Monthly Archives: July 2011
Switzerland: here are my views on Burqa
German Translation: click here
A few weeks ago, I was invited to a reunion of the association of freethinkers inSwitzerland, and was accompanied there by Daniel Stricker the blogger and youtuber, who happens to be also the president of freethought association in St. Gallen.
During our journey by train, we discussed a document prepared by his association concerning a bill presented by the Swiss People’s Party, which demanded a legal ban on burqa in Switzerland. My friend Daniel was hesitant, particularly because this topic is closely related to human rights issues, like individual freedoms, and women’s right to dress as they see fit, but he completely agreed with the local freethinkers’ point of view: ” I am against the burqa but also against the banning of the burqa.. because in Switzerland it is simply not a problem yet. And right-wing parties (members of these parties who are christians) want to make that an issue in order to gain votes. I cannot support that.
As a person with an Islamic background, who understands the implicit significance of burqa, I replied:
To me burqa enforces gender inequality and contempt for women. I may even say that it’s a denial of her existence, and her right to share the public space. It’s as if Islam, with its hijab and burqa, wants to tell us that the normal place for a woman is between the walls of her home, away from the prying eyes of society, in an attempt to isolate her and deprive her of her right to share experience in society, to communicate and make friendships.
So how can we accept such a grave infringement on women’s rights in Western societies without any attempt to fight such a backward and sick culture, where women are reduced to a hole for sex, and a machine to procreate and cook, when their counterparts in the West compete with men in all intellectual and artistic fields? We may accept with much pain and grievance to see women wearing burqa on TV or on the Internet, in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Iran… but allowing such slavery creep into Western countries like Switzerland under the guise of respecting alternative cultures, would be unacceptable. How can I respect a culture that degrades the value of women and infringes on their basic rights? It’s like being asked to respect Nazism or stoning in Iran! Frankly, it’s an attempt to spoil European sophisticated taste, by exporting the culture of hijab and burqa to the West, where forward steps had already been taken in such matters since the beginning of the Renaissance and the Enlightenments, thanks to the great sacrifices of feminist movements.
Burqa, as a form of disguise, is a big threat to security in the social milieu, because the face is the best way we can recognize a person, and the means through which we can communicate with the people with whom we share the public space, thus sharing emotions implicitly, like the feeling of security or fear. How can I feel secure in a bus for example, when the person next to me is hiding their face, and I can’t know whether they’re a man or a woman, a friend or a foe?
Hijab and burqa convey dangerous religious and racist messages as well: a girl dressed thus conveys the idea that she would only marry a Muslim or someone who converts to Islam (after they had undergone a circumcision), which would severely hinder their ability to integrate into Western society. Every Muslim expects that his sister (in the religious or literal sense alike) would only give birth to a Muslim, and that’s why such mode of dressing, like burqa and such, should be prohibited in educational institutions, and other social and economic sectors. Hijab, despite giving off a similar connotation, remains a moderate form of Islamic dressing, and though I’m not in favor of that practice (why wouldn’t Muslim men, for the sake of equality, cover their hair as well?), I don’t think a legal solution regarding it should be sought at this point. I have to say that a legal ban would not suffice by itself to solve this issue: Islam has to be reformed, so that Muslim women can have the right to marry non-Muslims… and so that the old teachings are renewed, because they belong to the past, whereas the future is for freedom, equality, and human rights. But, because there seems to be no will to renovation and intellectualization within the body of Islam, the legal solution is the only one available.
During my visit to Zurich, I was surprised to see women sitting near the river that runs through the city, with their children, wearing burqa. The scene seemed exotic to me despite the fact that I was used to seeing women with hijab and burqa in my own country Morocco, because I was not expecting that such a sick mentality has gone beyond its borders, infecting everything like a cancer.
It is not a necessary practice of the religion as many extremist scholars try to depict it, but a mere recent invention in its present form by the salafist current. Similar forms of dressing existed long before Islam as well in nearby civilizations, but when they started to spread among the Muslim population, they were not stopped; instead, the then new dress was encouraged by many as a means to enslave women and restrict their movements even more.
