this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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World news might be a bit out there but couldn't find a better place to post.
Basically the province of Eastern Flanders is implementing a ban that would see headscarves be illegal on schools. This will mostly target muslim girls as they are the ones wearing it of course. They will do it to encourage 'neutrality' and some people see it as a feminist act.
Now of course none of these wankers has actually talked to, you know, a muslim woman because they will soon find out that a lot of them actually want to wear headscarves. Or at least have the option to choose.
'We shall prevent policing how you dress by policing how you will dress! We are feminists!'
I used to be in favor of this myself until I actually met muslim women who were against it and their logic is sound: let women decide. Can't argue against that. Simple as.
I disagree. Most women don't want to wear headscarves, and a few people who do that willingly don't justify allowing religious symbols. People coming from strictly religious families find refuge in schools. And for them, school is an excuse to not wearing or performing religious clothing or rituals for at least 5 hours per day. Schools should definitely ban strictly all things non-secular
EDIT: now, I agree with OP
The problem is that under the guise of feminism you are just advocating for women to be oppressed on two fronts. What good is this going to do when muslims communities are ghettofied and remain at a socioeconomic disadvantage?
I'm sorry but this seems just so wrong to me.
Isn't the ban just about headscarves? A piece of cloth is not a religious symbol and policing women about their fashion choices is an awful idea.
It seems specifically worded to hide behind (white) feminism while just being another bigoted law that specifically targets Muslim people in Europe to scare them and to send them a message.
And I would like to know on what you are basing this idea that "most women don't want to wear headscarves". Maybe most white Western women don't?
Because from my personal life and experiences I can tell you that I've met plenty of both Muslim women and also black women who not only preferred wearing a headscarf, but actually felt more empowered precisely because they could control who gets to see what of themselves.
And don't even get me started on the weird obsession that white people have for black people's hair. So wearing a headscarf can also helps to have healthier hair... In addition to literally stopping white people from randomly touching your hair just because "they're so different!"
The ban is made for hijab but I forgot the word so I used a more literal translation for the Dutch word which is headscarves. Though headscarves probably fall under the new measure as hijab wearing people would otherwise be able to say it's just a regular headscarf.
Thank you for the clarification then!
Your point is definitely convincing.
Yeah I fear that's probably similar to what lawmakers are trying to harness with this law (OP then wrote that the law is actually specifically targeting hijabs and they wrote headscarf for the translation).
I personally think this could be a much longer conversation about clothing, racism, states' policing and religion. For example, even European fashion used to have far more hats and head covering in it before it became associated with Islam and deemed as "scary/dangerous" in the West.
But because nowadays white Western European fashion has mostly moved away from that specific style, and also because Europe has become less religious, they slowly kind of collectively agreed that 'covering your hair=bad'.
Pair this with their negative views of immigrants and Muslim people and you can see how some lawmakers are hiding behind things like "feminism" or "schools should be neutral" to target minorities and make them feel not welcomed in Europe.
They can be far creepier than that unfortunately. And it falls again in that realm of "we don't want you to feel at home here. You either conform to European whiteness or you're already going against the law from when you are a child"
I think it depends on the broader social and historical circumstances. Policies can't be analyzed in a vacuum, they have to be looked at in context. I am not against the idea of school dress codes, but in general there should definitely be no such restrictions in the broader public, i think we can agree on that.
However, even in schools, in this case i don't think it's a good idea, because this is not rooted in a desire to help women and advance secularism, it's rooted simply in Islamophobia, which in Europe is essentially a form of racism. In different historical and cultural circumstances such a ban might possibly be justified, but not in a European country where Muslim people already face prejudice, othering, hate, suspicion and discrimination.
If we were talking about this policy in the context of, say, early 20th century Atatürk's Turkey, then i can see this argument being valid that this is a way to have schools encourage secularism and combat the entrenched religious conservatism in society, but this is not remotely the case for Belgium. What needs combatting in Belgium is not religious conservatism, that is not a major social contradiction in this society, rather it's bigotry, racism and Euro-chauvinism.
But that's not the point. The point is that under the guise of neutrality and feminism the choice of these women gets suppressed. I'm all for empowering women and especially teaching young girls at school that they have authority over their bodies and choices but this is not it. You don't do that by banning things but by educating.
This whole thing is distraction, creating problems that aren't there. In my countries some kids are unable to get, for example, math classes for months due to no teachers being available. School results are dramatically decreasing. The teachers that are there are overworked and are constantly attacked by the government. There are actual muslim women not allowed to work only because they want to be able to decide whether or not they wear a headscarve.
All this will do is pushing more muslim girls away from schools like this only to fall into the hands of even more conservative schools where headscarves are allowed. All the while the actual important stuff, like quality of education and teachers' rights, are plummeting. It's a distraction.
And there is no true neutrality in these schools. In a dominantly christian, capitalist and liberal country the education system is a direct result of these ideologies. I was spoonfed anticommunism, liberalism, capitalism, christianity and even white supremacy through this very same school system, despite it claiming to be 'neutral'.
Yes, the system overall is bad. I was also fed lib-propaganda. But a broken clock is right twice per day. Parents enforce how their kids dress outside of school, and school is the only place where children from religious families are free from at least the (non-secular) dress-code
Well I'm guessing we have to agree to disagree then, which is fine.