reactions. Words are only part of the conversational exchange; facial expression is the rest.
It’s the reason why it’s considered very bad manners to keep your dark glasses on when speaking to somebody else, unless you are both sitting in the blinding sun on a beach. Concealment of the face is interpreted in European culture as an act of social hostility, with strong negative significance. The person with the concealed face is seen to be up to no good, because to hide one’s face is to hide one’s identity. Historically, masking one’s face in public was permitted only during the Saturnalian excess of carnival. On other days, it could lead to one’s arrest.
Now the British Prime Minister has joined the debate, saying that the full veil “is a mark of separation, and that’s why it makes other people from outside the (Muslim) community feel uncomfortable.” Tony Blair said that it would be “going too far” to say that women don’t have the right to swathe their faces in cloth on British streets – and in this he is completely correct, given that in a free country one may wear what one pleases, as long as one’s primary and secondary sexual organs are kept covered in towns and cities. “I do think that we need to confront this issue of how to integrate people properly with our society,” Mr Blair said. “All the evidence shows that when people integrate more, they achieve more as well.” He was alluding to the failure of most Muslim immigrants to do well in Britain, educationally and financially.
Mr Blair is right about this, too. Success is dependent on complete integration into the host society. That’s why Maltese immigrants tend to do astoundingly well in Britain but less well in Australia, Canada and the USA, where they herd together and try to recreate Maltese life and mores in an alien culture. The Maltese who emigrate to England – and most of them end up there, rather than in other parts of Britain – become more English than the English. A Maltese working-class family will morph, within the space of one generation, into a Liverpudlian or Manchurian working-class family, complete with authentic accent, attitude and habits.
Higher up the social scale, the Maltese Ć©migrĆ©s will turn into something plucked from A Passage to India, reinterpreted in 21st-century clothes, clipping their vowels like the Queen and walking around like Prince Charles. Let’s not be mean to them, though, for they have discovered the truth of the ages-old recipe for successful survival: when in Rome, do as the Romans do. The saying is supposed to be a contraction of some advice given to (Saint) Augustine by (Saint) Ambrose: “Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more; si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi” (when you are in Rome, live the Roman way; when you are elsewhere, live as they do there.”
This is what the historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has to say about Maltese emigrants to Britain, in his book Millennium: “The Maltese and Montserratian communities show the range of adaptive strategies. The tiny island of Montserrat sent more people over in the 1950s and 1960s, proportionately speaking, than any other West Indian island, driven by the collapse of the island’s sugar industry in 1952. There are fewer than 5,000 of them but they stick together. They marry each other. They settle together in spots like Long Ground in Birmingham, named after a village in Montserrat, or worship together in Pentecostal churches in Stoke Newington. They share business, form rotating credit associations, exchange visits – called “passing” – at Christmas and are tied to home by remittances and the fear of expulsion. The Maltese, by contrast – of whom there are 30,000 permanently in Britain by a common estimate – migrate singly and live dispersed. They blend into the British background – often in conscious flight from an identity besmirched by the stereotype of the vicious ponce, the evil reputation of allegedly Maltese gang leaders who practised the “unEnglish crime” of pimping in the 1950s. The difference between the Montserratians and Maltese is not to be explained by the colour of their skins. Cypriots are keen to cocoon themselves in their own culture; Ugandan Asians to forego theirs.”
Some Muslim agitators in Britain have made it loudly known that they think the resentment with which the veil is viewed by the non-Muslim British is caused by growing Islamophobia. That only shows how unfamiliar they are with the social culture of the country in which they live, which is the world’s oldest democracy, with the most ancient tradition of free speech, and one of the first to embrace the concept of the civil liberties of the individual.
Resentment against the veil, especially the full veil, has nothing to do with religion. The native British do not look askance at Sikh turbans, crucifixes worn round the necks of Roman Catholics, the beards, curls and caps of Orthodox Jews, or even the old-fashioned black gowns and headgear of nuns – even though Roman Catholicism and Papist folk have been the traditional enemy since the days of Henry VIII, and suspicion of Semites has as long a history in Britain as it does in the rest of Europe.
The reaction to the veil is hostile because the wearing of the veil is in itself perceived to be hostile. It goes against the hard-fought-for and cherished democratic principles of British society in general, but on one in particular, which is that women are not inferior to men and cannot be held in subjugation to them. This means that women cannot be dominated and ruled by their husbands, fathers, uncles or brothers. That is one of the founding principles of modern European society, and it brooks no disagreement. The law of the land takes precedence over family custom or misguided religious tradition.
The women who wear the veil, covering their face or just their hair and ears, claim that it is a matter of decency and prudence, rather than subjugation. This is something with which Western women can never agree. Women raised in a strict Muslim family in an undemocratic Islamic country don’t have the full perspective on the issues at play here. We shouldn’t be surprised. Women raised under Roman Catholic oppression in Malta in the 1940s had no proper perspective, either. To Europeans raised in secular democratic societies, the veil is seen for what it is: yet another of the worldwide, cross-cultural, pan-historical and pan-religious attempts by men to keep women under control, because of fear of what might happen if they don’t, in this instance by keeping them under wraps. As for the full veil, European women regard it with absolute horror, because it is an extreme manifestation of men’s oppression of women. The real emotion which completely swathed women engender in us is not fear of Islam, as the extremists seem to think, but pity for these creatures trapped in a system from which they cannot escape even if they want to.
The veil has nothing to do with the Koran. It is about as compulsory in Islam as the wearing of a crucifix is in Roman Catholicism. Yet it is untrue to say that women are taking it up of their own free will. People living in societies in which religion is dominant and used as a form of control are pressured into conformity. Look what happens in our own society: everybody resents duttrina classes as an imposition, but everybody conforms and sends their children along all the same, not because they believe, but because they feel they have to. It’s the same with the veil. Until fairly recently, cities in many Muslim countries were full of women in fashionable clothes, wearing make-up and with coiffed hair. Now they’re all wrapped up in veils – even if they don’t want to. It’s the pressure of society.
In the long term, it is education that will “rescue” women who live in a repressive Muslim social structure, in the same way that it rescued women who lived in an oppressive environment controlled and monitored by the Roman Catholic Church. Both religions seek to control society by first controlling women. Give Rome an inch, and we’ll be no better off than the veiled women. Thank heavens for the separation of church and state. Yet the long term will be very long, and it is almost regrettable that the rules of freedom of expression – and it is this freedom that governs the wearing of veils, and not freedom of religion – cannot be bent or broken to ban this symbol of female oppression. Curiously, it was a Muslim country – Tunisia – that had the guts to call the veil by its true name, and to have banned, since 1981, the wearing of it in public.
"
