Eideard

Muslim women will no longer be able to cover their faces as they take Canadian citizenship after the country’s immigration minister announced a ban on anyone wearing the niqab – the face veil – or burqa – full body and face covering – while taking the oath of citizenship.

He said that he had received complaints from citizenship judges who had claimed that it was difficult to ensure that individuals whose faces were covered were actually reciting the oath.

“They told me last month that it’s a fairly common problem. Every week, in every region of the country, we’re dealing with situations where applicants arrive with a veil on,” said Jason Kenney, the minister of citizenship and immigration. “Frankly, I found it bizarre that the rules allowed people to take the oath with a veil on.”

He added that the move was also not simply a practical measure, saying: “It is a matter of deep principle that goes to the heart of our identity and our values of openness and equality.”

Kenney said the oath of citizenship has to be done freely and openly and under equal conditions.

The announcement was made in the French-speaking province of Quebec, where a law passed last year banned the wearing of any face cover while applying for government services in the province…

Canada’s supreme court last week also heard arguments in a case where a Muslim woman wants to testify while wearing a niqab, pitting her right of religious freedom against her alleged rapist’s right to face his accuser in the trial.

I admit to occasional episodes of frustration with both of the sides that form up to battle over questions like this one.

The simplest and most democratic way I’ve come to political decisions on the question – is that civil law, the practices decided necessary by common law of the land, take precedence over religious custom. Or any other custom, for that matter, that lies outside the boundaries of law accepted as binding upon the whole country.

Ontario’s highest court has set out a framework allowing judges to decide on a case-by-case basis if women can wear religious head coverings that obscure their faces while testifying.

The Ontario Court of Appeal also lays down the bottom line on the issue: “If, in the specific circumstances, the accused’s fair trial right can be honoured only by requiring the witness to remove the niqab, the niqab must be removed if the witness is to testify.”

His right to a fair trial trumps her right to religious expression.

In essence, the 3-0 decision written by Justice David Doherty and handed down Wednesday, kicks the controversial issue back to the domain of lower court judges, who must now consider the question with the aid of legal points laid out at the appeal court. This marks the first time the issue has been dealt with by a Canadian court of appeal.

The decision stems from a historical sexual assault case in which the alleged victim, a Muslim woman, wanted to wear her niqab while testifying at a preliminary hearing two years ago. The covering shows only her eyes…

The judge presiding over the preliminary hearing ruled the woman must remove her niqab. She appealed and the Ontario Court of Appeal quashed the judge’s earlier decision. That means the preliminary hearing judge must now make a new decision regarding the niqab, taking into account the legal considerations provided by the higher court.

The right of an accused to confront their accuser is a keystone of Western jurisprudence. Not that our governments respect the practice anymore than those who would prefer religion to overrule access to a fair trial.

Two French female students have made a film of the pair of them strolling through the streets of Paris in a niqab, bare legs and mini-shorts as a critique of France’s recently passed law.

Calling themselves the “Niqabitches,” the veiled ladies can be seen strutting past prime ministerial offices and various government ministries with a black veil leaving only their eyes visible, but with their long legs naked bar black high heels.

Bemused passers-by can be seen gawping at the pair or asking to take photographs in the clip.

At one stage in the film, the two women approach the entrance to the ministry of immigration and national identity, only to be told by a policeman to go elsewhere. However, a policewoman also present is delighted by their clothes. “I love your outfit, is it to do with the new law?” she asks. “Yes, we want to de-dramatise the situation,” one girl replies. “It’s brilliant. Can I take a photo?” asks the policewoman, who will soon be required to fine public niqab wearers…

“To put a simple burka on would have been too simple. So we asked ourselves: ‘how would the authorities react when faced with women wearing a burka and mini-shorts?,” asked the students, one of whom is a Muslim…

“To dictate what we wear appears to have become the role of the State (as if they didn’t have other fish to fry …).”

We’re going through the opposite government morass here in Santa Fe. The question of public nudity – even as a form of protest – tied up city government for debate and ponderous discussion for days after a recent demonstration of nude and semi-nude bicyclists.

No doubt there will be prayers of praise at the Cathedral this Sunday for the final passage of a torturous ordnance that can hauled out next year for the world nude bicyclists’ protest. Or better yet – to bust some performance artist who poses in front of a tourist from Texas.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Syria has banned the face-covering Islamic veil from the country’s universities.

The Education Ministry’s ban on the niqab comes as similar moves in Europe spark cries of discrimination against Muslims.

An official at the ministry says the ban affects public and private universities and aims to protect Syria’s secular identity…

Sunday’s ban does not affect the headscarf, which many Syrian women wear.

The niqab is not widespread in Syria, although it has become more common recently. It’s growing popularity has not gone unnoticed in a country governed by a secular, authoritarian regime.

Last month, hundreds of primary school teachers who wear the niqab were moved to administrative jobs, local media reported.

Probably less of an uproar in the Middle East than in Western democracies. For more reasons than the obvious.

A Belgian parliamentary committee has voted to impose a nationwide ban on wearing face-covering veils in public…The ban includes any clothes or veils that do not allow the wearer to be fully identified, including the full-face niqab and burqa.

If passed, the measure would be the first clampdown of its kind in Europe…

With the governing parties and opposition in agreement, officials expect the full house to easily endorse the draft law…

“This is a very strong signal that is being sent to Islamists,” said Denis Ducarme, a French-speaking deputy from the centre-right Reformist Movement that proposed the bill. Ducarme said he was “proud that Belgium would be the first country in Europe which dares to legislate on this sensitive matter”.

