A "race" against time..
The veil row stirred London last week and diverted the media attention to yet another controversy related to islam. Comments poured in from everywhere - from common people to ministers to even the religious leaders.
I wont start off a debate here again on whether niqab or veil is a religious obligation or is redundant and what is Koran's say on it. There are thousands advocating either side of the issue.
The question is whether this niqab and veil is relevant in the world of today, a world where the masks induce fear. The most immediate response to this question is, "let them wear whatever they want." but wait a minute... its against the so called non-negotiable british values.
So what should the muslims do? Well for british muslims...there is something to consider..
Take the case of the sikh community in britain...there was a time when they had to fight the same battle - to gain public recognition of their culture and traditions. and they won. The sikhs made use of legal channels and questioned the discriminatory laws. Finally the sikh community was recognized as an ethnic group and were given the special rights like wearing turbans and carrying kirpans. Today sikhs and jews in britain enjoy these rights but the other immigrants like muslims and hindus still do not come under the Race Relations act.
There is need for these immigrants to act togather but there are constant differences among them and their chances of standing togather for a particular cause doesnt seem much probable.
Add to this the fact that the muslims in the today's world are known more as terrorists than anything else and a masked person on the streets of britain doesnt enjoy the greatest of responses. Multi-culturalism as a public policy is effectively dead, to some extent by militant islam.
A long and tough road ahead..
Apart from this, there are extremist voices in the islamic world too - mainly by the so called religious leaders, who try to impose their own religious interpretations on the people - ideas which are polluted by their own personal insights and the political and social cocoon they grow in. Sadly these are the voices which are heard more often although they are clearly against the mass opinion and lead to misunderstandings towards muslims. These extremists openly express their hate towards modernization in general and the west, in particular.
The extremists, it seems, today are not against the west. They are against time.
Technorati Tags: U.K, muslims in UK, veil row, niqab, sikh, islam, extremist
posted by i-factor at 3:01 AM
6 Comments:
dude...i wanted to know the website from which u got that 'is my blog influenced to u"....in ur side bar da...plz can u tell me...!!!
well its from a site called pollwizard.com
want one on your page?
go to- http://www.pollwizard.com/magazine/45622
I'm always disturbed by the authorities’ lack of ways to give information.
1) When it comes to veil...It is many ways of covering the hair. Some use hat, some use hood, some use cap, some use scarf and they wear it in different ways. So here is the point, that it is not WHAT you wear but the WAY you wear it which makes it unaccepted. Why not also make it illegal to wear the cap the wrong way???
2) When it come to nigab, the Muslim themselves have abused this way of “security”. Even here in Egypt, when a family can afford to have only one child at school, they put on them nigab, and they go one/two days each and then even the boys use then nigab, so the teacher believe it is still only the one girl signed in at school who are there.
Nigab has been used too many times by both men and women in cases of criminal acts. . . Like smuggling, terror, kidnapping etc.
Because of this, nigab starts to be banned, also inside muslims countries.
This is something which has to be said officially, loud, shouted out to the whole world. And the Muslims have to accept that. . . “they have dressed their own bed.”
If it is so then i just cant understand why there was such a big row when jack straw and Blair commented on it..
I fully agree to your point that a niqab can be really a big concern when it comes to security reasons...
and i am also sure that its banning would create another big row among the clerics..but something has to be done!!
That's a whole other debate, though. Muslim or no, I wouldn't want to live in country where I didn't have the right to go incognito, where I had to identify myself to all and sundry whether I like it or not. We're sleepwalking in to a surveillance society as it is.
If there were a lot of women who were allowed to wear veils where a non-muslim would not be allowed to wear a mask or something, then there would be a problem - but it's not the case. The woman who tried to teach kids English with a veil over her face was fired, and i don't see anyone getting through passport control with a veil on.
As Jack Straw actually said, there's no way and no reason to legislate against the wearing of veils.
a very good post..actually set of posts.keep it up.
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