Burka ban

I still wonder if burka-wearing women are allowed to speak to men?

I once attempted to speak to burkisioner (that's a good one, isn't it?) to offer her a space in a queue and her man headed me off very aggressively with a 'talk to me'. This was in rural Ireland.

smacl wrote: »

Quite right, which is why I'm at a loss as to why you dragged herr Führer into this debate. Seems bizarre in this context.

Refusing to stand up for what is right may bring severe reprecussions even in a democratic state, even when someone is democratically elected.

In contemprary Ireland, apathy towards everything is the order of the day and a mood of passive compliance and a willingness to look the other way seems to be prevailing with regard the burka, and all the connotations that surrond it. Here we have another group of women imprisoned by religion, with the men controlling the religion and the women. I would have hoped we as a country would have learned our lesson in this regard, but still we tolerate the intolerable.

When a state is fundamenatally linked with a religion little good comes from it as we well know; look at Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic.

Turkey is an example of a traditional Islamic country that saw the separation of state and religion. When Atatürk outlawed the veil (and the fez) in Turkey and closed traditional religious schools, this allowed for a massive increase in the literacy rates in women. Further more, the 1926 monogomy rights changed aspirations in this newly secular country and by 1932 Turkish women had the vote.

However, Afghanistan and Taliban are an example of a culture that is as we all know anti women, the burqa is the strongest symbol of oppression violence and control, it has shattered the lives of many women and men.

An article in the Guardian titled "We don't want the burqas back" summoned up the feelings of many Afghan women and found "A 2012 survey of women across Afghanistan by the charity ActionAid found that nine out of 10 feared the departure of the international community, believing that their lives will significantly deteriorate. And violence against women has never been higher: 87% of women report domestic abuse.

The return of 2.2 million girls to school after 2001 was considered the international community's great triumph, but in the past few years schools have been closing behind the departing backs of phased-out foreign forces. There have been reports of schoolgirls poisoned and beaten, headteachers assassinated and classrooms firebombed. The majority of girls don't stay on after fifth grade and nine out of 10 15-year-old girls are illiterate. Some girls are enrolled in schools but never go"

Afghan women don't want to wear a burqa despite persistant indoctrination and the fear of much worse, they understand what a burqa is for, what it means.

The burqa should not be tolerated in any equal society becuase by its very nature it is a tool of inequality - we shouldn't ignore this or become compliant with the intolerance a burqa represents.

Would you believe I read this entire thread over the course of the last week or so. Reason being that I didn't know myself what I felt about the whole thing.

Note: I started to write this and it ended up getting really long. The TL;DR is I've ended up more or less agreeing with the ban but spent most of the post arguing against the main reasons that have been given for it!

I must say some of the arguments from the pro-ban side have been very poor, tautologies and hypocrisy abounding, but that I think is the side I've eventually landed on, albeit for different reasons to most of the rest.

I find the two main pro-ban arguments pretty weak, namely the indoctrination/inability to choose argument and the oppression reduction argument.

To take the first, there are so many ways it fails to stand up to scrutiny I could rebuff it all day, but essentially it comes down to what I think are the two most salient points:

1. The reasoning that runs thus - "you can't provide an example of a reason I consider rational for wearing a burqa, therefore none exists, therefore indoctrination" contains at least one gaping leap of faith.

Even if I can't in my wildest dreams think of an explanation for wearing a burqa other than indoctrination, the idea that this proves indoctrination is the only possible reason is the sort of logical fallacy that would be laughed off any other thread on the forum. It's the stuff of "the mountain exploded, wonder why", "god did it", "I doubt it", "You don't have any other explanation do you?", "No", "QED".

It's pretty trivial to think up other reasons anyway, e.g. fashion statement/attention seeking, a manifestation or expression of rebellion against western sexualisation of women on, or just being subversive for its own sake.

But anyway, even if you can figure out a way to refute those examples to yourself the fact remains that absence of evidence for rational reasons does not equal evidence of absence of same.