Some people may say that burqa cannot be considered as a “phenomenon” in Switzerland, to justify a legal ban; but why not? Why do we have to wait until the problem becomes a phenomenon, with a large base of supporters, and then the challenge would be greater, and it would be quite difficult to ban burqa legally? It would be wiser to ban burqa and any cultural practice that degrades the value of women and diminishes their freedom.
I beseech human rights activists to discuss phenomena socially and historically before making any positive or negative judgment, instead of using the method of a sports critique, which is weak and unacceptable. Burqa wearing may seem like a right that should be protected, but in fact it’s no more than the manifestation of negative and inhumane culture.
Like this:
Atheism: an attempt at self-criticism
Atheism is a common word that carries more negative connotations than its etymological significance implies. I personally prefer to use the term “non religious” because it approaches the intended meaning much better.
Atheism and non religiosity do not entail a complete rejection of the religious hypothesis regarding the origin of existence; it’s a state of free-thought wherein the idea of the existence of a willing force, that meant to bring the universe as it is today into being, is put into question.
Richard Dawkins, in his book “The God Delusion”, shed some light on the categories of atheism and gave the term its true meaning, amidst unfair depictions by the religious, and many atheists picked it in a form of defiance until the new meaning became so common that it overshadowed the other ones.
Atheism is, before all, a skeptic, logical, free, and independent vocation, which cancels the authority of the sacred, and finds its basis in deductive and comparative reasoning which has proven its efficiency to produce knowledge in modern scientific methodology. However, in its most famous conception, atheism became more focused on the rejection of the idea of God, in some sort of an “intellectual neurosis” which starts with the refusal of the concept of deity and confines itself to it forever.
Logically speaking, we can say that believing in the non existence of deities (as an atheist stance) is simply a basic deductive mistake, because a skeptic methodology must necessarily produce a skeptic stance. This is how the idea of the existence of god becomes legitimate within atheist thought, god being understood here as the first cause without regard to anthropomorphic traits and forms attributed to it by religions; and the feeling of spiritual belonging to that cause is logically acceptable, as an evolutionary link between the final state of existence and its origin, again without any regard to rituals of worship that religions appended to the deep desire to know the origin of all that exists.
Scientific objectivity requires that we transcend the idea of god, to inquire about the reasons behind the resilience and longevity of religious representation of the universe, and such an act requires that we accept that representation within atheistic thought not as contradictory but as logically comprehended.
The God delusion does not mean a complete rejection of religion, and that is what Dawkins meant by religion being a “symptom of a human need”; a symptom hints to an illness, but it’s not the illness itself.
Our colossal efforts to fathom the Islamic phenomenon should be directed to studying the double sanctity, i.e. the sacredness of the original text (the Koran) and that of the application texts (Sunnah, or Tradition). The fact that Muhammad prevented his followers from scribing Sunnah, is an explicit affirmation of its non-sacredness for political reasons, because he was aware of the dangers of having the sacred text contradict its applications: the text of the Koran, in its final establishment, became authoritative even on Muhammad himself, which implied that its applications should not have been written down in any way. Understanding the essence of human need to religion leads us to a primary observation, which is that religion is a personal and individualistic need, which then later becomes a collective phenomenon; Muhammad’s personal need for a religion became a collective entity with a leadership, followers, ambitions, and constraints, and this appears clearly in the contrast between the revelations in Mecca and Medina in shape and content, and the contradiction in the implementation of Islam, which did not differ much from the practices of any political leader; thus the transition from a personal to a collective belief was not necessarily intended.
There was an alteration in the finality of the sacred text with political pressure and the necessity to defend the ideology, which is why we need to make a double effort, first, to understand the constraints and the way through which the religious message mutated, at the time of the prophet, and later his followers; and second, to overcome ideological temptations as a researcher when dealing with the sacred text, by recognizing the genius of Muhammad and the genuineness of his existential quest, regardless of the conclusions he ultimately came to.
