The Burqa and The Public Blanket

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I boarded a subway earlier this week with a friend and saw a surprising sight: someone sitting in a corner seat with a blanket covering (her?) body.

I remarked to my friend that that was a lot like a burqa, and that if burqas are banned, why not blankets covering public sleepers?

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I came to this article in today’s news talking about the banning of the burqa.  I hadn’t heard the different reasons that different countries were interested in banning the clothing.  This passage will clue you in to some of those reasons:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy favors a burqa ban, saying the veils compromise women’s dignity. Unlike the Belgians or the Dutch — who see a clear and straightforward public security issue — the French are struggling with the constitutionality of outlawing a religious dress code.

I guess I’d only heard the security argument and not the indignity argument.  While on the surface the practice of wearing a burqa seems to me to be an undignified thing, as yet I don’t know the reasoning behind wearing the clothing so I can’t give an educated opinion, nor can I comment on the legality of promoting indignity.  I can comment more on the security argument, and it seems to me that if wearing a burqa can necessitate arrest on the grounds of creating a security threat, so should donning the hiding blanket for the (woman?) on the subway.

And in considering the nature of the security threat, not only that, ban any covering in public.  What is a tent, then?  Might large sunglasses obfuscate identity in a problematic way?  What about security in Prince’s entourage, who purportedly tower over him as to make him unseen?  When I’m wearing a big pashmina scarf on a cold day, am I committing a crime?  Does my rather helpful ski mask criminalize my need for facial warmth when skiing down slopes or biking down streets?  When I wear clown makeup, do I send fear into the hearts and minds of the CIA?

The security notion strikes me as brazen cultural discrimination based on fear and ignorance.  The burqa is a covering with holes for eyes; so is many a Halloween costume.  A burqa is fabric that reveals the eyes; a blanket doesn’t have eyes, so it is more concealing.  Don’t we have some potential hypocrises here if the U.S. government develops a semantic reaction to burqas similar to the reactions of the other banning nations?

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A lot of different cultures and heritages are represented in my neighborhood.  I see a few burqas here and there, and while they surprise me a little bit, it’s only because they are unusual, and after seeing a person wearing one, my thinking usually shifts to “Treat this person just as I would any other person–with a sense of humor.”  Granted, to date I’ve never interacted with a woman wearing a burqa, so I don’t know if those are wise actions.  Apparently to the governments of some nations, underneath these items of clothing could be an assassin, so in these countries I should maybe feign threat.

But what I don’t see are people walking down the street in ski masks.  Those are probably more shocking to me than burqas.  And I have to calm myself down the moment I see them.  Methinks part of the fun of wearing a ski mask is the shock it generates in other people.

The subway sleeper probably wanted to create (her?) own bit of security.  If so, was the public blanket a security threat, or a security boon?

It depends on the motives.  The meaning, as we remember, lies in the person.

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