Maryam Namazie’s speech at QED was very powerful and left a lot of people needing a couple of days to think over their response to it. I urge you to read it in full, right now.
What I took away from it was a strong feeling that we (and by ‘we’ I mean secularist, leftie-types) should give religion no quarter. We should not waver or compromise on issues like equality, human rights, the banning of faith schools or the disestablishment of the Church of England. These things are not part of our culture, nor ideals to aspire to. They are basic requirements of secularism and, I increasingly feel, of civilisation. It is shocking that we are even having the discussion, and we should not allow ourselves to believe that something is not utterly disgusting simply because it is the status quo, in this or any other society.
I haven’t written those thoughts up properly, and don’t intend to do so now. Here, I’m addressing just one part of the speech:
Secularism… requires the banning of burqas because they are straitjackets for women and mobile prisons. Of course you can’t ban the veil for adult women but you can still criticise it without attacking women who are veiled. The veil is a symbol like no other of what it means to be a woman under Islam – hidden from view, bound, and gagged. It is a tool for restricting and suppressing women. Of course there are some who choose to be veiled, but you cannot say it is a matter of choice because – socially speaking – the veil is anything but. There is no ‘choice’ for most women. … Take away all the pressure and intimidation and threats and you will see how many remain veiled.
When it comes to the veiling of girls in schools, though, child veiling must not only be banned in public institutions and schools but also in private schools and everywhere. Here the issue extends beyond the principle of secularism and goes straight to the heart of children’s rights. While adults may ‘choose’ veiling or a religion, children by their very nature cannot make such choices; what they do is really what their parents tell them to do. The state is duty bound to protect children and must level the playing field for children and ensure that nothing segregates them or restricts them from accessing information, advances in society and rights, playing, swimming and in general doing things children must do.
In the latest Pod Delusion, Steve Page argues that she is wrong on this point.
My fear is that if the government gets to rule on one item of clothing that a large enough number of people find offensive, then they will not stop at the burqa.
He described the burqa as “bizarre and nonsensical”, and then compared it to skydiving, saying that people should have autonomy to do bizarre and nonsensical things if they so choose. It is the sort of argument that is so simplistic it must be either unarguably true or facile, and I fear it is the latter.
He describes his approach as liberal, and if it was true that the ban is being advocated because “a large enough number of people find [the burqa] offensive” then it would be. In reality, though, his approach is libertarian. In fact, it’s precisely the argument used by the wholly illiberal Conservative party to oppose the EU Working Time Directive, a law which bans excessive hours. The Conservatives said it restricted workers’ rights — which of course is true — and therefore was a bad thing, but didn’t mention that if workers are allowed to work excessive hours then employers will take advantage of that. The truth is that workers have more freedom with the ban than without — at least, in theory. You can make the same case against the ban on working for less than £6.08/hour, or the ban on sixteen-year-olds becoming prostitutes, and in each case it’s nothing like sufficient to show that the ban is problematic. These are bans on things that nobody willingly does. They are bans on being exploited.
The burqa ban would be similar: yes, proponets say, we accept that banning an item of clothing is illiberal and would very much prefer not to, but most veiled women are such not by choice but by intimidation, and banning the burqa represents a very straightforward means of preventing that. Nobody is arguing that respecting people’s rights is unimportant — just about where the line is drawn. Repeatedly stating a premise everyone accepts helps nobody. Such arguments may convince, but convincing someone of your conclusion using false arguments accomplishes nothing but distorting polling data.
In fact, not only does he refuse to address the practical arguments for the ban, he almost argues that you shouldn’t:
The right to do things that other people consider stupid should be protected, simply because we should not appoint an intellectual arbiter to take such decisions out of our hands. Like free speech, you either allow everything, including things you dislike and consider potentially harmful, or you run the risk of letting the government choose what you can or cannot think or say.
…
The decision to ban the burqa can only be justified if one decides that one religious symbol is less worthy of protection than another, and is willing to sacrifice one’s so-called secularist principles for the greater good.
I don’t know Page’s position on every issue under the sun, obviously, but it seems likely he accepts that at least one of these should be illegal:
- Alternative medicine practitioners telling sick people they have a safe and effective remedy to hand.
- Fraudsters scamming money out of vulnerable people by lying to them.
- Threatening someone into committing a crime you would otherwise have to do yourself.
- Advertising a product that does not do what you say it does.
- Branding innocent people as paedophiles in a national newspaper.
You can’t simply say “all speech must be free” as if it’s self-evidently true. Loads of people do, but I’ve never once heard any of them criticise skeptics for fighting against dangerous false medical claims, so apparently they are in favour of some restrictions. Why should secularism be immune to real-world compromises?
