Just a week after the lower house of French parliament passed a measure banning burqas amid charges of discrimination and xenophobia, Syria’s Ministry of Education has rather quietly banned the niqab—a veil that leaves only the eyes uncovered—from public and private universities. And this ban came just a month after the Ministry transferred hundreds of teachers who wore the niqab at government run primary schools to positions outside the classroom.
It would be a stretch to suggest that the Syrian ban is the result of a widespread fear of foreigners as three quarters of the country is Sunni Muslim. It reflects, rather, as R.R. Reno suggested of the French ban, a desire to protect a secular civil society. While the French dressed up their defense of Laïcité in women’s rights clothes, the Syrian Minister of Education has admitted that the niqab ban is to protect the “‘objective, secular methodology’ of Syrian Schools.”
July 21st, 2010 | 9:37 am
Actually the Syrian government has always been quite scared of its own Sunni Muslim population for two reasons.
1. They are baathists, and, as you suggest, therefore want to protect their secular (ostensibly pan-arabist) dictatorship.
2. The Assad family (and, by extension, most of the government/military) are Alawite Shia and are therefore viewed as heretics by hardline Sunni.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alawite#Beliefs
July 21st, 2010 | 11:14 am
It’s not exactly fear of foreigners so much as fear of foreign ideological influence. Wearing the niqab in Syria is a custom that is coming in through Saudi influence (niqab is traditionally found only in the Gulf). Given that Syria is a secularist country (to my knowledge, the only Arab state where the government does not officially note the religion of individual citizens) whose Alawite leaders are slowly trying to find a rapprochement between their religion and Twelver Shiism, it’s only natural that they fear further Saudification of the Sunni majority. Really, I think almost anything that happens in the Middle East can be explained by the rivalry between the overt alliance of Syria and Iran and the implicit alliance between the Saudis and Israelis….
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