Barcelona bans burka and niqab

According to Article 18 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion … freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

The burqa and the niqab are part of an individual’s religious beliefs. It’s strikingly contradictory therefore that France, in order to liberate women from perceived Islamic oppression, has to violate their universal human rights.

To be sure, given that France’s face-covering ban will only affect 2,000 citizens out of 62.3 million, the imminent interdiction is more a symbolic issue than a practical matter.

I have seen western educated Muslim women are in Burqa while their mothers never even covered their heads in Pakistan. I do not know whether it is due to western education or because they find themselves victim of racism. According to Lord Burtend Russell, western education makes a man stupid and selfish. The credit cruch in the world is due to the policies of blue eyed western educated elites. British schooling is also in a mess because of such western educated elites.

Burqa is not locking women, it is a buffer line between protecting chasity and exposing. Being naked and drunk is acceptabl but being covered and modest is inhuman.

No body has the right to tell a woman how to dress, or worse, how to undress? Let her wear what she likes, especially if it's part of her religion. I see the banning of headscarves or niqabs as an attack on both religious freedom and on the rights of women & girls. A veil ban targets very few women; it speaks to a fear of other who is Muslim. This is Islamophobia. In the United Kingdom, there is a social and economic pressure on Muslim women not to cover themselves with headscarf or a veil. The tiny minority of women are being blamed for all the failure of integration policies through out Europe. European Muslims are more worried about the economy, the cost of living, decent housing and racism than about a burqa ban.

French president wants Muslim women to be topless like his wife who posed topless in fashion shows. He has no right to ban the burqa because it is undemocratic and an unqualified attack on individual freedom. Burqa is not just a piece of cloth but a lot of ideological and cultural connotation to it. Women are just being exploited in the name of rights. Burqa protects women's rights and treat each women like a princess. No one has the right to ban the freedom of choice in a secular and democratic country. The right to choice is a basic fundamental right the person should have.

French president's interpretation of burqa as a symbol of subservience is false. It is a usual habit of western ideologists to twist history and distort the facts inorder to project their culture as superior one. The president should be criminally tried for spreading such falsehood. To veil or not to veil should be an individual choice. Dress codes are for children, not for adults. Government legislated dress codes for the Taliban religious policy not western democracies. Women should be free to wear burqas. If women can get away with wearing cropped shirts and pants that show their panties, they should be able to waer burqas too.

Those Muslim women in Europe who want to wear burqa are being asked to migrate to another country, remind one of Shiv Sena's suggestion to India's Muslims to migrate to Pakistan or qubristan(graveyard). There is no difference of mentality between Hindus and Europeans. Both of them have no respect and tolerate those who are different.

People should understand that better than 90% of the women in France and Belgium (as also UK and Germany) who wear burqa, are young women who were born in those countries; they did not migrate from another country. In fact some of them converted to Islam from Christianity and Judaism. .

The lawmakers in Belgium and France are trying to target such a small population is pure irrationality. Unless the motivation is racial and sectarian hatred of the Muslims. The same as BJP and Sangh Parivar in India.

Equal rights, human rights, womens; rights are not just nice topics of discussion after dinner; or to make women the plaything for men's pleasure. They mean the right of each woman to determine her lifestyle as she so choses. The best thing to spread something is to outlaw it. If you outlaw burqas now in France, it will soon stand as a martyred symbol of ethnic cultural tradition in the face of racist oppression. Do you really want that? The fact is that western tradition of exposing female skin for the edification of the male sex is degrading. I think I'd rather walk around the street looking like a ninja than wearing what girls these days are expected to wear. If I dressed up like a ninja all the time in the street It wouldnt hurt any one. So why the big fuss? I see the argument for oppression, but how the heck are you gonna know if its oppression or if the woman really wants to cover up?

Human rights organizations have declared such bans to be illegal and a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as violating the rights to freedom of expression and religion. Lawyers for human rights and Islamic groups are preparing to challenge the bans in both national courts and eventually, the European Court of Human Rights.

One Muslim woman, Caroline Chaiima, writing in Lepoint.fr, said she wore a veil: "Let those most closely concerned speak. I am a French woman born in France, with French parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and I am a Muslim. I wear the full veil and I feel like saying: So what? I am happy behind the veil, I protect myself from depraved stares. Neither my father, nor my brother, nor my husband forced the full veil upon me; it's a personal choice."
Iftikhar Ahmad
London School of Islamics Trust
www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk