For many, the wearing of the hijab is a simple declaration of faith; for others, it is a symbol of religious oppression. Has the time come for an official hijab policy? asks Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, Migration Correspondent
IN THE MIDDLE of last week, the parents of a teenage girl in Co Wexford wrote to the Minister of State for Integration out of concern over the tone of a public drama in which they felt themselves unwittingly cast.
Previously, Liam Egan and his wife Beverley McKenzie-Egan had requested that their daughter be allowed to wear the hijab at school, which led her principal to call for official guidelines on the wearing of the headscarf in State schools. In their letter, the Egans asked Conor Lenihan not to give in to calls to rescind her right to fulfil what they saw as a religious obligation.
Muslims had become an easy target, they wrote. "It will take a courageous individual to look beyond this and ensure that the rights of the individual take precedence over the scare mongering that has typified most responses to this innocuous piece of cloth."
By a chance piece of synchrony, they wrote their letter around the same time that in Ankara, Turkey's highest court was preparing to publish its own keenly awaited decision on whether university students could wear that same innocuous piece of cloth. When its ruling came, overturning a law that allowed the headscarf on campus, it brought protesters onto the streets, led to predictions of the government's demise and caused the lira to fall against the dollar as markets baulked at the political uncertainty ahead.
Only a few days earlier, in Kuwait, nine men walked out of the inaugural meeting of parliament in protest at two female cabinet ministers' failure to wear their headscarves, while back in Europe, a Danish television station attracted the wrath of some secularists and Muslims alike for its Miss Headscarf 2008 competition, which organisers hoped would be "an alternative way of encouraging young people to participate in the debate, by addressing them on their own terms". Four more disparate sets of circumstances would be hard to find.
But if there was any temptation to believe that the headscarf had lost some of its tendency to stand for larger, highly charged debates, this month's press cuttings offered scant reassurance. Indeed, that Liam Egan and his wife chose to remind the Minister that the subject was little more than a piece of fabric was a reminder of how naturally it has come to be seen as so much more.
Without those freighted associations, the incident that brought it to public attention here would, by any objective measure, hardly be the stuff of a running story. Last autumn, a school principal in Co Wexford asked the then minister for education Mary Hanafin for advice on whether his board of management should allow a student to wear a headscarf. She refused to say. The school decided to allow it and there hasn't been a problem since.
When that correspondence came to light recently, the new Minister for Education, Batt O'Keeffe, said the Government would consider whether to issue guidelines when it drafts an intercultural education strategy later this year. Conor Lenihan, for his part, pointed out that the hijab is already being worn in many schools, and that he has no objection to it.
But the two Opposition spokesmen on education, Fine Gael's Brian Hayes and Labour's Ruairí Quinn, take a different line. Both say that they oppose the headscarf being worn in State schools. "It's a simple thing to say 'let every school decide what it wants to do'. That's shedding the responsibility in many respects," says Hayes. Parents are entitled to send their children to religious schools, he says, but those who opted for State education should expect that there won't be "any huge, demonstrable evidence of religiosity". There was enough "segregation" in the system already without introducing another layer, he adds.
Labour's Ruairí Quinn admits that the experience of countries such as the UK, Denmark and The Netherlands has led him to change his view on multiculturalism, and feels that more effort must be made to integrate newcomers. "I'm encountering amongst Irish people of all classes a sense of alienation with the speed at which immigration has occurred in this country, and the sense of separateness that is there from different immigrant groups."
The headscarf should not be worn in State schools, he believes. "I personally think that it is divisive and to the best of my knowledge it is not an intrinsic part of the Islamic faith that a girl has to wear it. I also feel there's an element of male domination over females being enforced."
JUDGING BY THE recent debate, the arguments for a ban fall into four main categories. The first, articulated last week by the writer Martina Devlin, is a liberal feminist position that views the headscarf as a symbol of the oppression of women. Writing under the headline "If Muslim men like the veil so much, let them wear it", Devlin argued that there was no place for the hijab in civic life here. "Here's what banning the headscarf is about: the State demonstrating our belief in gender equality. It's about removing a symbol of repression and submission," she wrote.
One reason many feminists find the headscarf problematic is because the trajectory of feminism in the west has been bound up with the freedom of women to uncover themselves. A century and a half ago, few women in the west would leave the house without a hat, and it was the taunt of immodesty that kept women in their traditional roles, writes the British feminist writer Natasha Walter. "Taking off their covering clothes, gloves and hats as well as painful corsets and long skirts, was tied up with a larger struggle to come out of their houses, to speak in public, to travel alone, to go into education and into work and into politics, and so to become independent."
A second argument holds that the display of religious symbols is inconsistent with the norms of secular societies, a line that resonated especially in France and Turkey and is raised by both Hayes and Quinn.
Others argue that the hijab shows a refusal to integrate - it is a declaration of separateness over belonging, the theory goes, and if newcomers want to live here, the least they can do is abide by our norms.