I don't think that's even the biggest problem with the line of reason which is obviously that EVERYBODY is indoctrinated. The arguments back and forth about grown ups adopting a religion obviously having been brainwashed is lol because there is no logical difference whatsoever between holding that opinion and them holding the opinion that a person who adopted atheism as an adult has been brainwashed by Richard Dawkins.

And let's be honest, for most of us that's true to one degree or another. If I don't know how I feel about something I typically ask Christopher Hitchens through the wonders of YouTube. More often than not, he convinces me, the odd time (like on this issue) he doesn't. If it's a more current topic I can't make up my mind about, I often wait to see what oldrnwisr thinks and he usually gets me on board. The only reason I'm an atheist is because George Carlin brainwashed convinced me to be one all those years ago.

For religious people, substitute god in for Hitchens, Dawkins, Carlin and oldrnwisr and it's the same thing. They ask their book or their priest when they don't know what the story is and find an answer they can jive with most of the time.

I happen to be from Kerry, therefore I think gaelic football is the greatest sport ever conceived of and that Maurice Fitzgerald is the most sublimely talented athlete of his time. I'm hardly unbiased, clearly I've been indoctrinated and coerced into this line of reasoning by my cultural upbringing, but does that mean if there's a poll about it somewhere my vote doesn't count?

The idea that indoctrination leads to personal decisions about personal matters we can ignore is absurd. Everything you decide to do is coloured by who you are, where you came from and what you've been told in the past, that's just life baby.

As an aside, it was mentioned but I believe ignored, the idea that we can't take a person's decision to wear a burqa seriously but we would allow them, say, to vote in a referendum about blasphemy is lol. If they can't be trusted to go into their wardrobe and pick out their clothes they can't be trusted to have a say in anything they do.

2. The argument that banning the burqa will reduce oppression is also pretty bad I think. It's been mostly covered anyway I think so I won't belabour others' points, but the whole treating the symptoms rather than the cause argument is pretty valid.

A few people have argued that it's not a bad thing to remove one small manifestation of oppression if you can, and I can see where that's coming from to a point, but really I don't particularly buy that it's a good thing either. In a vacuum, no more burqas could potentially remove the ability of some men to oppress some women by forcing them to wear the thing, but in real life the accumulation of other oppressions the ban causes probably outweighs the good, between people being forced to stay indoors and the intrinsic oppression of stopping me wearing whatever I want.

Fighting oppression is obviously a good thing, but I really don't think this gets any part of the job done at all. People were forced to cover their faces yesterday, today they're forced to uncover their face - I just don't see this as any kind of step in the right direction. Maybe it is a tiny one, maybe - but it's as near to nothing as makes no odds.

As has been said, the way to fight oppression is how we've been getting on with it for decades - we educate, we put structures in place so that when the education eventually seeps through people have support to become less oppressed, all that good stuff that's seen women go from second class citizens here to a lot closer to equal. This is obviously working pretty well already when you consider the per capita burqa wearing figures in the west compared to the less liberal regimes, you have to accept that there isn't a magic sponge we can rub on problems like these to make them go away and that it will take time, some people will take longer than others but education is the clear way this problem gets solved.

Wanting to ban burqas to reduce oppression is somewhat noble from a motivation POV I guess, but it's so philosophically dubious, and so marginal an effector that I think the negatives outweigh the positives in that regard.

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Now, all that being said, I still think I'm in favour of the ban, and the reason actually goes to the rights of everyone outside the burqa.

The thing that's been keeping me from falling fully into the anti-ban camp all the way through is this nagging discomfort at the idea of somebody opting to completely obscure their identity. I wrestled with that for a while and can't find a way to convince myself that that is a right you have.

As someone mentioned at some point, we are creatures who have evolved to communicate with one another through our senses, of which sight and the ability to gauge facial reactions etc. is obviously a key element. That's part of what makes us all human, that we can interact with one another as humans.

