The Burqa, Colonial Feminism And The Politics Of Dog Whistling

What is the significance of the comments of Tony Abbott and Cory Bernardi on the subject of Muslim women? How are we to understand these comments, and how should we respond to them?

Consider first the comments of Tony Abbott. There have been mixed reports on where he stands on burqas being banned in Parliament. As to burqas, he explained:

I have said before that I find it a fairly confronting form of attire. Frankly, I wish it was not worn but we are a free country, we are a free society and it is not the business of government to tell people what they should and shouldn’t wear…

We can all have an opinion, we can all have a preference but in the end it is up to the citizens of Australia to decide what they should wear. It is a little different obviously in a situation where people’s identity is important.

In a sense, much of this should be uncontroversial. Governments mostly do not tell people what they should and shouldn’t wear, though there are exceptions – such as laws that regulate public nudity.

In a free society, there should be very few restrictions on what people can wear. Restrictions should not be based on the preferences of this group or that group, or even of the majority. A majority of Australians may not approve of the fashion choices of goths, punks, emos, hippies, hipsters and so on, but they do not imagine that any rights follow from this disapproval. They would not presume to regulate things like what kind of haircuts people should have, or how they should apply make-up.

There are people who don’t like make-up. People who think high-heels are sexist. People who oppose things like breast implants, botox, and other cosmetic surgical procedures. Those who try to make such arguments to groups beyond their friends typically do not propose legislation to ban them. There are no major political figures or movements that support banning breast implants or make-up: it’s hard to even think of minor figures who would advocate such positions.

Some forms of attire may be confronting to others in Australia. By now, the Mardi Gras has become rather mainstream. However, the point of at least some of the floats is to openly display forms of sexuality that some conservative elements historically have found confronting, shocking and upsetting. We laugh now at Reverend Fred Nile’s continuing opposition to the Mardi Gras, but there was a time when his position was more mainstream.

In short, sometimes things that are confronting are a good thing. Sometimes people should be confronted. People can be complacent about moral values that may actually be grossly outdated, offensive or wrong.

For hundreds of years, people with liberal values have drawn straightforward conclusions from this about the value of freedom. Even Tony Abbott once said – in words one can agree with, even if he doesn’t – that we must support the freedom to be obnoxious and objectionable.

Free speech is not bland speech. Often, it’s pretty rough speech because people are entitled to be passionate when they are arguing for what they believe to be important and necessary. Speech that has to be inoffensive would be unerringly politically correct but it would not be free.

Put aside for now all the exceptions drawn by Abbott and the right in their supposed love for freedom – in relation to journalism, so-called terrorism offences, to our scandalously repressive defamation laws.

The problem with Abbott’s comments lie in the implication that the burqa is “confronting”. The suggestion is that there is something unsettling about the burqa – and the burqa alone. It is hard to understand how he would be confronted by it. I doubt that he regularly comes across women wearing burqas in his electorate in Northern Sydney, or around Parliament in Canberra. If he finds anything confronting about it, it is the idea of the burqa. Something about it seems strange and different.

Malcolm Turnbull warned that “We don’t want to have debates like this being turned into some sort of coded attack on the Muslim community”. Clearly, he understood that it is a coded attack on the Muslim community. Relatively few Muslims in Australia wear the burqa or niqab. However, it is taken as a symbol of Islam, and plays into various stereotypes and bigoted tropes about Muslims that circulate throughout Australia.

And the tropes don’t need to be fully articulated to be tapped into. They go roughly like this: Muslims are different. Terrorists are Muslim, and it is hard to tell how many Muslims are terrorists or sympathetic to terrorists. Islam oppresses Muslim women.

People like Tony Abbott don’t need to explicitly say any of these things. They just need to get into the right ballpark, and know that the right audience will take the right message. Saying the burqa is confronting ostensibly doesn’t say much about Islam or Muslim women, but the right message will be received by the right audiences.

Saying that it “is important that people be able to be recognised” in Parliament house subtly links Muslim women to security threats. He doesn’t need to blare any message. He doesn’t need to say Muslim women are a security threat. Plenty of Australians get the connection easily enough.

Though the overwhelming majority of Muslim women don’t wear the burqa, many have reacted with outrage to Abbott’s comments. They understand that they are the real targets of such comments. As I have argued, this is how the war on Iraq and Syria will be sold by the Australian government. Not through arguments, but by innuendos about Muslims.

We don’t have any concrete evidence that this is official government policy right now. However, back in 2011, Lenore Taylor revealed in the Sydney Morning Herald that the “opposition immigration spokesman, Scott Morrison, urged the shadow cabinet to capitalise on the electorate's growing concerns about ‘Muslim immigration’, ‘Muslims in Australia’ and the ‘inability’ of Muslim migrants to integrate.”

