VICTORIA (CUP) — “Extreme” views are behind calls to ban the burka in Canada, according to members of the University of Victoria’s Muslim Student Association (MSA).
Earlier this month, the Muslim Canadian Congress called for the prohibition of burkas, the garments Muslim women wear to cover their face and body.
The congress said the practice of wearing the burka has no place in a society that supports gender equality.
Farzana Hassan, congress spokesperson, told the CBC that there is nothing in any of the primary Islamic religious texts, including the Qur’an, which requires women to cover their faces.
“Covering is a matter of opinion,” said Mohamed Ghilan, president of the UVic MSA. “It is a woman’s free choice, especially in Canada. There is no coercion.”
Ghilan said the Qur’an states that there is no compulsion in religion; Islam is based on free will, but with guidelines, not rules, he added.
“There are many interpretations of religious texts and the Muslim lobby group [ . . . ] have an extreme [interpretation], where they are beginning to contradict the right to practice religion,” Ghilan said.
Ghilan said Hassan is imposing this interpretation and is attacking Muslim women who choose to wear traditional garments as a method of worship. He questions Hassan’s reasons to call for the ban of the burka.
“The group itself is controversial,” he said. “They call themselves ‘secular Muslims,’ which in itself is a contradiction.”
Ghilan said the lobby group is hypocritical and that Hassan’s motive may rely on the environment she grew up in — an environment where perhaps she may have been forced by friends or family to wear the coverings.
“These cases are few and far between,” Ghilan said. “It is wrong for a Muslim woman to be forced to wear the burka by anyone.”
But there are cases where this does happen and Ghilan said they are a direct result of a lack of Islamic literacy on part of the family and friends. Islam is not set up in a hierarchy, said Ghilan, but rather, it comprises a body of scholars based on a democracy; there are no infallible figures.
There is an idea being perpetuated in the media that is false, and people are trying to simplify a vast culture, he said.
An example of this is that the banning of the burka has become so aggressive that some Muslim women are even afraid to leave their homes after dark.
“Disallowing Muslim women to chose to wear traditional garments of worship is like disallowing a Catholic nun to wear her habit, or a Sikh to wear his or her turban,” he said.
According to recent articles found in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, many Muslim women even attest to wearing traditional garments as a way of liberating themselves from being subjects of sexual scrutiny or consumerism.
“Mankind. We created you from a male and a female and made you into nations and tribes that you may know and honour each other,” Ghilan quoted from the Qur’an.
“We are all created differently, and this is what makes us individual.”