I haven't quite put a well articulated version of it together quite yet and maybe some discussion on the matter will help, but I feel as though one person's right to communicate with another as a human is taken away by one of the two people completely obscuring their identity. There's a refusal by one party to allow the other to be a human and to do the most basic thing a human does, which is communicate as a human (stop saying Hawai'i in there) with them. That seems like a wrong to me.

There's a counter-argument that these people want to keep themselves apart from society, and that's fair enough. I don't think I see a good reason to force someone to be in society if they don't want to be, but society is everywhere - it's in the parks, it's in the shops and in the streets. If you don't want to behave like a human and interact with the rest of the humans then cool, but maybe if you want to stay out of society altogether, stay out of it alogether.

gaynorvader wrote: »

The point was that the only people who wore burkas were Muslims. There seems to be no other reason.

"Seems" ain't no kind of science.

gaynorvader wrote: »

True. It's a difficult one to get any hard evidence on it. However, all available evidence would lead one to believe that women wear a burka due to Islamic influences. I have yet to see any evidence for any other theory.

Well, that's trivially easy to disprove - people wearing burqas as a fashion statement:



Someone - I think it was Nodin - gave a pretty compelling argument for women adopting the burqa as a symbol of resistance in Iran as well.

Regardless, not being able to think of a reason or not getting on board with any reason you're given makes no impression on the argument that every decision everyone has ever made is based on how they've been mentally conditioned by life, or on the fact that if you can't trust someone to pick their clothes you can't trust them to vote or do anything else either.

keane2097 wrote: »

Well, that's trivially easy to disprove - people wearing burqas as a fashion statement:

Source for this picture?

keane2097 wrote: »

Someone - I think it was Nodin - gave a pretty compelling argument for women adopting the burqa as a symbol of resistance in Iran as well.

That would be resistance to how said women would be treated in said Islamic country if they didn't wear the burka, right? That's still wearing it due to Islamic influences.

keane2097 wrote: »

Regardless, not being able to think of a reason or not getting on board with any reason you're given makes no impression on the argument that every decision everyone has ever made is based on how they've been mentally conditioned by life, or on the fact that if you can't trust someone to pick their clothes you can't trust them to vote or do anything else either.

And if we follow this argument in the direction its logically going then we cant criticise homophobes or racist because they are only the outputs of their environments too.

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Source for this picture?

Google images.

Mark Hamill wrote: »

That would be resistance to how said women would be treated in said Islamic country if they didn't wear the burka, right? That's still wearing it due to Islamic influences.

The details are pretty irrelevant, the point is that wearing a burqa as a form of protest is a pretty rational idea, whether it's against sexualistation of women in the west or whatever else.

Mark Hamill wrote: »

And if we follow this argument in the direction its logically going then we cant criticise homophobes or racist because they are only the outputs of their environments too.

I can already see several ways I'm going to be dismissing your elaboration on this point off hand.

I've said I'm falling down on the side of the ban, it's just that your logic is illogical.

keane2097 wrote: »

Google images.




The details are pretty irrelevant, the point is that wearing a burqa as a form of protest is a pretty rational idea, whether it's against sexualistation of women in the west or whatever else.



I can already see several ways I'm going to be dismissing your elaboration on this point off hand.

I've said I'm falling down on the side of the ban, it's just that your logic is illogical.

keane2097 wrote: »

Sweet, add "social commentary" to the list!

Sure, let's legalise wife beating while we're at it, I mean it's used in theatre, right?

Dublin Red Devil wrote: »

I think the Hijab is acceptable But the Burqa, Niqab and Chador should all be banned from Public places

If acceptable is a legal term .... then yes I agree. Bt we MUST outlaw the covering of the face at all costs. It is an abominable and offensive thing and a crime against a woman's identity. Surely we have a culture and society that can stand up and say this is too far.

Deleted User wrote: »

I'm also uncomfortable with the notion that dress codes should be imposed on people by law - even if that is supposedly being done in the name of a political or philosophical belief system to which I might happen to subscribe.

I find it deeply offensive to equate the permanent public erasing of a woman's very identity ... to some kind of 'dress code', like uggs or midi skirts or little black dresses.