Art by Khalid Albaih/Flickr (Creative Commons)
A Q&A post last week that highlighted the reactions of three prominent Muslim women in California to a controversial French law banning face-covering veils, enacted last week, has generated a lively debate in the comments section.
While the arguments have been heated, and the opinions not all politically correct, it has been an interesting discussion in that it displays how there are different ways of defining freedom.
The post featured interviews with Hadeer Soliman, vice president of the Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine; Edina Lekovic, director of policy and programming for the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles; and Zahra Billoo, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The interviews were conducted by KPCC intern Yasmin Nouh, who herself is Muslim and wears hijab, the traditional head scarf.
The new French law bans what is is referred to there as burqa or niqab, a veil covering the face that is worn by religious Muslim women for modesty. The French government has defended the ban as promoting gender equality, while critics have called it an appeal to anti-Muslim voters.
The three California women interviewed took what might be considered an American approach to the controversy: A common thread to their reaction was the idea that Muslim women in France should have a right to choose how they dress. Some readers agreed, some didn’t.
Alimannan, who blogs about Muslim issues, wrote:
Regulating freedom of choice is not the way forward. The French need to “integrate” Muslim women into their society through alternative measures that are based on the concept of equality…
And no, the Veil is not a symbol of oppression unless someone can show me empirical data arguing such a point.
