Jordan's Muslim Brotherhood lashed out against France's decision to ban people from wearing the burqa and niqab in public. The AP reports:
The head of Jordan's Muslim Brotherhood says France's ban on the Islamic face veil is a war against Muslims.
Hammam Saeed claims the move is a violation of French civil liberties and underlines a "new crusader behavior" against Muslims.
Saeed said in a statement on April 12 that it "marks the beginning of a dangerous war" between cultures. The Brotherhood's political arm, the Islamic Action Front, is Jordan's largest opposition group.
The Brotherhood advocates the introduction of strict Islamic Sharia laws in the country.
Some have called France's attempt Islamophobic, including here on DailyKos:
It's an Islamophobic law, it was written to be an Islamophobic law, and no one's under any illusions that it's otherwise.
This is ultimately not about women's rights. It's about the ignorant and irrational fear of Islam and any public expression of it.
Others, including Muslim feminists, have praised the law as an attempt to free Muslim women from their "prison":
"When you wear the full veil, you don't have the right to work, you don't have the right to choose your husband, you don't have the right to love," said [Sihem] Habachi, a Muslim feminist. "You are totally in prison. What is the aim of our democracy? What is the aim of our republic? It is to protect. That is a new challenge for our republic today."
I personally am all for France's law and I don't believe it to be Islamophobic in the slightest. It's about France wanting to preserve its secular culture that values womens rights and equality of the sexes.
Further backing my point that the law is not Islamophobic is that fact that a few Muslim-majority countries have banned the burqa and niqab in certain situations as well:
Syria has forbidden the country’s students and teachers from wearing the niqab – the full Islamic veil that reveals only a woman’s eyes – taking aim at a garment many see as political.
“We have given directives to all universities to ban niqab-wearing women from registering,” a government official in Damascus told the Associated Press on Monday.
Would anyone call Syria Islamphobic for this decision?
Or how about Turkey and Jordan? Are they Islamophobic?
Syria is the latest in a string of nations, from Europe to the Middle East, to weigh in on the veil, perhaps the most visible symbol of conservative Islam. Veils have spread in other secular-leaning Arab countries, such as Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, with Jordan’s government trying to discourage them by playing up reports of robbers who wear veils as masks. Turkey bans Muslim headscarves in universities, with many saying attempts to allow them in schools amount to an attack on modern Turkey’s secular laws.
There is surely plenty of Islamophobia in Western Europe, as there is in the United States, but in this case, I think its pretty clear that France has decided that the freedom of women and equality of the sexes trumps a conservative Muslim man's religious obligation to suppress women's rights.