Is Banning the Veil Compatible With Liberalism?

Is Banning the Veil Compatible With Liberalism?

Yesterday, the Dutch government agreed to put together legislation that would ban the wearing of all full face coverings – including the Islamic burqa and full veil (niqab) – on grounds of security. Another justification that has been brought forward for the ban is that the full veil is an obstacle to the integration of Muslims into Dutch society, in that it prevents proper communication with the women concerned.

One absurdity about the whole situation is that the Muslim community in the country estimates that only about 50 women actually wear the full veil there. So that largely invalidates the argument about security, unless the Dutch government is seriously concerned about a specific terrorist plan to use the veil as a form of disguise to carry out an attack. But no official, as far as I know, has made this claim.

In terms of the argument about integration, it should be obvious that one effect of introducing a legal prohibition against the veil would be to make many Muslims feel alienated and victimised. One opposition politician, who is also a Muslim, was indeed quoted in the press as saying that if the new law is passed, it will lead many young Muslim women to start wearing the veil as a protest.

The Mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen [now, would I be wrong to assume he is Jewish?], even said that women who were turned down for employment because they refused to wear the veil should not expect to receive welfare benefits. How does that square with integration? This is more the ‘exclusionist’ model of integration: either you accept integration on our terms, or you are excluded. On this model, society becomes integrated on the basis that certain groups or individuals that don’t fit in are simply not counted as members of that society.

The terms for social integration that are being proposed, or imposed, in the Netherlands could be called liberal, in a general philosophical sense. Is it appropriate to use the expression ‘liberal intolerance of non-liberal values’ to describe what’s going on? Is the increasing Islamophobia – in the sense of fear of Islam as much as dislike of Islam – we see in supposedly liberal Western European countries an example of how liberal societies react when they feel their values, and the institutions that support those values, are under threat? We see so many examples of this throughout the continent, another one being the argument that is adduced in the UK to support illiberal detention laws: that it is better that we accept derogations from the liberal principles that underpin our laws in order to protect our liberal society and institutions as a whole. I have previously argued [MySpace blogs of 11 November and 13 November: see http://blog.myspace.com/culturalcritique] that this is an illogical position: once the instruments of power and law enforcement start acting in an illiberal way, then they are by definition no longer fully liberal and cannot be said to be protecting liberal society.

What we are coming up against here is the question of limits and limitations: are there limits to liberalism? How should liberal societies take action against minorities that supposedly do not accept their values and who push those societies ‘to the limit’? Should we accept limitations to our own liberty to ensure its survival? Is wearing the full veil ‘the limit’ that liberal society can’t tolerate? Should specific individuals’ liberties be subject to limitations – e.g. UK-style Control Orders – to ensure the freedom of others in society?

In the specific Dutch case, the pretexts for the proposed law’s limitations of the freedom to wear what one chooses, and the freedom of religious expression that is at work in wearing the veil, are invalid, as I have argued above. There is little or no real security threat involved in 50 women throughout the Netherlands wearing the niqab in public places in general (specific public places like banks or public transport could be reasonably accepted as a special case). The proposed legislation makes a ludicrous but revealing equation between the niqab and other face coverings such as motorcycle helmets: as if women wearing the niqab for religious reasons represented a threat equivalent to that of people walking around public places wearing motorcycle helmets! I don’t know: maybe the atmosphere of Islamophobia has grown so intense in Holland that women going about in veils are genuinely suspected of being potential suicide bombers. But then those in authority should try to defuse and counteract those fears by promoting better understanding and greater interaction between mainstream society and the Muslim community; not reinforce those fears, and the barriers that sustain them, by officially suppressing the differences that arouse suspicion and forcing them to go underground.

In fact, the experience of suicide bombings around the world – including in London in July 2005 – has been that it is far more effective as a tactic if the attackers blend in with their surroundings and adopt a Western appearance. The hostility towards the veil merely seizes upon a visible “mark of separation”, to quote Tony Blair’s words last month, viewed as a symbol of a defiant Islam that insists on maintaining its adherence to orthodox teachings that are at variance with Western liberalism and which, by association with the terror threat, evoke the fear of violence.

In order for laws that restrict certain liberties to be tolerable within liberal societies, there has to be real evidence that the behaviour or actions that are limited in this way pose a serious threat to the enjoyment of freedom and the security of other members of that society. As I have previously argued [blogs of 11 and 13 November], the trouble about the UK government’s detention legislation is that it has not presented convincing evidence to justify some of the measures either on principle, or in practice, in terms of actual examples where – without the application of those detention provisions – a terror attack would probably have occurred. In the case of the proposed Dutch legislation, it seems clear that – as applied to the burqa and niqab – the restrictions are motivated more by fear (by actual terror, if you like, rather than real terrorism) than by a calm, evidence-based assessment of the real risks.

And also, of course, there are other motivations behind the shallow pretexts for the Dutch legislation, such as prejudice, racism, an anti-religious liberal agenda, and a social liberalism (including feminism and advocacy of free sexual expression) that perceives traditional Islam (symbolised by the veil) as the ‘enemy’ but won’t openly say so. But is modern Dutch intolerant liberalism (which you could also perhaps call ‘radical liberalism’) really liberal any more, in the sense of tolerating and embracing diversity of expression and belief, so long as those practices and beliefs accept the same freedoms in others? And are Mr Blair’s ‘common British values’ – in the name of which Muslim veil wearing has recently come under attack – truly liberal values?