In a piece on Slate posted yesterday, Anne Applebaum tries to make sense of a controversy in Britain over a Muslim teaching assistant who was fired because she refused to remove a veil that covered her face in the presence of male teachers. Oh, those silly Brits. Applebaum gently guides us through the issues; on the one hand, you want to honor a person's religious freedom as possible, but on the other, you have to consider the veil's association with fundamentalist Islam and ergo, terrorism, what with the threat of terrorism and all.
But wait, that's not it?
And yet, at a much simpler level, surely it is also true that the full-face veil—the niqab, burqa, or chador—causes such deep reactions in the West not so much because of its political or religious symbolism, but because it is extremely impolite.
Fair enough, it is impolite in Western society to be masked. But this is where Applebaum starts to lose us a bit.
Just as it is considered rude to enter a Balinese temple wearing shorts, so, too, is it considered rude, in a Western country, to hide one's face.
Did she just compare a dress code in a place of worship to a workplace in a multi-ethinic community? But there's more.
We wear masks when we want to frighten, when we are in mourning, or when we want to conceal our identities. To a Western child—or even an adult—a woman clad from head to toe in black looks like a ghost. Thieves and actors hide their faces in the West; honest people look you straight in the eye...
Damn those thieves and actors -thieves and actors!- making veiled Muslim women look bad.
Multicultural Matters [Slate]
