Daniel Martin Varisco: Born Free, Unless You are Female

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University.]

I opened my email this morning and back-to-back there was instant conflict: a posting about a new Indian Deobandfatwa ruling that veiled Muslim women should not ride bicycles and another about a female French lawyer who ripped the face covering off a young Muslim girl in a shopping mall near Nantes, the latter a pre-emptive strike for the pending anti-niqab law in the French parliament. Both rulings strike me as silly, both as overtly political. So now instead of the standard “Death to America” vs. “Muhammad is a child molester” chant wars we have entered the era of dueling over social mores through Fatwa Wars. Although not as erotic as the recent tit-illating fatwa controversy, also involving women’s bodies, the battle lines are still drawn over the same resource: what males do to control women’s bodies and minds.

Let’s start with the Deoband bicycle banning. The commentary by Nigar Ataulla, an Indian Muslim who happens to be female as well as a journalist who enjoys bike riding, called “Cycle Fatwa  Rides into My Re-Cycle Bin” reads:

The Dar ul-Uloom Deoband, India’s largest madrasa, is back in the news again—this time for a fatwa it has just issued that lays down that Muslim girls above the age of 13 should not ride cycles on the grounds that it would be difficult for them to do so while wearing their veils. Besides, so claims the fatwa, cycling has an adverse effect on girls’ physiques.
 
A recent fatwa, issued some months ago by the very same madrasa, advising Muslim women not to work in offices left me dumbfounded, but this one, I must confess, made me burst out laughing. Gobbling up my breakfast, I jumped into a three-wheeler, zoomed into my office and marched into my editor’s cabin. I told him that I was going to speak my mind to the world about this latest decree. He did not seem to share my indignation, though. “Don’t get sucked into negativity,’ he advised, seeking to me to calm down. “Forget about them. Let them do what they want. In any case, people don’t listen to such fatwas”. But, gosh! I cannot be a saint like him and I really must speak out my mind, I said to myself.

Not only does Nigar Ataulla, editor of Islamic Voice, speak her mind, but she is nimble with her fingers and clicked the offending fatwa into the trash. The Deobanders are going beyond what the media mogul Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi has suggested: that it is okay because women were allowed to ride camels in the early Umma, as long as they are properly veiled, not hanging on to a man not their husband and not breaking their hymen. Teenage Indian Muslim girls not allowed to ride bicycles, nor seemingly to work in public, mature Saudi women not allowed to drive cars, what next? How about French Muslim women not allowed to cover their faces in public? This Niqabgate is one of those rare things that unites the most Islamophobic bigots on the French right with the most adamant feminists on the French left. I can think of few other issues such a prejudiced binary could agree on. Of course the new French law does not single out Muslim women, just women who totally cover their faces and this covers only about 2,000 French women who happen to be Muslim. Imagine a law that banned sidelocks, not because they adorn the heads of Orthodox Jewish men, but simply because they are too long?

The ban on the niqab is, ironically, proposed as a way to preserve the revolutionary French value of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, although it does exactly the opposite for those actually wearing the offending coverings. The young French girl accosted in the mall was not “free”to wear her face veil, which does not appear to be one that fully covered her face and thus is allowed even under the new law; certainly conservative Muslims are not considered equal to liberated secular French minds and the fraternal returns to the eternal paternal. I understand the frustration of women who rightly see the veil as a visible symbol of male control, but then the very fact that we must wear clothes in public at all is just as visible to a naturalist. Don’t go topless; don’t totally cover the face: both of these are rules that stem from the same motivation. I am not defending the mentality behind total veiling, nor advocating (apart from wishful thinking) that women be allowed to go topless if they so please, because the principle that counts here is the negotiated one of modesty. In the Quran this is a principle that applies to males as well as females; in historical practice Muslim men were at times all too eager to have sex with naked concubines and sequester their son-bearers away in a harem. The problem has always been male suppression of women; the nagging problem in our so-called liberated modernity is how to unsuppress rather than the exact amount of dress or undress. It nags even more when one must assume that any woman who wears a full face cover only does so because males force her, even when she insists this is not the case. Were it a health issue (fgm for example), act committed on a child, or legally pragmatic (showing the face on a driver’s license or passport), I could see the rationale as proper. But the idea that what a Muslim wears is offensive to secular values smacks of intolerance and interference.

In any society there are rules people follow in order to maintain what a famous French philosopher, Rousseau, long ago styled a “social contract.” The first lines of his treatise are among the most quoted, the bewildering paradox of being born free and yet being everywhere in chains. To paraphrase for the present issue: we are all born naked and yet everywhere (given the march of civilization) we are chained by clothing. Unless we are willing to keep blaming Eve for giving the apple to Adam and creating the first knowledge of nakedness, then we should listen carefully to what Rousseau is saying. Looking at the whole quote is instructive:

MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.

If I took into account only force, and the effects derived from it, I should say: “As long as a people is compelled to obey, and obeys, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke, and shakes it off, it does still better; for, regaining its liberty by the same right as took it away, either it is justified in resuming it, or there was no justification for those who took it away.” But the social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights. Nevertheless, this right does not come from nature, and must therefore be founded on conventions.

Whether the unnatural act in the Garden of Eden or Darwinian nature, Rousseau realizes that we need to negotiate conventional rules as part of a social contract rather than kneejerk Hobbesian compulsion. Having seen the disastrous effects of religious wars in Europe, moreso among Christians rather than against the encroaching Turks, Rousseau saw that the real problem was when religion ruled (thus he would despise the Saudi Arabian system) or where the state started acting like a body of priests (Henry VIII, for example). Here is his main point:

The dogmas of civil religion ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded, without explanation or commentary. The existence of a mighty, intelligent and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas. Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected.

Ah, Monsieur Rousseau, would you were still alive, because the vexing question before your 21st parliament is how far can one tolerate intolerance. Do the requirements for being a good citizen of a secular state (at the time of this writing France was still a monarchy with religious trappings) extend to what one chooses to wear or not to wear? With no easy answer, the fatwa wars rage on. Unfortunately, no one seems to get the irony in Quelle horreur, since we are all so satisfied with C’est la vie.