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Islam & The Niqab

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Arbitrary Interpretations Veil Religious Fashion ...and Now the Law

By Pierre Tristam
June 17, 2003

Navel-wagging midriffs, miniskirts that mime existence, surgically resurgent breasts, toes ringed in stories of O: Immodesty's fads never cease. But for a garment that packs it all -- fashion statement, ideology, mystery, symbolism, eroticism, God Almighty -- nothing beats the veil. Or the burka, the hijab, the jilbab, the head scarf. Whatever you want to call that wrap of cloth that keeps women covered in varying degrees of totality while keeping everybody else in varying states of distress, depending on the time zone.

The veil (as I'll call it, for simplicity's sake) seems perfectly designed not just as a show of modesty but as a lightning rod of misunderstanding. To the eye unshaded by reflection, the veil is backwardness, proof positive that some people haven't learned to flow with the times (as if tank tops were an improvement). Not just to the Western eye, either. Turkey's population is 99 percent Muslim, but since the late 1920s women have been forbidden from wearing veils in public schools and in some professions, because Turkey considers itself a secular, modern state and veils an embarrassing throwback. Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation, but when younger, educated women there took to wearing the veil in the late 1970s, they were derided as fanatics and fundamentalists. In the 1990s, France forbade the veil in public schools, judging it "outrageous, ostentatious, or meant to proselytize." So much for la difference.

The veil itself flaunts prejudice. Islam's requirements about head covering are like the Constitution's due process clause. You never know exactly what it means, leaving it in the hands of clerics and demagogues, all of them males and most of them from Mars, to decide what on earth is to be exclusively and eternally en vogue. The Koran's dress code doesn't get more specific than suggesting that women "should lower their gaze," and also "should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty" except to a long list of mostly male family members, slaves and male servants "free of physical needs." Nothing about covers from head to teasing ankles. Incidentally, the Koran requires men, too, to "lower their gaze and guard their modesty," but that bit of advice seems to have been lost as surely as Christ's advice to "love one another as I've loved you." Selective amnesia is every religion's specialty.

So veil protocol is more whim than law, its application from sect to sect and from country to country as unpredictable as fashion designers' fancy from season to season. Pity the judges trying to make law out of so much caprice. But veil controversies are like the migratory patterns of volcanic clouds: eventually, every part of the globe gets its share of fallout. This month, it was Florida's turn.

Sultaana Freeman, an American convert to Islam, refused to take off her face-covering veil for a driver's license photo. The state refused to issue her a license. She sued. On June 6, an Orange County Circuit Court judge ruled reasonably enough that Freeman had been unreasonable. Florida's Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1998 requires government to "not substantially burden" religious expression except when the state has no other choice. It is when the judge tried to justify why the state had no other choice that the argument self-destructed in a mishmash of prejudice and unconstitutional bunk.

Judge Janet Thorpe argued that Freeman had to remove her veil because the tenets of her beliefs are suspect (which may be true, but it isn't the judge's business to decide); because in light of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, "it is a different world than it was 20-25 years ago," when some states did allow pictureless driver's licenses (which is like saying that constitutional protections are as reliable as a chameleon's colors); and most specious of all, that the driver's license is primarily an ID card and law enforcement tool rather than proof of an individual's ability to drive (which is bunk). For those reasons, Freeman had to submit to the government's orders or go without license.

The decision against her showed how far courts have moved away from individual rights and toward blind deference to police powers that have no basis in law before or since Sept. 11. The question isn't whether Freeman would have been substantially burdened by having to remove her veil for a photo. It is whether a police officer would have been substantially burdened during a traffic stop by having to spend a couple of extra minutes on his laptop making sure that Freeman is in fact who she says she is. Clearly, the answer is no. But this is truly "a different world." It is a dangerous world -- not because of people like Freeman, but because of rulings like Thorpe's, in which police-state whims replace law no less arbitrarily than when clerics decide to act like fashion designers. Either way, the resulting reasoning is more French than constitutional.

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Published on Tuesday, June 17, 2003 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal (Florida)

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