An opportunity to dip her toe in the water

Mahnaz Nadeem has an excellent piece on the burkini ban at Sedaa.

She looks back to a time when Muslims weren’t under relentless pressure to demonstrate their religiosity.

Before then Islam was cultural and spiritual and no-one was publicly over-preoccupied with proving how puritanical they were; they were more concerned about the day-to-day and making the most of their arrival to this land of opportunity. Iranian Fatwas, Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine issue, 9/11 and Wahhabi funding changed our psyche so that we came to adopt religious positions by default on absolutely everything under the sun.

Which is a bad trend, because the religious position isn’t always the best one, to put it mildly.

Muslim women who wear the costume are paradoxically rejecting the confines of their home and are wanting to participate in the liberating activity of enjoying the outdoors. They have not decided to envelope themselves in an all-concealing burqa to ensure they go undetected and unrecognised.

Rather the wet-suit provides a Muslim woman an opportunity to dip her toe in the water literally and metaphorically which ordinarily she may not entertain were she required to expose more of her body. It is the first step toward the Muslim community appreciating that the Muslim woman can be part of the outdoors as much as the indoors.

There may be a multitude of other reasons a Muslim woman or any woman for that reason wishes to wear it: she may not want to be sun burned; she may have a skin-complaint, she may want to keep warm; she might be body conscious for non-religious reasons; it just might be more comfortable.

Here’s a surprising thing: bikinis actually aren’t comfortable at all for most women. You have to be truly flawless to feel ok wearing those things where people can see you. Beach anxiety is a running joke and has been for decades.

‘Creeping Sharia’ has had its day and if we want to survive in Europe we need to have a far more intelligent strategy, where we can keep hold of our Islamic faith yet not offend the dominant population’s sensibilities. It is going to be a very tricky task indeed, and will need some intelligent thinking rather than a defensive victim approach. Our conduct and a secular attitude is going to speak much louder than any attempts at religious PR.

In short the “burkini” ban is the cumulative result of years of tolerance towards Islamism encroaching into the public sphere, but this recent attempt to deal with it has resulted in unfairly targeting Muslim women. Instead, the pulpits and criminal elements need to be taken more seriously by French authorities and Europe at large, even perhaps reflecting on our relationships with countries that espouse extremist ideology.

Encroaching on the civil liberties of Muslim women’s rights to enjoy the sun and water is not the solution. Equally Muslims need to appreciate the honeymoon period of encroaching Sharia is over.

Muslim men could wear burkinis in solidarity. That would make the whole thing seem less targeted at women, and less calculated to put them in the wrong no matter what they do.

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