Posted on 07/19/2010 10:05:33 AM PDT by Pyro7480
Syria has banned the face-covering Islamic veil from the country's universities to prevent what it sees as a threat to its secular identity, as similar moves in Europe spark cries of discrimination against Muslims.
The Education Ministry issued the ban Sunday, according to a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly.
The ban, which affects public and private universities, is only against the niqab — a full Islamic veil that reveals only a woman's eyes — not headscarves, which are far more commonly worn by Syrian women.
The billowing black robe known as a niqab is not widespread in Syria, although it has become more common recently — a move that has not gone unnoticed in a country governed by a secular, authoritarian regime.
"We have given directives to all universities to ban niqab-wearing women from registering," the government official told The Associated Press on Monday....
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Yeah. About as fascinating as China’s one-child-except-if-you-live-in-a-big-city-or-are-protected eugenics program.
Next thing you know they’ll be trying to claim asylum to the US so they can be extreme muzzies and intimidate other muzzies with the veil because Syria won’t let them
The Baathists, have always been a secular movement. They may, like their brethren, Saddam in Iraq, from time to time, use Islam when it’s to their advantage.
Interesting. Syria is like the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. It was an Islamist state, but only within limits; mostly it was a dictatorship based on “Islamic principles.” This indicates to me that the radical Islamists are picking up steam in Syria (probably thanks to the fact that we enshrined Islam in the Iraqi constitution).
No surprises there.
Syria is a secular totalitarian state. House Assad went to war against the Muslim Brotherhood in the early eighties and even bombarded to rubble and massacred an entire town that had rebelled.
The muzzie fanatics still hate the Assads. Bashar and his henchmen may funnel money and arms from Iran to the likes of Hezbollah and Hamas but their brand of islam is for EXPORT only. There is no power allowed in Syria but the all-encompassing state.
Just google “Hama”. Syria’s rulers have kept it just as it was ever since as a warning to others.
I’m surprised they don’t put dresses on the legs of pianos.
Absolutely. Under Saddam the Christian minority was protected and even allowed to participate in government. Then we installed the current regime.
Syria today protects its Christian minority and even allows them to participate in government. When will the US try to change that?
Exactly as you said, no surprise at all.
I recall a story some Syrian friends of mine told about Hafez Assad having the headscarves of female students forcibly removed some time ago. The Assads are members of a minority Muslim sect called the Alawites but keep a lid on Muslim extremism, or try to.
This is hugh and syria.
Wrong way to look at it. They have even more reasons to crush the Wahhabi, Islamists see the current leaders as ‘hypocrites’ and are trying to cause problems for them.
Syria is a dictatorship and there is an active domestic opposition to it, much of it Islamofascist in nature. The pragmatic dictator will do whatever is necessary to maintain his power; and if Islamism is the enemy, then Islamism must be confronted and controlled.
It's a clever move -- university graduates will go on to important positions in government and elsewhere, and that includes women. The women least likely to be affected by this ban are those who are least under the influence of Islamism ... and thus the concentration of potential allies is increased.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Racists!
Ridiculous.
First of all, no one was allowed to participate in government - it was a totalitarian regime.
The one nominal Christian in Saddam's regime was the Muslim-named traitor Tariq Aziz, who changed his name from Michael Yuhannan so he would not appear to come from a Christian family.
Christians in Iraq were tolerated because they allowed the state monopoly on the sale of alcohol to be conducted through them, so that the Muslim Saddam would not be seen to be directly selling alcohol.
Then we installed the current regime.
There is no "regime" - there is an elected multi-party government.
Pimp for dictators and spit on the accomplishments of America's war dead on some other forum.
Nobody is “pimping for dictators.” Saddam was a dictator, but he wasn’t an Islamist any more than it suited him. He favored his own type of Islam, and he liked to dress up and pretend he was a new Saladin (big Muzzie hero) but Christians were generally left alone. Since they were generally the most educated, most commercially adept, etc. he used many of them in his regime.
That is not to defend him. He obviously had his own reasons for doing this and they weren’t charitable. However, the big problem is that we let the post-Saddam Muslims enshrine sharia in the Iraqi constitution - we could have and should have prevented that.
Bush was terrified of offending the Muslims. I think he intended originally to go for the two somewhat secular states, Iraq and Syria, then take out Iran, but of course the left’s attacks on him over Iraq made that impossible. What he should have done, IMHO, was wipe Saudi Arabia off the map, taking Mecca with it, and the whole problem would have been solved. But that’s never going to happen (even aside from the fact that we have a Muslim in the White House at the moment).
I posted this to an Islamic forum NO Protest until now....
THEY know WHO HE IS
Nobody is downplaying the sacrifices of our soldiers in Iraq. However, there is an irony that if we try to install “democratic” governments in the Middle East we may actually wind up with creating systems that will be far more anti-Jewish, anti-Christian and anti-infidel (The West). Perhaps in a few generations, when the middle class has expanded and there is more connection to the world, nations like Syria and Libya will evolve into something like Turkey. I hope that Iraq will develop a Turkish model as well. The problem is, if the majority of people in a country see life from the eyes of a fundamentalist Muslim then don’t expect something looking like Jeffersonian democracy to develop. I thought Saddam was brutal, but he was trying to make Iraq into a secular state, which might have served our interests better had we tried to co-opt him rather than use him to punish Iran in the 1980s.
Oh, and if the new government of Iraq is so wonderful, why are Christian Iraqi people trying their best to leave?
No one was allowed, under pain of death, to emigrate before. Now that Iraq is a free country which allows its citizens to freely travel abroad, there will definitely be plenty of emigrants - especially Christians who already have relatives and established social networks in other countries. A free Iraq is better than a totalitarian Iraq, but America and France and Sweden are still better places to live than any version of Iraq to date, and anyone who has a connection to one of those countries is going to jump on it.
Plenty of Iraqi Muslims are emigrating as well.
Whoops! Thanks Pyro7480. This time for sure. [blush]
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