Face-covering – not head-covering, but face-covering – is incompatible with the conduct of Western social and cultural life. And women do it because they want to, because they want to withdraw from the conduct of Western social and cultural life. Even little girls are dressed, not ordinarily by their fathers, but almost always by their mothers. The whole thing has nothing to do with men.
Like female genital mutilation, which is also a man-free practice, something that women do to each other. Just as male genital mutilation, a readily tolerated religious or cultural practice, is something that men do to each other. Jewish, Muslim, Xhosa or whatever sort of women prefer it? How do they know? It has nothing to do with women. Correspondingly, men from backgrounds in which FGM is practised cannot know whether or not they prefer it. But then, it, like face-covering, has nothing to do with men.
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Xhosa are one of the fastest growing immigrant groups in Britain, maybe they don't like the fact that South Africa now has a Zulu President.
ReplyDeleteThey are also the backbone of one of the liveliest churches in the Traditional Anglican Communion, and therefore presumably in the coming world of Ordinariates.
ReplyDeleteA body of Xhosa, including Thabo Mbeki, stand in a tradition of those whose Methodist missionary heritage led them to a high ecclesiology and sacramental theology which in turn led them to accept Anglican Orders, but always with a separate structure, before they finally broke away as much as an expression of Xhosa nationalism as anything else.
We must hope and pray that reconcilition with and to Petrine Orthodoxy will finally bring them to the New Testament rejection of male genital mutilation as a ritual mark of cultural separateness.
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ReplyDeleteI don't consider it the business of govt to tell people whether or not they can cover their faces as they go about the place. I don't approve of the practice, but I see no cause to legislate against it.
Other people are not allowed to cover their faces, nor should they be. At the other extreme, it is rightly illegal to go about stark naked.
ReplyDeleteWe identify ourselves by our faces. Women who wear the niqab are choosing - because that is what they are doing, choosing - to be unidentifiable. That is not acceptable, any more than public nudity is acceptable.
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ReplyDeleteI must most respectfully disagree Mr. Lindsay. There have been women wearing burkas in this country all my life. Nobody ever thought to criminalise them before. If a foreign person turned up naked & claimed that was their culture (I guess they would have to come from a much warmer country!!) we would tell them to put clothes on because we won't stand for public nudity.
When these women turned up in burkas nobody thought to call the police. They were breaking no law. Passing a law aginst the burka now has nothing to do with the freedom of women, and very little to do with public security. For the majority of the supporters of a burka ban it is just a populist attempt to get at Muslims.