“We have to free women of this burden,” said his colleague Corinne de Parmentier.

The vice-president of the Muslim Executive of Belgium, Isabelle Praile, warned that the move could set a dangerous precedent. “Today it’s the full-face veil, tomorrow the veil, the day after it will be Sikh turbans and then perhaps it will be mini skirts,” she said.

Well, the question as proposed to parliament is one of identification. I’m not certain mini-skirts are hiding much of anything – including recognition.

If endorsed, the vote would see the ban imposed in streets, public gardens and sports grounds or buildings “meant for public use or to provide services” to the public.

Exceptions would be allowed for certain festivities like carnivals if municipal authorities decide to grant them.

I think it appropriate to place all religious symbolism in carnivals.

A court in Egypt has ruled in favour of the government’s decision to ban students from wearing the face veil (niqab) while taking university examinations. But female students who had appealed the ban when it was originally imposed by the government last October have vowed to appeal the verdict.

The students said the ban on niqab infringed on their religious rights…

Nizar Ghorab, the lawyer of the students, said the ban “supports rape and sexual harassment”.

“It forces a woman to expose part of her body she doesn’t want exposed. It is soul-crushing for these women,” he told Al Jazeera.

The government said it banned the niqab in part because students, male and female, were attending exams disguised as other candidates by wearing a face veil…

Al Jazeera’s Rawya Rageh, reporting from the Egyptian capital, Cairo, said the trial reflected a divide in the Egyptian society

“It highlights the intensifying divide between the government’s brand of moderate Islam and a population increasingly turning to stricter interpretations of the religion.

“For some, covering up has even been a tacit defiance against the system.”

Hiding behind religion for personal gain is nothing new. Is it?

Until recently you would never have seen women presenting television programmes dressed from head to toe in the niqab or burqa. But on the Saudi religious channel Awtan TV it has now become the norm.

Female broadcasters at the station are draped in the all-enveloping dresses, which are usually black and also cover their faces.

The work environment too is very different. Male technical assistants do not enter the studio while the women are presenting.

Awtan TV decided to take a unique approach. The station was launched in 2008, and last month it set a precedent by allowing women to present, but only on the condition that they wear the niqab…

Wahhabism, the strain of Sunni Islam that is officially practised in Saudi Arabia, is considered one of the religion’s most conservative forms.

The Muslim women I’ve known have moved beyond this aspect of living in the past.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

This week, France plunged into another bitterly divisive national debate on Muslim women’s clothing, reopening questions on how the country with western Europe’s biggest Muslim community integrates Islam into its secular republic. A parliamentary inquiry is to examine how many women in France wear full Islamic veils or niqab before a decision is made over possibly banning such garments in the street. More than 50 MPs from across the political spectrum have called for restrictions on full veils, called “degrading”, “submissive” and “coffins” by politicians. Yet the actual numbers of niqab wearers in France appears to be so small that TV news crews have struggled to find individuals to film. Muslim groups estimate that there are perhaps only a few hundred women fully covering themselves out of a Muslim population of over 5 million – often young French women, many of them converts.

That such a marginal issue can suddenly take centre stage in a country otherwise struggling with major issues of mass unemployment and protest over public sector reform shows how powerful the symbol of the headscarf and veil remains in France.

If men decided to join a religion that required playing dress-up like the pope, walking around with velvet slippers and swinging a incense brazier from the radio antenna of their mule – I think you’d get the same response from the officials of a nation that works more at being secular than are the critics from other purportedly secular nations. Hypocrites all.

The current initiative against full Islamic veils began in Venissieux, a leftwing area on the industrial outskirts of Lyon. Its communist mayor, André Gerin, led proposals for a clampdown, saying he saw increasing numbers of full veils in his constituency…

Gerin said women in niqab posed “concrete problems” in daily life. “We had an issue in a school where a headteacher at the end of the school day didn’t want to hand back two children to a phantom,” he said. Gerin has refused to conduct the town-hall wedding of a woman wearing niqab. Another woman wearing a full veil was refused social housing by a landlord in the area. The mayor said that when women haven’t removed their face covering, it has resulted in conflict with public officials who often felt insulted or under attack. But he denied stigmatising the wider Muslim population…

Two previous calls for a law restricting full veils have been left to gather dust. This time, the debate is gathering force.

In some nations, Jedi is becoming a significant minor religion – for whatever reason. Do I get to testify before a court of law wearing my Darth Vader helmet?

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

A judge has ordered a Toronto woman to testify without her niqab at a sexual assault trial – raising the thorny issue of whether Muslim women should be allowed to appear as witnesses wearing a veil that covers everything but the eyes.

The issue is a collision of two rights, pitting religious freedom against the right of a defendant to face an accuser in open court…

In October, Ontario Court Justice Norris Weisman reached his “admittedly difficult decision” to force the complainant to testify with her face bared after finding her “religious belief is not that strong … and that it is, as she says, a matter of comfort,” he wrote in his ruling…

In his judgment, Weisman wrote “at the 11th hour we learned … she has a driver’s licence with her unveiled facial impression upon it.” She told court she took comfort the picture was taken by a female and there was a screen between her and potential male onlookers.

But Weisman wrote the “driver’s licence can be required to be produced by all sorts of males,” such as police officers and border guards…

Debate about Muslim women and head coverings has surfaced in recent years over girls wearing the hijab to play sports and whether voters must show their faces.

Alia Hogben, executive director of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, said, in court “the laws of the country should be acceptable,” and although it is important that “sensitivity be shown … showing the face is acceptable.”

Civil law takes precedence over religious custom. At least in a civilized secular democracy.