TABLE
OF CONTENTS
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Religious Conflict:
Resolution in Sight?
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By Allie D'Amanda
An article entitled, “Uproar over
veiled women in Britain”
featured in a newspaper for Saturday October 7th 2006,
focuses on
women who wear veils in Britain.
Former foreign secretary Jack Straw
instigated a backlash from the Muslim community when he wrote in his
daily
column that he has observed more women wearing full veils on the
street, which
has made him have “considerable concerns about this being a rather
visible
demonstration of separateness.” He goes
on to say that, “this is a country built on freedoms. I defend
absolutely the
right of any woman to wear a headscarf, but wearing the full veil is
bound to
make better, positive relations between the two parallel communities
more
difficult.”
In
writing this, Jack Straw appears to be suggesting that wearing the full
veil
asserts the identity of Muslim women and in turn acts as a venue
emphasizing
separateness in the community. When I
think about what makes a strong community, I imagine a dense network of
individuals
all depending on each other to strengthen ties of culture and
interconnectedness. It would be silly of
me to believe that this is possible in all communities, since there has
been
such a strong move toward individualism in the past few decades. Yet, I still hold a glimmer of hope for a time
and place when different cultures, under the same state or even the
same world,
can coexist in such a parallel manner as Straw mentions.
We
have been traveling to some countries with a significant Muslim
population, and
I could not help but notice the women in full veils.
I would be dishonest if I said I was not
nervous around these women, and this concerns me. I
do not want to have these feelings just
because I tend, embarrassingly enough, to equate their look with terms
such as
gender inequality, oppression, and violence. I
walked around Istanbul
and saw many women wearing full veils and I begun
to feel more
different from
these people than in any other country. I
began to over-think every outfit I wore and whether it
was modest
enough or could be taken as offensive in any way. I
am positive that these feelings of anxiety
have a great deal to do with how the “Western” media portrays Muslim
women, in
combination with my own personal ignorance of the Islamic religion and
the
significance of the veil. I couldn’t help but think about my
experiences in the
other countries and how I began to rearrange my perspective in order to
learn
more about the people I met.
Thus,
I can see why Mr. Straw had the reaction he did, but in openly
expressing his
views, I believe he has made the “separateness” issue more prevalent
than
not. He has labeled these women and the
Muslim community as “different,” “wrong,” and “unparallel,” and in
turn,
separates them from what he believes
are a consensus of ethics and obligations to society.
His statement encourages the British Muslims
to create a misunderstood subculture, further separating them from the
broader
community rather than attempting to integrate without stigmatization;
in
effect, he shames their core religious values and rights.
Yet,
after reading Farha Ghannam’s essay in her book Remaking
the Modern: Space, Relocation, and the Politics of Identity in Modern Cairo, on her feelings of separateness among
fellow
Muslims in Cairo, Egypt, I am beginning to
see how
the situation Straw purports should be a topic of discussion. Ghannam writes that once she started to wear
a head veil, her interactions with Christians were restricted and
“superficial”
(7). Yet, the backlash Straw got is a
sure sign of more resistance to come from the Muslim community, and I
am not
certain as to how we might begin to deal with this issue of
separateness
between Muslims and Christians.
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