A call to break the fast publicly in Ramadan
Update: this video made more than 183,860 views.
A call to break the fast publicly in Ramadan
The month of Ramadan is considered as one of the most important and most sacred religious occasions for Muslims. During that month, Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, and having sex everyday from sunrise to sunset. Unfortunately, as many people know, Muslim society absolutely refuses to respect alternative voices and opinions, especially if it comes from people who were forced to be Muslim by tradition, meaning that they were unlucky enough to be born in an Islamic country, where they would either die as Muslims or have a death sentence over their head for apostasy.
In these societies with a Muslim majority, there’s a large faction, though a peaceful minority, that chose to free itself from the ties of religion, and obviously they do not observe the fast because they have no moral obligation to do so from close or afar. But all too often they are obliged to for their own safety, pushed into some sort of a compulsory hunger strike, a fact that should be considered an infringement on individual liberties, guaranteed by international conventions on human rights, which state that no person is to be forced to do something they do not wish to partake in, especially when it’s related to their freedom of belief.
There are many who consider Ramadan a catastrophe, as they are coerced to pretend to be fasting in a society that forces its religion and traditions on everyone without any regard to freedom of individuals with their different religious beliefs and world views. Some call it a “nightmare” which they have to endure for 30 days every year: a month of disputes, nutrition problems, or a month of sleeping, eating in toilets and dark places, far from the prying eyes of society, like a thief or a criminal.
It’s a psychological battle led by every individual who is forced to fast in the presence of their family, their friends, and society at large, in order not to provoke Muslims, as they say, yet they do not seem to be provoked by the sight of a woman in her menstruation period eating, or when parents prepare the food for their kids, or when a woman fasts a number of days in compensation for the period during which she had to break the fast, when everyone around her eats normally, and she may even be the one who prepares the food.
Unfortunately the price of breaking the fast publicly during Ramadan in Islamic countries is high because, despite differences due to legal variations, its common trait remains ostracization, humiliation, hatred, and verbal and physical attacks. In Morocco for example there’s a law article which considers public eating during Ramadan a crime punishable by imprisonment. In Saudi Arabia and Iran death penalty awaits those who break the fast publicly.
We are a group of non Muslim Arabs who decided to call for an event centered on the theme of public eating during Ramadan, in several countries including Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon. Our objective is to break the wall of silence, to defend religious freedom, and make it a wide scale discussion in which everyone would participate.
By no means do we demand from believers in Islam not to observe their fast, or to abandon their religious practices, but it’s a humanistic call from the heart of dictatorship and suffering to respect the right of non Muslims to break the fast, and to protect that right with a legal support that would eliminate any punishment for public fast breaking and replace it with an article that would condemn any act of social segregation or attack on a citizen or a foreign resident who refuses to fast and eats publicly.
Achieving that goal would require a lot of courage and sacrifice, and the revolutions of the Arab spring may suffice to realize it provided they are protected from those who want to divert them from their path and exploit them to advocate a caliphate or a theocracy, instead of freedom and human rights.
You can support us by joining the page of the event on facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/Breakthefast
——– traduction française par Michel D. que je remercie ———-
“Un appel à la rupture publique du jeûne durant le Ramadan.
Le mois de Ramadan est considéré comme l’un des moments les plus importants et sacrés pour les musulmans. Pendant ce mois, les musulmans s’abstiennent de manger, de boire, et d’avoir des relations sexuelles, tous les jours, du lever au coucher du soleil. Malheureusement, comme beaucoup de gens le savent, la société musulmane refuse absolument de respecter les voix et les opinions alternatives, surtout si elles viennent de personnes qui sont contraintes d’être musulmanes par la tradition, c’est à dire qu’elles ont la malchance d’être nées dans un pays islamique où elles risquent, en tant que personnes musulmanes, la mort ou une sentence de mort pour apostasie.
