The Niqab Ban in Syria

In CiF, Faisal al Yafai discusses the under-reported limited ban of the full-face veil by the Syrian government; where teachers wearing the full niqab in public schools have been removed.

Islamists groups in Syria will decry this as a gesture to suppress its growing influence in the country as the only viable opposition to the secular authoritarian Syrian government. But the dynamics are complicated. The influence of the Salafis, who regard the Islamist tendency to equate temporal power (their own, preferably) with divine authority as a perversion of Islam.

Islamist response to this criticism is to embrace and include conservative Salafi doctrine into its politics which has the effect of pushing the Islamists further to the right. The case of the niqab ban is an example in point. Islamists are not unanimous in their agreement of the religious mandate of the full niqab, however they support the niqab for women because (a) they do not want to alienate the support of the ultra conservatives (the Salafis) and (b) the niqab has become a flashpoint in faith identity politics which the Islamists have claimed as their ‘political space’.

Then there are the more genuine secular moderates, such as the Syrian feminists. They would rather not have what they choose to wear or not wear dictated to them by the state – whether that’s the autocratic Bashir regime or a totalitarian Islamist solution.

The debate, crudely put, is over the space between the personal and the political. Secular-minded governments have tried to keep faith out of state institutions; Islamists want their faith to guide those institutions. Personal space has also increasingly been politicised, with a rise in the wearing of the headscarf and the veil in Syria and in most Muslim-majority countries.

For the Syrian government this increased religiosity is a serious challenge to its secular, authoritarian rule. Those who look to faith to guide their lives want it to guide their leaders too. Islamists comprise the main opposition in the region: if there were free and fair elections tomorrow, the Islamists would win.

Yet even as defenders of secular rule find their arguments weakening among the general population, from the other direction even Islamists are being pressured to be more conservative. This pressure comes fromSalafism, an austere, less flexible version of Islam that has rapidly gained ground over the past three decades.

Salafists tend to retreat into enclaves against what they perceive as the corruption of society. They often see organised politics as usurping divine authority. It is important to recognise that while Salafism is still a minority view in the Islamic world, its influence is felt widely. Islamists, wary of criticism from austere Salafists that they are too compromising on political authority, have sometimes reacted by moving to the right, to shore up their position as a viable opposition.

This is a complex, unfolding argument, with deep roots, but it is one we are scarcely attentive to in the west. Yet it matters, because the same currents affect Muslim communities in Europe and North America. What shape Islam in the west takes, how liberal, how participative, how beholden to faith identity Muslim communities become will be affected by this debate. (And not only Muslim communities: a rise in faith identity will be felt across the political spectrum.)