That’s not really the point, though: you don’t need to compromise your “so-called” secularist principles to ban full-body veiling. Secularism does not require you to pander to any and all religious whims. Accomodationism requires that. Secularism requires you to ignore any and all religious whims. Secularism requires you to pay absolutely no heed to the teachings or traditions of Islam when you decide whether or not banning a particular item of clothing would be a justified or unjustified limitation of your citizens’ liberties. The feelings of individual Muslims should obviously be considered, but one of Namazie’s points in her speech was that we should never assume what those feelings are simply because we have labelled the people.
Ultimately, I think the only question here is what the actual effects of a ban would be. Is there evidence that the ban would have a net positive effect? Page does discuss this, but only briefly and, I think, superficially. He suggests that banning the mobile prison would simply move oppressed women to static prisons — their houses — but offers no evidence of this, which makes me think it is merely a post-hoc rationalisation. But even granting him that assumption, it doesn’t entirely support his thesis. As far as I can tell, he is against bans in principle but this argument is against this particular ban in practice. It is less an argument against a burqa ban than it is an argument for a burqa ban and a system to detect, punish and prevent the kidnapping of women by their husbands and parents. That is a bigger intrusion into people’s lives and rights, and while you could argue that the larger intrusion required to actually solve the problem at hand is not justified, Page doesn’t.
In short, I think that most discussion of any potential burqa ban, particularly on the opposition side, fails to acknowledge or address the actual reasons for it, and that firing off clichéd truisms about bans being bad and freedom being good will only ever be part of the problem. Skeptics in particular are constantly having to make a subtle argument against an opponent with bombastic sledge-hammer of a case, so I would hope they would understand well how annoying it is for a brash interlocutor to confidently and repeatedly assert simplistic things like “I took this pill and I got better” or “loads of people use it” while you’re trying to explain about regression to the mean and recall bias.
But in this case at least, it seems that people are happy to shout down a reasoned argument with a cliché.
I think the comparison with sky diving is completely missing the point because people skydive out of free choice, and people who are brought up in a culture where the wearing of a veil or burqa is considered normal are usually oppressed into that from an early age. Not similar at all.
We’ve discussed this on Righteous Indignation previously, and often come to blows with our listeners with our opinions. Personally I feel that an outright ban has the potential to oppress the women beneath the burqa even more by making it ‘unacceptable’ for them to go out into public because their culture forbids it, and our culture forbids they step out covered.
I do believe that people need to be empowered to make the decision for themselves that it IS acceptable for them to step outside without covering themselves. I just think it is the fairer, and all round more productive solution. I just have no idea how one would go about achieving that?
The examples you give of things Page may consider making illegal don’t really work. They’re not analogous with wearing the burqa; they’re analogous with forcing somebody to wear the burqa. There’s one easy way to see that that’s an absolutely vital point: if you enact a ban on full-body veils, and you find a person wearing a full body veil in public, who do you punish? Well, you punish the person wearing the veil. What else could you do? Nothing else makes sense.
Similarly, there’s no ban on earning less than minimum wage. There’s a ban on paying employees less than minimum wage. If you take less than minimum wage, the law is not going to be all up in your shit for not earning enough; it’s going to be demanding that your employers stop screwing you. Nor is a 16-year-old prostitute committing a crime – the buyer is.
Banning full-body veils because women are coerced into wearing them is like making it illegal to hand your phone over to a mugger.
I don’t know where I stand on a burqa ban, and in practice I expect it would depend how exactly it was implemented. I don’t like the idea of punishing someone for being oppressed either. But I think the parallel holds: if you oppose the burqa ban purely because it infringes on liberties, which is the usual given reason, then you ought logically to oppose the minimum wage.
And if you oppose it for other reasons as well then you need to state them or else you’ve not really said anything.
On the other hand, you don’t really need to state your reasons for opposing a ban until someone has made a reasonable argument in favour of one. The neutral position is not to legislate against an act. I don’t recall ever seeing such an argument – they all seem to suffer the very basic flaw I outlined above, when they are not bans against all identity-obscuring clothing for the sake of security. The arguments that you suggest are missing the point seem to me to be reasonable if you grant that it only makes sense to ban an act that is performed voluntarily. Perhaps the problem is partly one of communication? That premise seems so obvious to me that I can easily imagine not realising that somebody wasn’t working to it if they didn’t spell it out.
(Obviously the salient points are different where children are concerned – I’m not quite clear on how this post, Page’s piece and Namazie’s points join up in this regard, not least because I haven’t listened to the second of those.)
I think you do need to state your reasons for opposing a ban if you are presenting a podcast feature about why we shouldn’t have a ban.
His main stated objection struck me as a knee-jerk argument against all bans on anything ever. My minimum wage (etc) analogies were only intended to refute that case. I only intended to discuss whether the idea of legislating against burqas in some way is an acceptable limitation on personal liberty — whether we can practically do so without criminalising and further oppressing already downtrodden women is, to me, a mostly separate issue.