Dans ces sociétés à majorité musulmane, il y a une fraction importante, même s’il s’agit d’une minorité pacifique, qui a choisi de se libérer des liens de la religion, et évidemment qui n’observe pas le jeûne, car ne se sentant aucune obligation morale de le faire, de près ou de loin . Mais trop souvent, ces personnes sont obligées, pour leur propre sécurité, à se contraindre une sorte de grève de la faim obligatoire, un fait qui devrait être considéré comme une atteinte aux libertés individuelles, garantis par les conventions internationales des Droits de l’Homme, qui stipulent que nul ne peut être forcé de faire ce à quoi il ne souhaite pas prendre part, surtout quand cela est relatif à leur liberté de croyance.
Nombreux sont ceux qui considèrent le Ramadan comme une catastrophe, car ils sont contraints de faire semblant d’être à jeun, dans une société dont la religion et les traditions s’imposent à tout le monde sans aucun égard pour la liberté des individus dans leurs différentes croyances religieuses et leurs visions du monde. Certains appellent cela un «cauchemar» qu’ils ont à supporter pendant 30 jours, chaque année: un mois de conflits personnel, de problèmes de nutrition, ou un mois à dormir, à manger dans les toilettes et des endroits sombres, loin des yeux indiscrets de la société, comme un voleur ou un. criminel.
C’est une bataille psychologique mené par chaque individu qui est obligé de jeûner en présence de leur famille, leurs amis, et de la société au sens large, afin de ne pas provoquer les musulmans, comme ces derniers disent, lesquels ne semblent pas être provoqués par la vue d’une femme mangeant pendante sa période de menstruation, ou lorsque les parents préparent la nourriture pour leurs enfants, ou quand une femme jeûne un nombre de jours de compensation pour la période pendant laquelle elle a dû rompre le jeûne, quand tout le monde autour d’elle mange normalement, et elle peut même être celle qui prépare la nourriture.
Malheureusement le prix de la rupture du jeûne, faite publiquement pendant le ramadan dans les pays islamiques, est élevé parce que, malgré des différences dans l’application des cadres juridiques nationaux, le trait commun reste l’ostracisme, l’humiliation, la haine et les attaques verbales et physiques. Au Maroc par exemple existe un article de loi qui considère que manger en public pendant le Ramadan un crime passible d’emprisonnement. En Arabie Saoudite et l’Iran la peine de mort attend ceux qui rompent le jeûne en public.
Nous sommes un groupe d’arabes non musulmans qui ont décidé d’appeler à une manifestation centrée sur le thème “manger en public pendant le Ramadan”, dans plusieurs pays dont le Maroc, l’Egypte, la Tunisie et le Liban. Notre objectif est de briser le mur du silence, pour défendre la liberté religieuse, et provoquer un débat à grande échelle auquel chacun participerait.
En aucun cas, nous n’exigeons que les croyants de l’islam cessent d’observer le jeûne, ou renoncent à leurs pratiques religieuses ; c’est un appel humaniste qui vient du cœur de la dictature et de la souffrance, visant à ce que le droit des non-musulmans à rompre le jeûne soit respecté, et à promouvoir la protection juridique et légale qui permettrait d’éliminer toute sanction en cas de rupture publique du jeûne et à remplacer l’arsenal juridique actuel par un article qui condamne tout acte de ségrégation sociale ou le fait d’attenter à un citoyen ou un résident étranger qui refuse publiquement de jeûner.
Atteindre cet objectif exigerait beaucoup de courage et de sacrifices, et les révolutions du printemps arabe pourraient y parvenir si elles se préservaient de ceux qui veulent les détourner de leur chemin et les exploiter afin d’imposer un califat ou une théocratie, en lieu et place de la Liberté et des Droits humains”.
Vous pouvez nous soutenir en vous joignant à la page de cet événement dans facebook:http://www.facebook.com/Breakthefast
