The Strong Brand of Syrian Secularism
Jul 29, 2010
By Sami Moubayed
Syria was abuzz last week when unconfirmed reports surfaced in international media that the minister of higher education had instructed universities to prevent women wearing the niqab (face veil) from entering campuses.
Apart from raising eyebrows in conservative circles throughout the Middle East, the story reminded everybody of Syria's strong secular values, preached by its ruling Ba'ath Party since it came to power in the 1960s and upheld by individual Syrians since early years of the 20th century.
The ministry has not yet officially commented on the ban, while the Syrian public is aggressively debating the reported legislation. Moderate Muslims, Christians and seculars are pleased with it, claiming that the niqab is foreign to Syrian society, referring to the Holy Koran and saying that not a single verse commands women to cover their entire bodies and face.
Intellectuals argue that just as women are not allowed to walk the streets completely naked, they also should not be permitted to walk the streets covered from head to toe. Academics are also supporting it, arguing that teaching students whose identity is concealed is difficult, especially during exam times, and that it kills whatever face-to-face interaction a professor can have with his or her students.
Conservatives, however, argue that the niqab, which only allows a woman's eyes to show in public, is Islamic dress at its very best.
The handwriting for such a move has been on the wall for weeks. Earlier this summer, the Ministry of Education transferred - a polite way of saying froze out - over 1,000 teachers wearing the niqab from their teaching posts at schools throughout Syria. This was done, authorities confirmed, to preserve the secular nature of Syrian education.
The current debate is yet another chapter in the long history of conservatives versus moderates in the modern history of Syria. Women in Syria during the 400 years of the Ottoman empire were required to wear a long black dress covering their entire bodies, along with a thin cloth for their faces.
In 1920, a 21-year old girl from Damascus defied tradition and took off her milaya (traditional, full-length veil) when volunteering to fight in the Syrian army against the invading French army. She paraded through the streets of Damascus unveiled, with a rifle strapped on her shoulder, creating shockwaves throughout conservative circles of the Syrian capital.
Unveiling became increasingly popular in the 1930s and 1940s, thanks to secular political parties like the Syrian Communist Party, the Ba'ath Party and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party that encouraged women to unveil and take part in public life as equals to men.
By the mid-1940s, Syrian women were being hired in the work force, as secretaries, typists, journalists, and nurses while many began to enroll at the Damascus University Faculty of Law, not a single one of them covered or wearing the milaya.
Unveiled women took the lead at the Syrian Women's Union and the women's branch of the Syrian Red Crescent, while young ladies from big landowning families began to promenade in public with male friends, attending Clark Gable movies and dancing at parties to the tunes of Frank Sinatra.
Angry clerics fought the trend with zeal, tabling a bill in parliament in 1944 that sought the thickness of a woman's stockings and the cloth covering her face be regulated officially by law, and making their violation an offence punishable by hefty fines.
They attacked unveiled women on the streets of Damascus, stoning them for practices that they considered "devilish" and un-Islamic.
In 1953, a secular schoolteacher named Thuraya al-Hafez, who for years had strongly lobbied against the veil, nominated herself for parliament, becoming the first women to venture into a job that was traditionally reserved for male citizens. She lost but her defiance was repeated in 1961 by Qamar Shora, another strong-minded and unveiled women, who was also, defeated at the polls, due to fraud at the ballots by angry politicians who did not want to be challenged in the political arena by women activists.
The current niqab debate brings back strong memories of these women activists, who suffered great physical and social dangers to promote women emancipation, rather than women seclusion in a male-dominated society.
Syria's ruling Ba'ath Party has stood up for women's rights and so has President Bashar al-Assad whose wife, Asma al-Assad, is a perfect example of a 21st-century modernized Arab woman who works for female empowerment.
Syrians supporting the niqab ban are arguing that it is not about Islamic dress - which is perfectly fine with Syrian society - but it is about foreign influences penetrating into Syria. The traditional Islamic dress for Syrian women was the isharb, an Audrey Hepburn style scarf worn in the 1950s, and not the niqab, which came to Syria from Saudi Arabia over the past 25 to 30 years.
Currently, there are 2 million Ba'athists in Syria, 613,866 of whom are women. Within the Communist Party, for example, there are five women on the central committee and within the Syrian Social Nationalist Party an approximate 30% of members are women.
Currently, women make up 10% of all lawyers in Syria and 6% of all judges. In commerce and industry, there are 767 women entrepreneurs, 396 who own private businesses and 371 who own and direct private industry.
They are also well-represented at the Syrian universities, where 20% of all full-time professors are women. Some of them hold important teaching positions in departments such as chemical engineering, veterinary medicine, agriculture and economics.
In 1971, women finally made it into parliament, encouraged by secular president Hafez al-Assad, holding four seats out of a total 173. By 1981, the number of women deputies had increased to 10, and by 1994 it had reached an impressive 21. Today, women make up 10.4% of parliament and among Syria's top posts the vice president, the minister of Economy, the minister of Social Affairs, Syria's ambassador to France, and the presidential advisor on Media Affairs are all highly educated, unveiled and strong-minded women.
Syrian women who are defending women empowerment today are very proud of the fact that they got their political rights in Syria as far back as 1949, when only the most advanced countries in Europe, like the UK, France and Spain, had granted suffrage rights to women.
The UK did that in 1928, France in 1944, and Spain in 1946. Switzerland, for example, did not grant suffrage to women until 1971 and in the Arab world only Iraq preceded Syria, having ratified such a law in 1948. Lebanon, the most liberal nation in the region, followed in 1952, and Egypt did the same in 1956. Morocco did not give women the right to vote until 1963, and it took Jordan until 1973.
In the 1940s, Syria's late poet Nizar Qabbani, then a student at Damascus University, had a famous debate with Abdulsalam Ujayli, a medical student who went on to become one of Syria's best novelists. The young Ujayli criticized Nizar for writing about women saying that while the nation was ablaze in anti-French riots, all Nizar was doing was writing about love and women's emancipation.
A confident Nizar replied by asking Ujayli why the Syrians had been spilling blood against the French since 1920? Ujayli replies: "For independence." Nizar snapped back that Syria, just like a healthy human being, needs two legs to live properly. One leg is independence, the other leg is freedom.
If the Syrians are not free, they can never enjoy independence. It's like having only one leg to stand on. Freedom means the right to live and the right to love. A women who is forced into seclusion, by her family, her dress code, or by society, he argued, will never truly be free and independent.
It is only natural for a country that fought for its rights so long and ago, and produced open-minded and liberal intellectuals like Nizar Qabbani to try and regulate the niqab in Syria, 60-years down the road, with the purpose of preserving secular and moderate values that Syria has long stood and fought for.
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Sami Moubayed is editor-in-chief of Forward Magazine in Syria. This article appeared in Asia Times on July 29, 2010 entitled, "Niqab ban unveils Syria's secular past."
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