(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[veil] It has been said that it is impossible to be indifferent to Hege Storhaug and her alarm cry. This time it's different. If there is anything she reveals in Hidden. Revealed, it must be the project's resounding hollowness.
Her well-known disaster scenario, in which Western freedom values succumb to Islamism, might have been credited with a reality test. The veil debate is also a good fit, as it requires a certain complexity sensitivity. However, something like this is missing in the new book for Human Rights Services spokesperson. Faced with a complex political reality, where it comes to finding pragmatic solutions, it is virtually worthless.
Even worse, it must be that Storhaug does not even deliver a challenging indictment à la But most of all is freedom. Rather, this is rumination, which, due to peculiar dispositions and conceptual intercourse, is seen as irrelevant in any debate about the encounter between Islam and the Christian secular West.
Sour at the canteen
Storhaug begins in the burka, out in the streets of Oslo, and feels "like a being exhibited in a circus or in a zoo". It is unclear what the meaning of this stunt is. If it is to give credibility to the author, the question becomes: How much do you really learn about the blurring problem when reluctantly strolling around in a full-length suit on a Saturday morning? And if the stunt is to give examples of how the garment is "the most visible expression of gender fascism": How bad can this really be, when the worst thing that approves of the burkanovice Storhaug is apple cake and cream in the face veil?
Not only is there a ridiculous gap between Storhaug's nagging burqa fear and the modest experiences she actually gets in this garment. Instead of trying to understand the contexts in which the covering of the female body is involved – as a political symbol, as an individual marker of identity and as a religious ideal of piety – she also confines herself to defending the reactions of good Norwegians who shout insults at her self-staged burqa figure.
Print ink on the trade-offs
Strangely enough, she spends a disproportionate amount of space on substantiating the thesis that the cover's oppressive character of women is the cause of some European unrest over the use of veils in recent years. It is difficult to understand why this justifies printing ink, especially when Storhaug hardly elaborates on more central claims. For example, she claims the following «simple and indisputable truth»: «The more veiled, and the stricter women are covered in a society, the more human rights shine with their absence – be it women's rights, minority rights, gay rights, the right to freedom of speech or freedom of assembly and association. " Exactly how these different categories of rights are connected with the use of veils – in a social reality – we never get to know much about.
The author will also introduce a ban on the use of veils in schools and in public, but does not discuss whether it will help those who are forced to wear the garment, or whether it will make Islamism a minor threat. Before a pamphlet as veiled. Revealed can be taken seriously, such reflections must be included.
Concept porridge
It is admittedly an interesting observation that the veil does not always reduce the sexual gaze, but can also enhance it by giving the female body mythological appeal. But here, Iranian ayatollahs and Saudi Wahhabis, traditional conservative attitudes and modern umma-Islamism, converge into a sticky mass of concepts. Are there really no differences between the Egyptian Brotherhood and the villagers of Pakistan when it comes to the meaning of the veil?
Storhaug introduces a distinction between Islam and Islamists, but instead of holding on to this important distinction, she manipulates it. After first describing Islamism as caliphate utopianism with terrorist sympathies and Stalinist or Nazi features, she places all Muslim congregations in Norway in the immediate vicinity of this extremism. Her understanding of the phenomenon is thus too narrow and too inclusive at the same time. Thus, is Veiled. Revealed, with its deficient sketch of the cover's bookish and historical sources, never an informed contribution in a significant debate.
Definition robbery
The point is not to defend any cover-up practice, and thus participate in Storhaug's damning game. In addition, the debate about the weighting of different rights requirements in relation to hijab, jilbab, niqab, chador and burka has too many opinions. Maybe one should even give Storhaug the right that there is something half-hearted about calling the hijab good old-fashioned "scarf", like the ones our great-great-grandmothers used, something some well-meaning academics and press people have done.
However, the eternal main problem with Storhaug's rhetoric is robbed of the right to define who is oppressed. Arrogantly rejecting veil-bearing women's own interpretations is "false consciousness" leveling, a hermeneutics of suspicion, which we should now drop in the political debate.
The author's attacks on "naive" such as Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Randi Gressgård, Berit Thorbjørnsrud and Tore Lindholm also become weak when she experiences "the academy's lack of empathy with the oppressed and lack of willingness to examine the veil's inherent values fr as repulsive". Had she even investigated something.
Storhaug believes that the veil only works segregatingly, both when it comes to the relationship between women and men, and when it comes to the relationship between minority and majority society. She writes that the garment could just as well have been replaced with a poster, which says "no to human rights" and "abolish democracy based on reprehensible values of freedom".
One could easily set up a motto: The more such books are published, the more potent the veil becomes as a religious-political symbol.