I think with children it would probably boil down to “any adult in charge of a child is committing an offence if that child is wearing a burqa blah blah exceptions for school plays set in saudi arabia for some reason and whatever”.
Ah, sorry, I thought you were being rather more general.
I think it’s fairly obviously not an argument against all bans; it’s an argument against bans on personal behaviour that doesn’t encroach on the lives of others. It could be applied to drug prohibition but not to the ban on murder. That’s why I think the analogies are a big problem: you’ve had to pretend the minimum wage is something that it isn’t to make it fit into the argument, and then you’ve let it spring back into place to make the argument look more absurd than it really is.
I think you can reasonably hold and consistently apply the principle that that kind of personal behaviour shouldn’t be criminalized, and if you do then you can make the case that it really isn’t worth looking at the practical outcomes.
Anyway, I’m sorry for going on when I don’t really know the pieces you’re responding to. It seems from what you’ve reproduced above that Namazie and Page agree that “of course you can’t ban the veil for adult women”, yet it doesn’t look like Page is talking about how parents dress their children at all. It’s all very confusing.
Oh, balls, didn’t hit reply. Now my face is big and your threading is RUINED.
No worries, I think the threads only go five deep anyway and we’d have hit that soon enough.
The lack of distinction between adults and children is another thing that made me think Page hadn’t bothered to engage with the actual debate. Generally the whole bit wound me up but the adult/child aspect is particular to this one podcast whereas the ‘banning things is illiberal’ tautology is very common so I wanted to address that.
And I still don’t see how the principal is affected by the implementation. You could, for example, ban the import, sale, manufacture and imposition of burqas, but not the wearing of them. As far as I can see this would skirt around your quite specific objection but not Page’s far more general one — women are still bring prevented from wearing them. I suppose I generally got the impression from his piece that he thinks the reason for banning burqas is that proponents find them offensive and not that the women inside them are there against their will. And while I’m sure many people would like to ban lots of things simply because they find them offensive, I don’t for one second think Maryam Namazie is among their number.
Page may not be using his argument as one against all bans, but that is what it is. The onus is, as you say, on the proponents of a ban to justify it, but that means that opponents can’t make an a priori case — they have to respond to that of the proponent, and Page didn’t. He made no examination of the pro-ban arguments until the last minute, and when he did, at least one of them was a complete strawman — a response to an argument that nobody had made.
Well, there’s on really obvious difference: if a burqa is smuggled in the the country and a woman is coerced into wearing it, the ban you outlined don’t make her feel criminal. I think the question of which acts the state can forcibly respond to is quite an important one.
More broadly, it’s a question of what you think the law is for. Is it OK to make an act illegal that you don’t think ought to be illegal because doing so might have positive side effects?
I don’t think it’s worth me saying much about Page, as I haven’t heard his piece, but what I was getting at before was that if you think things shouldn’t be made illegal for the sake of a side effect then you don’t have to tackle the more pragmatic arguments you say he ignored. It doesn’t so like he did a very good job, though, so I say this mainly t help explain my previous comments.
I think a big part of it for me is that I would hope we could decide whether or not we should do something about burqas in general before trying to figure out what to do or how to do it. It makes no sense to argue whether or not we should make wearing them illegal. The question is whether or not we should legislate against burqas and if so, how. Focussing on just one option creates a false dilemma.
This argument is lining up, as so many do, along lines that seem to be mapped out by (predecided)politcal and philosophical belief. I prefer to respond directly as a person.
Any person who hides their face while expecting me to expose mine, and even demand a response to their words (which I would even be unable to lip read, had I the skill) will be disappointed. This is a species of bullying, by the partial definition that a bully expects one to observe rules they disdain.
So, yobs in balaclavas, riot police and their impersonators and persons (who may or may not be female) in Burkhas, you are not on my radar. As soon as you have the courage to face me as I face you,fully identifiable, I can treat you as an equal in society. Until then, find yourselves an interpreter.
Your assumptions are laughable. I wouldn’t want to meet you either, with or without a face covering.
People in this world talk about the freedom of a woman, freedom of her choice,her rights to serve the humanity as equally as men do,a question is still bothering and it bothers me when I sit to analyse and try to think to the point that is a women of any relegion is given a complete freedom in this world??? Muslim women in europe will make themselves criminal or guilty for wearing a burka or veiling face in the public when she thinks that she is doing it right? they would simply ask if a democratic state allows non muslims women to drink alchohals and roaming in the public in their bikinis then does the give them the right to cover their bodies and pray five times a day??? andrew i want you to answer this question buddy!!!
I’m not sure what point you’re getting at. There are loads of things that are illegal, and simply pointing at something that isn’t isn’t a blanket argument against something else being.
And all y’all sitting in your ivory towers drinking wine and being neurotically anal yet getting nowhere.
If it matters to you so much, why not personally interview a few burqa wearing women and find out more from a personal perspective…