Today’s Toronto Star has a piece by Haroon Siddiqui outlining the reasons he and other liberal democrats are troubled by the French ban on the hijab – a stance which reveals how much the influence of religion has waned in modern urban society.
Religious values and institutions are not the dominating reactionary force they once were, and still are, in predominantly rural societies, so it seems incomprehensible to Siddiqui and other liberals to attack what they now regard as harmless religious symbols – particularly when they belong to immigrants whose cultures should be treated with respect rather than intolerance. In this, they are mostly correct. Many young urban women wear the hijab today as a defiant assertion of their identity in the face of pressures to conform to Western society, and their daughters – another generation removed from the immigrant culture of their families – will almost certainly not feel the same urge to do so. In light of this, attacking the hijab and other religious practices, as Siddiqui notes, is unnecessary and politically counter-productive. But Siddiqui is mistaken in his belief that “secularism” was historically “neutral” rather than “anti-religious” when it arose in reaction to superstition and clerical domination, or that modernizing secular reformers like Kamal Ataturk were in their own way as oppressive as their misogynistic opposite numbers in the Taliban. URL: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1076800208681&call_pageid=1038394944805&col=1038394944443 Also: www.supportingfacts.com Sorry for any cross posting.