The government is probably aware of other concerns about Muslims today. As the Abbott government has been battling wild unpopularity for a while now, bigotry and xenophobia may be their strongest card.

Two days after Taylor’s revelation in 2011, Cory Bernardi ploughed on, undeterred. He unashamedly declared that “Islam itself is the problem – it's not Muslims… Muslims are individuals that practise their faith in their own way, but Islam is a totalitarian, political and religious ideology.”

Bernardi is not the only person to make this argument. One hears from others – including atheists who love to spruik their unique capacities for rational thought – that criticising Islam in this way can be distinguished from criticising Muslims, and is certainly different to things like prejudice and bigotry.

It is true that saying Islam is evil, that it causes terrorism and so on, may not explicitly say all Muslims are evil terrorists. However, the implication is clearly there to be drawn. The effect is to justify repressive measures and bigotry domestically, and violence, wars and oppression internationally.

The fact that someone is targeting religion with vicious accusations, rather than its adherents, does not diminish the bigotry of such accusations, nor the harm such accusations can cause.

For many centuries, blood libels were hurled against the Jews. It was claimed over and over that Jews murdered non-Jewish children, in order to prepare matzah for Pesach. The result was to justify massacres of Jews, by angry mobs who thought they were retaliating against the people they believed were killing innocent children.

Bernardi has claimed that the burqa is a “symbol of female oppression and Islamic culture”, carries security and identification risks and is “un-Australian”. The particularly blatant dog whistle comes in his claim that the burqa is un-Australian.

It is possible that he means sexism is un-Australian. However, one might then expect him to, for example, have expressed some reservations about the gender imbalance of the cabinet in the present Coalition government.

One might have expected him to have commented on some of the statements made over the years by the leader of his party on the subject of women.

It’s hard trying to single out the most appalling sexist outburst by our current Prime Minister when there are so many to choose from. I would simply suggest revisiting Julia Gillard’s brilliant speech on the subject.

The claim about the burqa being a security risk is preposterous enough. What kind of a disguise would leave its wearer so plainly distinct and suspicious? Anyone who wants to hide their face can utilise another long-standing device invented for the purpose, known as “masks”. Any venues that are concerned about security have recognised the possibility that people can hide weapons in their clothing – hence, the existence of things like metal detectors.

It is true that people can disguise themselves in burqas. They can also wear giant mascot costumes. The movie Snatch beings with a group of ostensibly religious Jews robbing a bank. No-one talks about regulating Jews who wear beards, peyot, black hats and coats – presumably because they aren’t regarded as un-Australian. This is because un-Australian is supposed to mean ‘different’. Foreign. Alien. That’s what we’re meant to think of Muslims.

Let us return to Bernardi’s claim that the burqa is a “symbol of female oppression and Islamic culture”. It is useful to consider the historical record. In Leila Ahmed’s seminal book, Women and Gender in Islam, she notes that in Christian Byzantium, before the rise of Islam, Byzantine women “were always supposed to be veiled, the veil or its absence marking the distinction between the ‘honest’ woman and the prostitute”. I will abstain from drawing fashionably wild conclusions about female oppression and Christian culture.

In her book, Ahmed identifies a phenomenon she calls “colonial feminism”: “feminism as used against other cultures in the service of colonialism”. Colonial feminists “captured the language of feminism and redirected it, in the service of colonialism, toward Other men and the cultures of Other men.” That is, the “idea that Other men… oppressed women was to be used, in the rhetoric of colonialism, to render morally justifiable its project of undermining or eradicating the cultures of colonised peoples.”

Ahmed describes the colonial feminism of those who opposed Islam, claiming that it inherently oppressed women, as being “in the service of” the colonial “assault on the religions and cultures of Other men.”  To give a particularly striking example, Ahmed cites the case of Lord Cromer. Cromer believed that the “mind of the Oriental” was inferior. When it came to Islam, he thought it was a “complete failure” as a social system, singling out “first and foremost” its treatment of women. Whilst deriding the oppression of women under Islam, his policies in Egypt were, according to Ahmed, “detrimental to Egyptian women”, such as “discouraging the training of women doctors.”

Whilst Cromer advocated the unveiling of Egyptian women to liberate them from sexist oppression, Cromer was also in England the “founding member and sometime president of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage.”

And then there’s the case of Bernardi, who among other things, is a strong opponent of abortion rights.

The colonial feminists of today weep over the terrible oppression of Muslim women. They do so as they vilify Muslims in Australia and abroad, telling us to fear them as potential terrorists. They do so, as they support brutal, tyrannical regimes that oppress Muslims across the Middle East. They do so as they launch an invasion of yet another Muslim country.

When people like Abbott express their concern over the oppression of Muslim women, I imagine many of them feel just like Julia Gillard did: “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man… Not now, not ever.”