People don’t half talk a lot of dross about the burka. Or rather, the burka doesn’t half make people talk a lot of dross, about everything else. Nicolas Sarkozy, the four-foot-tall French President, has decided that his countrywomen don’t have a ‘right’ to wear the burka. Damian Green, our own, taller, immigration minister, has decided that British women do have a ‘right’ to wear the burka. I haven’t a clue what either of them are on about. I wonder if they do.
It’s easy to get bogged down in this one. There’s altogether too much going on. Popular consensus is confused, but seems to be veering towards the view that all women in Islamic dress are actually nurturing secret desires to dress like Beyoncé, but afraid that their menfolk, who are rapists, might bury them up to their necks in sand and throw rocks at them until they think better of it. I daresay there’s a whiff of truth in this, but it’s striking that similar arguments are rarely made about other women who habitually feel inclined to conceal their femininity with scarves and whatnot, such as Orthodox Jews, Christian nuns, very ugly people, or the Queen.
That’s what makes me think that, whatever is going on here, it’s not really a feminist thing. And nor is it a security thing. I mean, sure, there are some places where its senseless to allow people to cover their faces (airports, Jobcentres) but plenty of others where it really doesn’t make much difference. Really, it’s about some people seeing other people looking altogether too Muslim and minding, and other people minding that they mind, and everybody trying to incorporate all of this, one way or another, into law.
It’s daft. I’m pretty sure that I, for example, have both a moral and a legal ‘right’ to go out into the street with pants on my head.
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