A COVER FOR DENIGRATING WOMEN
Different stories tell the tale for the real reasons for the niqab debate
We were on our way to lunch on University Avenue in downtown Toronto the other day, my friend M. and I, when a group of women passed us, three or four of them wearing the niqab, the full-face covering.
“Aaaah, now that’s a sight to gladden the heart, isn’t it?” I sniped.
All my friend said — in her mild, wise way — was, “Do men wear it? I don’t see any men wearing it.”
She meant, of course, that if the niqab was all it’s cracked up to be, it would be Muslim men wearing it, because it’s the way of the world, Muslim and not, that if a thing is really and truly fabulous, it will be a male thing, and if it ain’t, women should fill their boots.
Then, in unison, we both quoted our friend saying, “Just for one day. One day …” That was TN, who used to say that she’d like the male gear hanging between her legs, so she’d know, if only just for that day, what it’s like to have such peculiar but undeniable power.
Thus do I arrive at the niqab issue, denounced far and wide in the land as a divisive election gimmick by Satan himself, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose government is trying to have the thing banned from citizenship ceremonies and who on the campaign trail has been musing aloud about perhaps extending the ban to the public service.
Why, goes this rhetoric, it’s just a few women! It affects hardly anyone because hardly anyone wears the niqab! Why is he (the dark prince) doing this? It’s un-Canadian! Why, even the debate itself is un-Canadian!
(There is often a single, preferred view on Canadian issues, so debate is often deemed treacherous in these parts.)
And yet, the thing has got traction, good or bad for the government is hard to know, though of course those who support even a limited niqab ban are quickly denounced as retrograde racists and assigned to the redneck side of the equation.
I think two separate stories in Wednesday’s news illustrate the real reason some Canadians are deep in their bones uneasy about the niqab.
The first was about the Hail Mary appeal by Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their eldest son Hamed of their multiple convictions for firstdegree murder in the deaths of four women, respectively their three daughters and sisters and, in the case of Rona Amir Muhammad, Shafia’s unacknowledged other wife.
The three were convicted in early 2012 of killing Rona and the three girls, Zainab, Sahar and Geeti, then 19, 17 and 13.
Originally from Afghanistan, the family came to Canada via Pakistan and Dubai.
Shafia was enraged by his daughters’ eager embrace of regular Canadian life — boyfriends, makeup, dating, Sahar’s shortlived ditching of the hijab or head scarf and their all-around failure to snap to attention whenever he spoke.
He believed he had absolute control of his daughters’ sexuality. As for regrets, he had none, famously telling Tooba in a wiretapped chat less than three weeks after the girls and their aunt were sent to their death in a canal near Kingston, “May the devil s--- on their graves.”
Lawyers for the three now say they were victims of “cultural stereotyping” and claim they should get a new trial.
The second story appeared in the Toronto Sun, a Postmedia sister publication.
It was about a citizenship ceremony which in July apparently degenerated into a shouting match between a Muslim man and officials, who had told the man’s wife she would have to remove her niqab during the oath.
She was reportedly happy to oblige, but her husband flew into a rage, shrieking that officials “enforce his wishes.”
As he ranted in a side office, the woman slipped into the main room, where the delayed ceremony had begun, removed her niqab and was sworn in as a citizen.
And that, I think, is what those Canadians who don’t like the niqab don’t like — our sinking sense that it’s an old-world misogynist tool, meant to keep women and girls in line, and that it more times than not isn’t the choice of a freethinking young Muslim woman, but rather a choice that has been imposed upon her.
I don’t want the damn thing banned. I’d rather imagine that Muslim women fleeing repression could find help from the Canadian institutions and social services that are meant to help them. I’d like to think that when the woman whose husband threw a fit at the citizenship ceremony this summer went home, he didn’t whack her around and that if he did, she told him to blow it out his backside and went somewhere safe.
But then I remember: When Zainab fled to a shelter, when Sahar and Geeti told officials at their school they were afraid and had no freedom, and when child-welfare was called in, their parents wept and raged about their rights and lied through their teeth, the investigations were bungled, and nothing happened. The girls weren’t helped, but failed.
Institutional ineptness and cultural sensitivity won the day, and the kids and Rona paid with their lives. Their new country couldn’t save them at the back end. Perhaps it’s worth a shot trying to do so at the front.