Of scabs and niqabs

During the last phase of the current election campaign in Canada, millions of people, most of them not Muslim, are up in arms again about radical Islamic women’s clothing. This was touched off when the ruling Conservative Party, initially declining in the polls, managed to make political hay out of a court case involving the right of one Pakistani immigrant to take the oath of Canadian citizenship while wearing a niqab, a special kind of head-scarf, or hijab, that leaves only the eyes visible. All of a sudden, the niqab issue became important, even though very few people in Canada ever wear that garment, and only two women have ever wanted to become a citizen in one of them.

Immediately thereafter, the normally underdog New Democratic Party, which had made a valiant effort to win a federal election for the first time in history by repudiating socialism and moving to the center of mainstream Canadian politics instead, dropped from first place to third place in the polls (after both the Conservatives and the federal Liberal Party). Although the outcome of the election will not be known until October 19, and there are several issues considered by all to be much more important than that one, there is now a very real possibility that the right to wear, or not to wear, a face covering in a public ceremony will decide who gets to run the next federal government!

Most of those Canadian citizens reacting to the niqab were from Quebec, where the NDP has been the preferred federal party since 2011, replacing the previously dominant Bloc Québécois (a federal emanation of the “separatist” Parti Québécois). Until recently, most Quebecers had given up on the Liberals because of the corruption scandal that tainted them severely during the 1995 referendum campaign for independence. For their part, the Conservatives have not had much of an impact in that province since their enormous loss of influence following the English-Canadian repudiation of the 1992 constitutional compromise, a repudiation that almost resulted in a victory for the “separatists” in the referendum.

The NDP, which has some support all across Canada but not enough to win a federal election without most of Quebec behind it, was supposed to have been the party that brought the francophone Québécois majority back into the Canadian federation for real by “eliminating” the Bloc. Now, however, the Bloc’s opposition to the niqab and their own  reasonableness on other issues have also resulted in their return to significant popular support in Quebec. The federal Liberals, whose point of view on the niqab is quite similar to that of the NDP, have not suffered nearly as much from that in Quebec mostly because they did not have that much to lose in the first place.

On the face of it, this whole federal controversy seems to be quite similar to the one that erupted within Quebec provincial politics back in 2013, when the Parti Québécois government introduced its Charter of Values, then lost the 2014 elections to the Liberal Party of Quebec. Although that charter was hardly the only issue in that election either, the fact that the PQ tried to promote official government neutrality for its personnel by trying to ban the wearing of “conspicuous” religious symbols, especially cover-up clothing, certainly contributed to its defeat. It would be highly ironic if it turns out that the officially laissez-faire Conservative government in Canada, gets to deny power to the formerly social-democratic NDP because of Tory opposition to the wearing of radical Muslim women’s clothing during public ceremonies, while the formerly social-democratic PQ lost power for wanting to uphold very similar ideas! A Liberal return to power in Canada, on that issue, would be even more ironic.

These curious electoral foibles in Canada serve to underline some of the basic facts about the nature of “democratic” elections everywhere. In the first place, as in many other parts of the world, the political differences between the leading parties at both the federal and provincial levels have become much less important, even on the surface of things, than they used to be in the somewhat less uniform past. Issues such as the niqab can only become important when all the major parties seem to have adopted the same neoliberal approach to economic and social questions, and do not have much to fight over except largely symbolic differences. In reality, most governments nowadays have given up trying to have any real control over domestic policy, as many of them tried to do at least a little bit in days gone by. Which means that big time private investors now run pretty much everything important to them (“the bottom line”) from behind the scenes, even more than they did in the past.

Nevertheless, the niqab issue is not totally meaningless, even though only a handful of women in Canada have currently chosen to wear such a radically isolating garment in public. The wearing of cover-up clothing, from the ordinary hijab, which hides only the hair, to the totally isolating burqa, that makes the entire body, even the eyes, invisible to outsiders, is supposed to symbolically convey an ultra-Islamic message of female submission to male domination. It is the most radical interpretation possible of the Koranic admonition favoring modesty in women, which millions of ordinary Muslim women have shown can easily be attained without resorting to such ridiculous excess. Every form of cover-up clothing except the horrendous burqa violates the modesty provision anyway when the person supposedly trying to hide from the world always wears a lot of attractive make-up at the same time.

Interestingly enough, most of the anti-feminist, religious militants who favor male domination over women like them, are not meek, mild-mannered wimps, but are every bit as well-informed, dedicated, organized and seemingly intelligent as are most of the world’s feminist militants. To be sure, these ultra-conservative true believers do not mindlessly run around talking openly about the need for female submission as such, but speak instead of the need for social order, harmony, tradition and the sexual division of labor. In other words, they use the same kind of euphemisms for voluntary slavery that were already used a century ago by the equally well-educated, aristocratic ladies in Western society who also argued strongly against giving equal rights to women.

In any case, ultra-reactionary opposition to women’s liberation is certainly the leading characteristic of fundamentalist fanaticism within every religion in the world, including Islam. To make an intriguing analogy, advocating voluntary slavery looks a lot like the anti-feminist equivalent of the sociopathic libertarian movement, particularly strong in the USA, that supports right-to-work legislation aimed at silencing, and ultimately eliminating, the labor movement once and for all. Trade unionists use the word “scab” to designate people within the working-class who oppose all forms of collective resistance to private capitalism, particularly those determined individualists who identify so strongly with the bosses that they continue to work while their fellow wage-slaves are on strike. To complete the analogy, those female scabs sporting cover-up garments use them as publicly displayed ideological weapons for advocating female submission, with the ultimate goal of silencing the feminist revolution, all over the world, forever.

