Posted on 07/19/2010 4:54:46 PM PDT by gleeaikin
DAMASCUS, Syria – Syria has forbidden the country's students and teachers from wearing the niqab — the full Islamic veil that reveals only a woman's eyes — taking aim at a garment many see as political.
The ban shows a rare point of agreement between Syria's secular, authoritarian government and the democracies of Europe: Both view the niqab as a potentially destabilizing threat.
"We have given directives to all universities to ban niqab-wearing women from registering," a government official in Damascus told The Associated Press on Monday.
The order affects both public and private universities and aims to protect Syria's secular identity, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue. Hundreds of primary school teachers who were wearing the niqab at government-run schools were transferred last month to administrative jobs, he added.
The ban, issued Sunday by the Education Ministry, does not affect the hijab, or headscarf, which is far more common in Syria than the niqab's billowing black robes.
Syria is the latest in a string of nations from Europe to the Middle East to weigh in on the veil, perhaps the most visible symbol of conservative Islam. Veils have spread in other secular-leaning Arab countries, such as Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, with Jordan's government trying to discourage them by playing up reports of robbers who wear veils as masks.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
FARS, check this out, you might want to add it to your ping list
Glad to hear this, I have no problem with the head covering, it’s the face veil that is dangerous and enslaving.
As you now the Koran itself says "kill the hypocrites" ~ and a gal in a sack sitting in a classroom ready to blow up a bomb is particularly destabilizing no matter where you are.
Colonial French (Levant States) culture making a last gasp in Syria.
“and a gal in a sack”
with the face veil it could be a man in a sack. That’s where it crosses into a legitimate ban, to me. You need to be able to identify people. Terrorists obviously want anonymity.
You misinterpret the cause here. Outside of the regions where the more extreme notions of female modesty first arose, niqabs and burqas are pushed on women by Salafists, Sunni extremists who think that Mohammed and the first caliphs provide the model for a perfect human society. The Syrian ruling elite, in particular the Assad family, are Alawites, a Shi'ite sect which exhibits some Christian customs (personally I suspect back in the 9th century or so Alawites were crypto-Christians, but they are not now, just an odd sect of Shi'ite Muslims). They maintain their grip on power by maintaining an iron grip on the majority Sunni population, and treating all of the religious minorities--besides their own sect, other Shi'ites, Christians (Orthodox, Monophysite and Latin), and Druze--very well. This is a move to suppress Salafism.
(Syria provides a perfect example of why "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is false: the Syrian government is very much an enemy of Al Qaeda and Hizb ut Tahrir, but is hardly our friend--even if they did cooperate with us against Al Qaeda c. 2002.)
>>Perhaps Syria, France and these other countries should do what the leader in Morrocco did when he unsuccessfully outlawed veils and burkas. He then required all prostitutes to wear them. Suddenly, most of the women no longer wanted to wear them.<<
That is cool. That man deserves the award of “Biggest set”.
What are women doing by registering at a university when they are not supposed to leave the house? Sounds like just another provacative act by the worshipers of the goat humping pedophile.
Whoops, thanks gleeaikin.
i’m not too alert tonight:
Syria bans face veils at universities (Syria? SYRIA!?)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2555280/posts
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