LINKAGE: More Responses to Sarkozy & Co.

In "Feminist Theory: The Dos and Don'ts of Defending Muslim Women" at altmuslimah, Fatemah Fakhraie writes: "While I personally believe that women should be able to wear what they themselves want and face no cultural, religious, or other repercussions for it, assuming that changing clothing brings liberation is misguided. Clothing is a symbol of repression for a reason: it is not the cloth itself that oppresses, but the complex legal, social, and economic issues that enforce the cloth. Campaigning for Afghan women to have the right to remove their burqas will not change the issues that stand in their way and enforce a dress code."

In "How Do You Soak Yours," Safiya responds to a Guardian essay asserting that the "burqa is a cloth soaked in blood:" "I have to admit, that my initial response to such a statement was to think, 'Only if you’re not wearing enough sanitary protection and that could apply to any item of clothing.' Sadly the article did not go on to tackle laundry issues, instead it focused on the not just tired, but narcoleptic topic of Muslim Women are Suffering in Their Scarves and I Care About Them More Then You Do."

Shabana Mir in "Take It Off, Or We'll Make You," satirizes the Enlightenment directive to Muslim women: "Be bold. Make your own decisions. How do you know when you are making your own decisions? Your decisions can be recognized as peculiarly yours when they are strikingly different from the will of those other guys. At that point, they will also be strikingly similar to ours. If you would only choose to step out of the mold that your little community enclaves create for you, and step into the mold that the greater community of the state creates for everyone, you’d be in a safe place. A free place. Your own place."

Keven Tillman says "Enough Psuedo-Feminist War-Mongering in the Name of Islamic Women." "When it comes to neoconservative claims that we have to occupy far-flung lands in order to defend Islamic women from their sons, brothers and husbands, it's nothing short of striking. After all, any mention of the 'plight' of women in Christendom is dismissed by the very same conservative bobble-heads as the incoherent rantings of hairy-legged 'feminazis.'"

Nuseiba in "The 'Enemy' Within: Muslims in France" offers some historical notes to the French commitment to secularism: "French philosopher Alain Badiou writes that it is fear that drives such criticism of ‘foreign’ (Muslim) dress. The justification for protecting a secular identity is a front to undermine Islam in France, and this is closely tied with another part of France’s history: the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. The country suffers from a pathological fear of a ‘Muslim threat’ born in the Algerian revolutionary struggle against French colonialism. The hijab in its haik form was used as a form of national assertion and a reclaiming of a Muslim and cultural identity. Thus, the same French mission to civilise Muslim women persists today. French Muslim women are being ‘unveiled’ as part of a contemporary French colonial mission civilisatrice, in order to ‘teach’ the Muslim Other the superiority of Western knowledge and culture."

In "Banning the Burqa Isn't the Answer," Rushda Majeed argues that the politicization of the hijab by "modernizers" has consequences: "Secular governments of Turkey have banned the headscarf (a garment that in no way minimizes or erases the identity of a woman) on university campuses and in the public sector. It has had the opposite effect: an increasing number of Turkish women wear headscarves in defiance of a political system which they believe treads on religious turf. Tunisia is another example, if a less publicized one. Three years ago, its government, fearing resurgent Islamism, began going after headscarf-wearing women with particular ferocity. Many women consequently began to cover their heads as a dissenting gesture."