Niqab debate hides Harper’s true position

Full disclosure: I am 100 per cent opposed to Stephen Harper’s proposed ban on wearing the niqab at citizenship ceremonies, which I consider not only meanspirited and racist, but cynical and opportunistic. Why? Because in opposing the niqab, Harper has managed to position himself as a defender of women’s rights, while for most of this protracted election he has shown himself to be anything but.

Other than the niqab, in fact, Harper has avoided so-called “women’s issues” like the plague. He not only dodged September’s Up For Debate forum, where leaders talked institutionalized sexism and child care, but in response to the now notorious epidemic of missing and murdered aboriginal women, the Conservative government has been dismissive and wildly tactless.

Consider Conservative B.C. candidate Bob Zimmer’s recent comment that one of the “major drivers of missing and murdered aboriginal women is lack of economic activity, or simply put, a lack of a job.” (Right, because no gainfully employed woman has ever been kidnapped or murdered before.)

The most damning thing about the government’s inaction on this issue is not that an official inquiry would be successful. What’s infuriating is that even if an inquiry were impractical, the prime minister should have the sense to initiate one anyway, to symbolically communicate his awareness and concern. But symbolism isn’t in the wheelhouse of the cynic, a person, in Oscar Wilde’s estimation “who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

And yet, the fact that Stephen Harper may be a cynic who uses peoples’ prejudices to his advantage and pretends to defend a constituency he ordinarily ignores does not mean his convenient target in this case, the niqab, is morally excusable. I am opposed to it as well. Why? Because of an immigrant woman I tutored in an ESL program at a Halifax public library when I attended university in that city. Like many of my students, she was a Muslim, and had come to Canada, she told me, to live a life free from theocracy.

One day we sat down in the stacks to read Roch Carrier’s, The Hockey Sweater. (She was looking for a Canadian kids book she could share with her kids.) When she saw the illustrations of the French Canadian nuns she began to laugh. “Just like back home,” she said, rolling her eyes. She had mistaken the nuns in the story for niqabclad women. I told her some of my classmates and instructors at university — most of them white women born and raised in Canada — viewed the niqab favourably. They felt they weren’t in a position to judge other cultures, I told her, especially coming from a hyper-sexualized Western culture themselves. They thought “it must be nice not having men stare.” My student was astonished and baffled. She thought I was actually making the story up. How could I be on the side of women’s liberation on one hand, she was saying, and tell her the niqab was a good thing on the other? And she was right.

The point is, the niqab is not a woman’s issue like any other; it is complicated and bipolar. And my stance on the niqab is a stance I have yet to hear anyone articulate on the left or the right: I am intensely ambivalent about it. It is questions like the one my student posed to me — and not necessarily blind prejudice or ignorance — that I believe contribute to the popularity of the niqab ban. There is all manner of justified criticism from the left of the niqab ban itself, but there is minimal criticism of the niqab itself, a garment that, outside Canada, represents not defiance of the Harper government but, as my student saw it, theocratic misogyny.

I believe the absence of this criticism — what some might describe as uncritical cheerleading of the niqab itself — is hugely off-putting to a lot of voters. And to be frank, it’s off-putting to me, too. But no one’s discomfort should preclude the dignity and happiness of another human being. Which is why I’d like to make an appeal to Canadians such as me who have struggled with this issue — those who on one hand wince at the notion that a woman, whether at the request of her family or by her own volition, might want to hide her face from the world; but on the other would defend to the death her right to do it.

I urge you to do what Stephen Harper is incapable of doing. I urge you, in the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald, to multi-task: “The test of a first rate intelligence,” Fitzgerald wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” That is a Canadian ideal worth defending.