Until she was in her mid-40s my mother, a lifelong
Methodist, would never have dreamt of going to church on Sunday without wearing
a hat. There are many Christian
churches today where most women still wear hats, often quite flamboyant ones,
particularly those churches with an Afro-Caribbean origin. They are keeping up a tradition associated
with a passage in Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 11. My father never wore a hat in church – again
following advice in Corinthians where a distinction is made between the
requirements for men and for women.
The other day I was sitting in Bloomsbury Square in London
and a large Jewish family group came to sit on the grass near me. They were speaking in a mixture of American-accented English and Hebrew. All the adult women had headscarves,
and all but one of the men was wearing a kippah
or skull-cap. Clearly they were
following practices recommended in the Talmud.
In my class at secondary school there was Sikh boy who wore
a turban.
As I wrote in a separate blog (http://www.paulwhiteplaces.blogspot.co.uk - August 2016), I recently spent some time in
the Goutte d’Or district of Paris, where many West African women were buying
and selling goods in the street whilst adorned with their colourful
ankle-length dresses and matching head coverings.
It is common nowadays throughout Europe to encounter Islamic
women who cover their heads with a khimaar, hijab or scarf, although some also wear this around their necks and only raise it to
their heads from time to time as a mark of respect. They are following the guidance of the Qu'ran.
The tenets of Christianity, Judaism and Islam all have
things to say about requirements for modesty in women, including head
covering. Islam and Judaism in particular also talk about modesty for men. But a quick search of the
internet shows that in each of these religions a great deal is left to the interpretation of rather vague passages in the relevant texts, particularly in
Judaism and Islam. Hence the great variety of practice between women (and men) adhering to different beaches of the faith, or coming from particular parts of the world. And there is today a
much wider and more significant question about the extent to which these
various practices count as religious or cultural or both. Religion is part of culture, so such practices could be said to be both.
Why this matters is because of the increasing level of
debate over the wearing of the Islamic veil by women, and its possible prohibition. A number of countries, or local authorities,
have established bans on full face-veils – often in schools, sometimes more
broadly in public places or in courts. France and Belgium brought in bans in
2011, the Ticino (in Switzerland) in 2013: some cities in Italy have followed
suit, as has Barcelona in Spain. A
number of German Länder have banned
all forms of Islamic headscarf in schools, whilst Denmark – in what is perhaps
a more even-handed gesture – has since 2008 banned the wearing of certain religious
identifications in courtrooms: Islamic veils but also Jewish skull-caps and
Sikh turbans.
Meanwhile Turkey has gone in the opposite direction, with a
loosening of earlier bans on certain items of Islamic dress and with the
President clearly wishing to encourage a more all-embracing view of what should
be classed as Islamic ‘modesty’.
In the last few weeks we have had the escalation of events
in France with attempts to ban the ‘burkini’ on beaches on the Côte
d’Azur. In Germany the ruling Christian
Democratic Union (the CDU) has adopted a policy of bringing in a federal ban on
the headscarf.
In Britain the Sun columnist
Kelvin MacKenzie objected to Channel 4 News having a hijab-wearing Muslim woman covering the terrorist attack in Nice
on Bastille Day. Yet this could equally
well be celebrated as showing the more tolerant attitudes in the UK than in
several other European countries where such dress would not be allowed at all
for a television employee.
Issues of the integration of ethnic minorities are to the
fore in almost every European country, focused particularly on Islamic
populations. Yet it is odd that the
symbolic centrepiece of the discussion has become what women wear on their
heads (and only Islamic women at that).
Commentators lament that the headscarf shows the oppression of Muslim women
by men, yet many Islamic women (as also many Jewish women talking about their
scarves or wigs, and many Afro-Caribbean women wearing their big hats to
church) see what they wear as part of their personal identity and their feeling
of who they are. I’m sure my mother felt
the same.
And in the case of the burkini, it has been a passage of
only 60 years – much less than a lifetime – between the period when women on
many European beaches were asked to cover up their new bikinis, and today when
we have images of police officers on the beach at Nice requiring women to
remove some of their clothing in order to be allowed to stay put.
Certainly the creation of cohesive societies embracing
people of diverse origins is something that many people hold as a key goal
throughout Europe. But legislating on
clothing is a sideshow in comparison to the real issues for
progress. It would be very strange if the success of integration policies was to be measured solely by Islamic women giving up wearing the headscarf or veil.
