Syria follows Turkey and France with limited Niqab ban

Two women in Syria wearing the niqab while shopping in Damascus (Bassem Tellawi/AP)

On Sunday, Syria’s Minister of Higher Education,  Ghiath Barakat, announced a ban on the niqab, which veils the full face, in universities. Syria is not the first Muslim-majority nation to take such action, Turkey has that distinction –but the ban, closely following the controversial and more publicized French ban on the burqa and niqab still came as a shock to many.

In the face of what some see as growing religiosity, Syria’s decision is in large part to maintain its secular identity.

CNN Blogger,  Stephen Prothero writes:

“In France, secularism typically means sweeping the public square clean of the detritus of religion. In Syria, it means something very different — giving a public platform to a variety of moderate religious and warding off religious ‘extremism’ in the process.”

(Global Voices shined the spotlight on what Syrian bloggers were saying about secularism in the Middle-East a few months back. Very interesting conversation and one that we don’t often see in Western media)

Christian Science Monitor also has an interesting look at Syria’s motivations for the ban and why it might be upheld better there than in Egypt, for example. Read here.

And finally, if you don’t have link-overload yet, Faisal al Yafai of The Guardian sounds off on the ban as well, arguing:

“Syria’s struggle with Islamists and visible symbols of Islam is part of a wider clash, a clash within Islam itself. Political Islam is gaining ground across both the Arab world and Muslim-majority countries…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.”