The European fatwa against headscarves
The BBC reports (via Indigo Jo):
Turkey can ban Islamic headscarves in universities, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.
The court rejected an appeal by a Turkish woman who argued that the state ban violated her right to an education and discriminated against her.
Leyla Sahin had brought the case in 1998 after being excluded from class at Istanbul University.
But the judges ruled that the ban was justified to maintain order and avoid giving preference to any religion.
This is the same Leyla Sahin who lost the original ruling, which I discussed last year.
Am I surprised by this ruling? No, I'm not given that much of modern secular Europe, despite bleating about religion and politics, happily acts on the prejudices of its Christian forebearers (which is itself not surprising given that secularism is an heretical Christian movement). How far do you honestly think a ban on someone wearing a cross or even a yarmulke would really get? Let's be honest and say this ban has nothing to do with any constitutional concerns.
Consider the statement from the court as reported by the BBC:
"In a society where men and women are equal, it said, a ban on religious attire such as the headscarf was justified on university premises."
I can't see the logic or reasoning in this ruling. How does a Muslim woman choosing to wear a headscarf contradicts the notion that "men and women are equal"? In fact, it this ruling does the opposite and discriminates against women who wish to express their religious beliefs, while allowing men to do the same; unless the court also favours a ban on Muslim men growing a beard. Perhaps they'd like to introduce quotas for the number of hair follicles per square centimetre on the face of men, beyond which it is classed as a "beard" and a punishable offence? Further, as I pointed out in my previous discussion on this topic, the attempts by the ECHR to attach the headscarf to "extremist" Muslim movements is pathetic, and deserves to be rubbished and derided.
The practical absurdities of these sorts of rulings are highlighted by the French experience; at least the experiences relayed to us in a BBC documentary about French female students, in the wake of the fear that a few yards of black cloth could destory de Gaulle's Fifth Republic.What if a woman who happens not to be Muslim also wears a "headscarf"? Will they send in the Fashion Police?
More naked discrimination, masquerading as a well-thought out legal ruling:
"The court did not lose sight of the fact that there were extremist political movements in Turkey which sought to impose on society as a whole their religious symbols and conception of a society founded on religious precepts," the court's ruling added.
So, in mathematical terms:
(religious beliefs + movementseven if virtually non-existent)imposing beliefs = very, very bad
((secular beliefs + state power) | Fashionable in Europe)imposing beliefs = very, very good
If people genuinely wish to improve the lot of Muslim women -- and there are a number of people who support such bans that do so out of the notion that this will help them -- then these sorts of rulings actually stand in the way of many Muslim women. What is so scary about a confident, well-educated, Muslim woman who is also "religious"? Maybe some liberal ideologues have something in common with the Taliban afterall. But then I don't think this ruling is anything to do with helping Muslim women, but about ideological beliefs.
Ultimately, the whole headscarf issue proves to me is that there is nothing 'intrinsic' about liberal ideologies: they require the mobilisation of legal and state machinery, and the sermons of hardened secular evangelicals in the media and popular culture to inculculate such beliefs into the public at large, as much as any other ideology.
November 10, 2005 in News & Current Affairs
http://underprogress.blogs.com/weblog/2005/11/
