This past week, Denmark decided to extend its burka ban to include schools and universities. In the past decade, several Western countries – including France, Belgium, Austria, and the Netherlands – have passed bans on the niqab (full-face covering) in public.
The reasoning is largely the same. Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen stated: “We do not want [niqabs], as they are used as mechanisms of oppression toward girls.”
Similarly, Fadela Amara, a French politician, described the veil as “both oppressive for women and an assault on the values upon which the French Republic is founded.” Other Western leaders echo the same narrative: that the niqab is inherently oppressive, and therefore must be banned. Yet, the truth is that their action has done nothing but worsen the conditions for Muslim women.
Internalized belief systems would leave women isolated
I grew up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Upstate New York. Until the age of 16, when I stopped believing in the religion, I only wore skirts. I grew up being told that wearing pants is a blatant sin against God. Women cannot wear pants. There are no exceptions.
So for 16 years, I wore skirts. As much as I wanted to wear pants, to wear basketball shorts, to play on a sports team, I couldn’t. My own internalized belief system prevented me from partaking in a nationwide norm – the ability for women to wear pants.
Let’s play some hypotheticals. Imagine if America passed a law stating women can no longer wear skirts. They viewed skirts as too oppressive for women and decided that women should be fined if they wore skirts.
You know what would happen? I would soon be trapped in my home. I would become physically imprisoned by my ideology, which would only be strengthened by my government’s claim of helping me break free from it. If my government told me you cannot wear skirts, my response simply would be, “There is no choice here, it’s not up to me, this is what God wanted.”
I would be unable to leave my home. My belief, combined with my government’s attempt to help my conditioned discriminatory views of myself, would only leave me more isolated, alone, and oppressed.
This is exactly what is happening to oppressed Muslim women in the West. While the government claims they are trying to help this minority, it is only exacerbating the issue. Muslim women in Belgium said they have “stopped going out in public” because they “couldn’t afford fines or jail time.” This clearly underscores how the law results in the further forced withdrawal of Muslim women from public life.
Burka bans are more about optics than women's rights
The truth is, the West is lazy. They just don’t want to see the niqab because it’s uncomfortable. I am not making this up. Marino Keulen, a Belgian politician from Flanders and a former minister, has argued that wearing a burka “has an intimidating effect.” Basically, it’s uncomfortable to look at. Which is true. It is uncomfortable to blatantly see women who have been conditioned to think that hiding their entire bodies, except their eyes, is a beautiful thing for God. That’s sad.
However, the fact is that these women have been raised to believe that – just as I was raised to believe women should not wear pants. This is an ideological issue. Telling women to just show their face will have the adverse effect of hiding them completely from public life, thus, subjecting them to more violence and oppression.
Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, and the leaders of other Western countries, do not care about the oppression of these women; they just care about the optics of their society. “You can do it, just not in public” is the message they give with these abhorrent laws.
Instead, to combat anti-Western cultures in the West, we should be focusing on integration programs and including liberal and Western values-based education in our public and private academic institutions. Education is the only way forward.
I only broke out of my discriminatory mindset once I was exposed to other ways of living a moral life. To truly help these women and change the optics of our society, we need to focus on integration rather than the isolation of an already highly oppressed group of women. That is the only way forward.
The writer is a tech founder, Stanford University lecturer, and Middle Eastern activist best known for starring in Netflix’s My Unorthodox Life. She has over 400K followers, and has had recent features in Time Out and other media.