A large number of well-intentioned people have, however, made the very interesting point that religious clothing is no more a sign of male domination over women than is the often much more popular tendency that many unfortunate women have to under-dress instead of over-dressing. It is certainly true that those women who eschew modesty completely by leaving most of their clothes at home when walking on the street or in a suburban mall, are just as much under the influence of the ideology of male domination as are the ultra-religious women who do just the opposite. These two forms of extreme behavior do indeed have something in common, even though sexist over-dressing most often has a religious motivation (not just within Islam), while sexist under-dressing is usually associated with consumerism. In both cases, however, individual egoism, calling attention to oneself in the most immodest ways possible, is their most important shared characteristic.

Unfortunately, other seemingly well-intentioned people have taken to condemning all criticism of such religious over-dressing as being a form of Islamophobia. The National Assembly in Quebec, for example, recently adopted a unanimous resolution to that effect, rejecting what they consider to be irrational fear of the Muslim religion on the part of the Quebec population, and refusing to simultaneously condemn the ultra-Islamic ideology as well. By adopting this politically correct attitude, the elected representatives of the people at the National Assembly seem to have been aiming at populist xenophobes who apparently believe that all Muslim immigrants in Quebec are potential terrorists, just like the ones who recently assassinated thousands of innocent people all over the world.

It is true that millions of people in the West associate Islam not only with terrorism, but also with such things as honor killings, forced marriages, severely limited female access to education, complicit attitudes toward rape and pedophilia, and every other kind of female oppression possible. These Western xenophobes refuse to realize that millions of ordinary Muslims have also rejected the disgusting excesses of the Islamist ultra-conservatives, and that every other religion in the world also possesses ideologically similar fundamentalist factions.

Nevertheless, condemning Islamophobia without condemning Islamic fundamentalism gives the impression that Quebec politicians are bending over backwards to accommodate even those very numerous radical Muslims in many parts of the world who do indeed support such ultra-reactionary attitudes and policies. While it is obvious to everyone who follows the media that the majority of Muslims living in the West are not religious fanatics, some of them definitely are. If the good people at the Quebec National Assembly and those involved in the Canadian election campaign really wanted to support women’s liberation from religious fundamentalism, they would avoid both over-reacting to the symbolic content of the niqab issue, and also avoid trying to ignore it altogether.

The appropriate attitude would be to recognize that all kinds of religious fundamentalism, including the Islamic kind, are very harmful political ideologies, that cannot be successfully accommodated without destroying human rights, democracy, science, liberty, equality, fraternity, and all the other universal values that millions of people have adopted since they stopped supporting absolutism and totalitarianism. The same admonition also applies to every kind of racist or populist rejection of other people’s right to exist, whether it is rooted in some kind of self-contained religious mythology, or in some kind of politically-based populist xenophobia.

People all over the world also have to free themselves from the ridiculous notion that such values as liberty, equality and fraternity only exist within the Western tradition and do not apply to any of the world’s other cultures. In the first place, as the fascist and neofascist movements have proven over and over again, ultra-religious fantasies and barbarian tribal traditions have always been just as popular in the West as in any other part of the world.

Both ultra-right wing and ultra-left wing movements and intellectuals in the West are also dead wrong in assuming that everyone living in or coming from the Third World cannot possibly understand universal political or social values because of their Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Confucianist, Taoist, Shintoist, animist, totemist or shamanist traditions. It is the worst kind of racism to adopt any kind of Western exceptionalism towards every other culture. In reality, Christians and Jews, coming from the same Middle Eastern origins as Islam, are every bit as inclined as any other religious tradition to ultra-idiotic forms of fundamentalism, literal interpretations of religious texts, oppression of women, terrorism and the entire disgusting list of barbarian cultural practices.

Most of the leaders of the Conservative Party in Canada are also closet fundamentalists, pretending to reject the niqab for feminist reasons but really doing so for strictly opportunist, electoral reasons. In reality, they are not the least bit feminist, as every one of their economic and social policies attest. Electoral opportunism is also the only reason why they have so far refused to abolish abortions altogether, to revive the death penalty, to reject same-sex marriages and to plunge the entire country back into the same medieval conditions as currently characterize some of the more reactionary Muslim countries.

As for terrorism, the Canadian government, along with the American, British, French and sundry other Western governments are not at all opposed to using terror from time to time to achieve their foreign-policy goals. Western military machines, including Israel, regularly use “counter-terrorism” raids, particularly bombing attacks, as a method of convincing civilian populations not to support anti-Western terrorists in many parts of the world. In so doing, they are not that different from most of the non-Western countries, all of which have either supported terrorist organizations themselves, or punished their own civilians for supporting “illegal” terrorist organizations in their own (theoretically) counter-terrorism campaigns.

Governments, movements, religions and every other kind of human institution on this planet regularly distinguish between “our” terrorists, who are always good people, and “their” terrorists, who are always evil people. Even the Quebec independence movement regularly denounces bad terrorists everywhere else, such as the Canadian Army soldiers during the October crisis, while making an exception for the good terrorists from the FLQ. Even the First Nations like their own Warriors, while hating everyone else’s warriors. As for American citizens, they refuse to realize that they are supporting their own kind of internal terrorism as well with their utterly ridiculous gun culture. To be sure, killing millions of people, through legal or illegal terrorism, is much more devastating to human civilization than killing thousands of people, or even only a handful of people. But supporting terrorism of any kind is not morally defensible.

So the amazing entry of the niqab issue into the current federal election campaign in Canada is just a symptom of a much larger disease, affecting the whole world. The anti-feminist scabs in the pro-niqab section of the radical Islamist movement are a lot like the anti-feminist manipulators of public opinion in the Conservative government of Canada.

Neither group deserves anyone’s support. But there are also very few politicians or militants of any kind, anywhere, who play a completely blameless role in this kind of live theater.