Niqab ban unveils Syria's secular past
By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - Syria was abuzz last week when unconfirmed reports surfaced in
international media that the minister of higher education had instructed
universities to prevent women wearing the niqab (face veil) from
entering campuses.
Apart from raising eyebrows in conservative circles throughout the Middle East,
the story reminded everybody of Syria's strong secular values, preached by its
ruling Ba'ath Party since it came to power in the 1960s and upheld by
individual Syrians since early years of the 20th century.
The ministry has not yet officially commented on the ban, while the Syrian
public is aggressively debating the reported legislation. Moderate Muslims,
Christians and seculars are pleased with it, claiming that the niqab is
foreign to Syrian society, referring to the
Holy Koran and saying that not a single verse commands women to cover their
entire bodies and face.
Intellectuals argue that just as women are not allowed to walk the streets
completely naked, they also should not be permitted to walk the streets covered
from head to toe. Academics are also supporting it, arguing that teaching
students whose identity is concealed is difficult, especially during exam
times, and that it kills whatever face-to-face interaction a professor can have
with his or her students.
Conservatives, however, argue that the niqab, which only allows a
woman's eyes to show in public, is Islamic dress at its very best.
The handwriting for such a move has been on the wall for weeks. Earlier this
summer, the Ministry of Education transferred - a polite way of saying froze
out - over 1,000 teachers wearing the niqab from their teaching posts at
schools throughout Syria. This was done, authorities confirmed, to preserve the
secular nature of Syrian education.
The current debate is yet another chapter in the long history of conservatives
versus moderates in the modern history of Syria. Women in Syria during the 400
years of the Ottoman empire were required to wear a long black dress covering
their entire bodies, along with a thin cloth for their faces.
In 1920, a 21-year old girl from Damascus defied tradition and took off her milaya
(traditional, full-length veil) when volunteering to fight in the Syrian army
against the invading French army. She paraded through the streets of Damascus
unveiled, with a rifle strapped on her shoulder, creating shockwaves throughout
conservative circles of the Syrian capital.
Moderates and seculars hailed her as the Syrian Joan of Arc while she defended
her action saying that she was off to battle, defending her homeland from
occupation - the noblest deed on Earth - and not unveiling to attract or seduce
the opposite sex. The wives of the Prophet Mohammed, she reminded her critics,
had participated in battle with him unveiled.
Unveiling became increasingly popular in the 1930s and 1940s, thanks to secular
political parties like the Syrian Communist Party, the Ba'ath Party and the
Syrian Social Nationalist Party that encouraged women to unveil and take part
in public life as equals to men.
By the mid-1940s, Syrian women were being hired in the work force, as
secretaries, typists, journalists, and nurses while many began to enroll at the
Damascus University Faculty of Law, not a single one of them covered or wearing
the milaya.
Unveiled women took the lead at the Syrian Women's Union and the women's branch
of the Syrian Red Crescent, while young ladies from big landowning families
began to promenade in public with male friends, attending Clark Gable movies
and dancing at parties to the tunes of Frank Sinatra.
Angry clerics fought the trend with zeal, tabling a bill in parliament in 1944
that sought the thickness of a woman's stockings and the cloth covering her
face be regulated officially by law, and making their violation an offence
punishable by hefty fines.
They attacked unveiled women on the streets of Damascus, stoning them for
practices that they considered "devilish" and un-Islamic.
In 1953, a secular schoolteacher named Thuraya al-Hafez, who for years had
strongly lobbied against the veil, nominated herself for parliament, becoming
the first women to venture into a job that was traditionally reserved for male
citizens. She lost but her defiance was repeated in 1961 by Qamar Shora,
another strong-minded and unveiled women, who was also, defeated at the polls,
due to fraud at the ballots by angry politicians who did not want to be
challenged in the political arena by women activists.
The current niqab debate brings back strong memories of these women
activists, who suffered great physical and social dangers to promote women
emancipation, rather than women seclusion in a male-dominated society.
Syria's ruling Ba'ath Party has stood up for women's rights and so has
President Bashar al-Assad whose wife, Asma al-Assad, is a perfect example of a
21st-century modernized Arab woman who works for female empowerment.
Syrians supporting the niqab ban are arguing that it is not about
Islamic dress - which is perfectly fine with Syrian society - but it is about
foreign influences penetrating into Syria. The traditional Islamic dress for
Syrian women was the isharb, an Audrey Hepburn style scarf worn in the
1950s, and not the niqab, which came to Syria from Saudi Arabia over the
past 25 to 30 years.
Currently, there are 2 million Ba'athists in Syria, 613,866 of whom are women.
Within the Communist Party, for example, there are five women on the central
committee and within the Syrian Social Nationalist Party an approximate 30% of
members are women.
Currently, women make up 10% of all lawyers in Syria and 6% of all judges. In
commerce and industry, there are 767 women entrepreneurs, 396 who own private
businesses and 371 who own and direct private industry.
They are also well-represented at the Syrian universities, where 20% of all
full-time professors are women. Some of them hold important teaching positions
in departments such as chemical engineering, veterinary medicine, agriculture
and economics.
In 1971, women finally made it into parliament, encouraged by secular president
Hafez al-Assad, holding four seats out of a total 173. By 1981, the number of
women deputies had increased to 10, and by 1994 it had reached an impressive
21. Today, women make up 10.4% of parliament and among Syria's top posts the
vice president, the minister of Economy, the minister of Social Affairs,
Syria's ambassador to France, and the presidential advisor on Media Affairs are
all highly educated, unveiled and strong-minded women.
Syrian women who are defending women empowerment today are very proud of the
fact that they got their political rights in Syria as far back as 1949, when
only the most advanced countries in Europe, like the UK, France and Spain, had
granted suffrage rights to women.
The UK did that in 1928, France in 1944, and Spain in 1946. Switzerland, for
example, did not grant suffrage to women until 1971 and in the Arab world only
Iraq preceded Syria, having ratified such a law in 1948. Lebanon, the most
liberal nation in the region, followed in 1952, and Egypt did the same in 1956.
Morocco did not give women the right to vote until 1963, and it took Jordan
until 1973.
In the 1940s, Syria's late poet Nizar Qabbani, then a student at Damascus
University, had a famous debate with Abdulsalam Ujayli, a medical student who
went on to become one of Syria's best novelists. The young Ujayli criticized
Nizar for writing about women saying that while the nation was ablaze in
anti-French riots, all Nizar was doing was writing about love and women's
emancipation.
A confident Nizar replied by asking Ujayli why the Syrians had been spilling
blood against the French since 1920? Ujayli replies: "For independence." Nizar
snapped back that Syria, just like a healthy human being, needs two legs to
live properly. One leg is independence, the other leg is freedom.
If the Syrians are not free, they can never enjoy independence. It's like
having only one leg to stand on. Freedom means the right to live and the right
to love. A women who is forced into seclusion, by her family, her dress code,
or by society, he argued, will never truly be free and independent.
It is only natural for a country that fought for its rights so long and ago,
and produced open-minded and liberal intellectuals like Nizar Qabbani to try
and regulate the niqab in Syria, 60-years down the road, with the purpose of
preserving secular and moderate values that Syria has long stood and fought
for.
Sami Moubayed is editor-in-chief of Forward Magazine in Syria.
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