Fourth, there is an argument that allowing the hijab intrudes on the principle that all students should be equal in the classroom. In the name of tolerance, do we not risk sanctioning a type of segregation? And by deferring to one interpretation of the Koran - that a woman's hair should be covered once she reaches the age of puberty - what theoretical basis is there for objecting to other interpretations, for example, that complete coverage even of the face and hands is required?
Humaira Altaf tires of the incessant focus on the hijab and asks whether those concerned about oppression might talk instead about "real issues", such as domestic violence, which affects women of all cultures and religions. Born into a middle-class family in Pakistan, she has been living in Ireland for 24 years. She lives in Cork with her husband, a doctor, and studies at UCC. Confident and self-aware, Altaf explains that she never wore the headscarf until late 2001, when two events - the death of her father and 9/11 - led her to try it for the first time. It was in part an act of resistance against the stereotypes that seemed to have gained currency in those days after the twin towers came down. Three years later, she took it off again - she was just more comfortable without it.
"The women are not oppressed. It all depends on what background you have. You cannot mix the religion and the culture together - they're separate things. If you're coming from an oppressed cultural background, of whatever religion, I don't think it matters whether you wear the hijab or not.
"There are women who wear the hijab who are key people moving in the community - they are doctors working for the HSE, they are psychologists. They are confident, able people."
In France, Jacques Chirac's Stasi commission - whose report led eventually to the ban on conspicuous religious symbols in 2004 - made clear that it did not base its proposals on the right of equality between women and men because that would have meant an intrusive interpretation of a religious symbol that can have different meanings in different circumstances.
Where to some it may be an expression of subjugation, it can also be an articulation of a free belief, a means of protection against the pressure of men, an expression of identity and freedom against secular parents, or a statement of opposition to western society.
The commission decided that the state has no right to adjudicate between these meanings.
According to Piaras Mac Éinrí, a migration specialist at UCC who previously taught in France, Ireland's different religious and cultural traditions make it difficult to draw a comparison with France, as some advocates of a ban have done. In France, the state imagines itself as a scrupulously secularised space - the word laïcité in French has stronger connotations than secularism in English - and, unlike in Ireland, the practice and trappings of religion in modern France are matters for the private domain.
Others who argue for the status quo point out that the hijab question has been dealt with sensitively for years.
For that reason, teachers such as Mary Ryan of Castleknock Community College in north Dublin, where 12 per cent of students come from foreign backgrounds, profess surprise that this debate has arisen at all. Only one student wears it in Castleknock, and "it's not even noticed any more", she says. Her view is shared by Ali Selim, a theologian and general secretary of the Irish Council of Imams, who says Irish Muslim girls have been wearing the hijab to school for many years and "there has been no problem whatsoever".
Selim believes that most Irish people understand Muslims' position on the headscarf, and was encouraged by the findings of an Irish Times/TNSmrbi poll published this week, which found that 48 per cent of people feel the wearing of headscarves should be allowed in State schools. Some 39 per cent disagreed and 13 per cent had no opinion.
THE PRACTICE IN most schools is to allow the hijab to be worn provided the colour is consistent with the school uniform, and it is because of such "sensible and sensitive compromise" that we should be careful about interfering, says Philip Watt, director of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism - the State's advisory body on intercultural affairs.
To ban the hijab or other religious symbols that are important to minorities would be "likely to result in tension with those communities where no tension existed before", he warns.
Since being appointed Minister of State for Integration at this time last year, Conor Lenihan has promoted the idea that Ireland can steer a middle way between assimilationism and multiculturalism.
That third way is interculturalism, a model that emphasises inclusion by design and frames integration as a two-way process of mutual accommodation, albeit starting from certain core values.
But the centre ground of intercultural give-and-take is subjectively drawn and subject to constant negotiation, and that is one reason why the hijab issue has never found its way into policy documents. In truth, a de facto policy had been tacitly in place, and until now the practice has never been challenged.
When The Irish Timesmade a request under the Freedom of Information Act two years ago for correspondence between the Department of Education and schools on the question of the Muslim headscarf or other religious symbols, it was told that not a single letter or e-mail existed on the subject.
Many believe that the Department should resist the pressure to issue guidelines on the headscarf, and that it's a mistake to make an issue of it.
Questions of core values and non-negotiable red lines are perfectly valid topics for discussion, argues Jakob De Roover of Ghent University in Belgium, but focusing on a "relatively trivial" issue such as the headscarf obscures more important topics to do with diversity and integration.
"Once you start turning the dispute into one that includes modes of dress, you trivialise what it means to adapt yourself to the customs of a society," he says.
The issues raised by the current debate neither begin nor end with the headscarf, and whatever course the Government opts for in this case, the discussion over the deeper question of inclusion is only beginning. One indication of its infancy has been the confusion over terms such as "we" and "they", "us" and "them" in recent weeks, notes Piaras Mac Éinrí.
"How do you become Irish needs to be part of this debate. We like people who like to embrace us but we don't want a significant critical mass of others who want to retain their otherness in some way. That's what we haven't really addressed yet."