Burqa ban: Right decision – perhaps at the wrong time

• The details of the cabinet paper are also hazy. The mere allusion to it by Public Security Minister in a ceremony in a temple - not the ideal place to announce the decision - has already invoked strong reactions both in favour and against

Public  Security Minister Sarath Weerasekara last week said that he had signed a Cabinet paper to ‘ban the wearing of burqa’ for national security reasons. The paper should be presented to the Cabinet for approval and then pass a vote in Parliament to become law.  Both requirements are a mere formality given that the government has near two-third majority in Parliament. 

The Bill could nonetheless be challenged in the Supreme Court by the interested parties for purported infringement of religious freedom. Yet that reasoning had not held water in other parts of the world. Last week, Swiss voters in a referendum choose to ban face-covering in public places. While the ban did not explicitly refer to Niqab or Burqa, the proposal was widely touted as the burqa ban, and the Right-wing, Swiss People’s Party that put forward the proposal campaigned to ‘stop Islamic radicalism’.

Elsewhere, France, Netherland and Belgian have outlawed the burqa in public places. Last month, the French parliament passed the ‘anti-separatism bill’ which is aimed primarily at countering what President Emmanuel Macron described as ‘Islamist separatism, an enemy of the Republic’. The Bill tightened the state scrutiny on religious teaching, mosques, religious associations and foreign financing. The new laws came in the wake of the beheading by a Muslim youth of a French school teacher who showed the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in a class discussion on freedom of expression.

In Sri Lanka, the proposed ban on Burqa is the right thing - though perhaps it was undertaken at the wrong time. The details of the cabinet paper are also hazy. The mere allusion to it by Public Security Minister in a ceremony in a temple - not the ideal place to announce the decision - has already invoked strong reactions both in favour and against.

This writer has long advocated in these pages and elsewhere the outlawing of the burqa and niqab in public places. Burqa, the all-encompassing Islamic garment and Niqab, the face veil that leaves the area around eyes clear or worn with a separate eye veil, are signature garments of Salafi and Wahhabi fundamentalism, the two ideologies that are the ideological fountainheads of Salafi Jihad extremism championed by the likes of Islamic State (ISIS), Al Qaeda and the terrorists who were behind the Easter Sunday mayhem. 

The proposed Burqa ban is attributed to national security reasons. However, there are more compelling demands of national integration that might mandate the ban on full-face veil in public. The face is a very important element of interpersonal communication. Women, who withdrew behind an all-encompassing cloak, deprive themselves, their children and society of the opportunity to bonding, integrate and assimilate. The burqa is about self-isolation and parallel societies to which Muslims withdrew from the rest of the mainstream society. In those quarters, suffocating Arabized values, norms and religious teaching replaced the hitherto mainstream social and cultural ethos.  Multiculturalism in a burqa is an anomaly. The two are incompatible. 

Rather the burqa is a measure of Arabization of the local Muslim societies, and the spread of Wahhabism. Wahhabism is a puritanical form of Sunni Islam, aimed at its “purification” and the return to the Islam of the Prophet Mohammed and the three successive generations of followers. Wahhabism derived its name from its founder, the 18th-century cleric Muhammad bin Abd al Wahhab.  With the state sponsorship of House of Saud and Qtaries, Wahhabism later cross-pollinated with Salafism, another fundamentalist Sunni Islamist movement that strives to practice Sunni Islam as it was practised by Muhammad and his closest disciples.  The Saudis and Qataris patronage for the spread of Wahhabism is one of the major drivers of the rise of radical Islamism in non-Arab Muslim states and Muslim minorities in non-Muslim majority states. 

Wahhabism’s inroad into South East and South Asia has drastically altered the social fabric in moderate Muslim states such as Bangladesh and Indonesia and spiked up the religiosity and created parallel societies among Muslim minorities in non – Muslim majority countries. The proliferation of Wahhabi mosques in Sri Lanka should be viewed in this context. For instance, The Department of Islamic Affairs approved 190 new Wahhabi mosques in 2015, 50 in 2016, and 80 in 2017. Foreign preachers, including controversial Tamil Nadu extremist leader Jainul Abdeen and Zakir Naik visited Sri Lanka.

Wahhabism bankrolled by the petrodollars gradually displaced the local moderate Sufi Islam. The Sufi resistance, which manifested in several clashes in Aluthgama and Kattankudi withered away as Wahhabis consolidated their control, and infiltrated the institutions that cater to Islamic interests. Politicians accommodated Wahhabism and key Wahhabi ideologues, who in their own right were influential figures within Muslim clerical leadership.  The successive governments vacillated to act against rising Islamist revivalism due to political considerations.
Wahhabism’s role as a driver of violent Islamist extremism is ingrained in its uncompromising worldview, a strictly binary view of the world,  derived from the traditional Islamic partition of the world into two clear entities: Dar-al-Islam (The abode of Islam) and Dar al- harb (The abode of war).

Easter Sunday attack terrorist leader Zahran Hashim, described Sri Lanka as Dar- al kufr (land of unbelievers) to which Muslims should have no belonging and therefore it is haram for Muslims to live here. He called on his followers to “wet the earth of this country from the blood of people of other faiths.”

The Cabinet paper on Burqa also calls for the shutting down of around 1000 unregulated Madrasas. The exposure to foreign clerics has also proved to be contentious. For instance, over 200 foreign clerics were deported after the Easter Sunday attacks. Though there are no allegations at home, Madrasas have served as the breeding grounds of Islamic extremism. Taliban was born out of Madrasas in Peshawar controlled by Pakistani Intelligence Service, Inter-service Intelligence.

However, the new law on Burqa and Islamic schools are announced in a climate of growing Islamaphobia and a sense of Muslim victimhood. The government’s decisions such as the mandatory cremation of COVID dead bodies and racist dog-wisting by some of the government members are central to the Muslim grievances of marginalization.

In this context, even rational decisions cannot be prevented from being viewed as ethnically and racially motivated. The minister Weerasekara himself has a reputation of borderline bigotry. That again risks the new Bill being viewed in the context of the minister’s ideological compulsions.

Nonetheless, countries should fight the invasive Islamist extremism head-on, through laws, social reforms and kinetic means if needed. The liberal naivety and self-righteous policies were responsible for parallel societies of Immigrant Ghettos in Western Europe, where growing cultural separatism has proved to be hard to overcome. Sri Lanka is not there yet, and with the commonsense laws and empowering of the traditional Sri Lankan Islamic faith and leaders, the country can defeat the nascent radicalization in some quarters of Muslim society.  The government should do so, while not making additional grievances to Muslims.

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