“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 6 (1865).
Psychoanalysis concerns itself, above all, on the meaning of language and communication. We recognize that our language and behavior, despite all their manifest shortcomings, are the best vehicles we know to convey meaning. Our words and behaviors convey multiple layers of meaning, some intentional and conscious, other meanings unintended and unconscious. (Can unconscious communications be thought to have intent behind them? Our unconscious minds often seek expression of ideas that our conscious minds reject yet we do not equate conscious intent with unconscious intent even as the Psychoanalyst attempts to enlarge the realm of conscious awareness.) Literature and the arts can also be thought of as endeavors which attempt to convey multiple layers of meanings, often much more than the author intends. These are non-controversial ideas yet in certain areas of current discourse, there is an implicit insistence that Humpty Dumpty's attitude in Alice in Wonderland should be our guide to meaning.
In today's New York Times, Steven Erlanger reports on the controversy in France over the wearing of the Burka, or Niqab:
Burqa Furor Scrambles French Politics
It is a measure of France’s confusion about Islam and its own Muslim citizens that in the political furor here over “banning the burqa,” as the argument goes, the garment at issue is not really the burqa at all, but the niqab.
A burqa is the all-enveloping cloak, often blue, with a woven grill over the eyes, that many Afghan women wear, and it is almost never seen in France. The niqab, often black, leaves the eyes uncovered.
Still, a movement against it that started with a Communist mayor near Lyon has gotten traction within France’s ruling center-right party, which claims to be defending French values, and among many on the left, who say they are defending women’s rights. A parliamentary commission will soon meet to investigate whether to ban the burqa — in other words, any cloak that covers most of the face.
The debate is indicative of the deep ambivalence about social customs among even a small minority of France’s Muslim citizens, and of the signal fear that France’s principles of citizens’ rights, equality and secularism are being undermined.
Erlanger focuses on the French tradition of anticlericism and the perceived threat to French values of such public displays of religious devotion. He makes one minimal comment about French concerns over the growth of radical Islam (in the 10th paragraph) but manages to do so in way which minimizes the concern, conflating it with base political concerns:
There is a strong suspicion that Mr. Sarkozy, who has supported religious freedom, is playing politics in a time of economic unhappiness and social anxiety. But he also seems to want to restrict more radical and puritanical forms of Islam from gaining further hold here.
Having managed to undermine the argument that Sarkozy et al might have some genuine reason for concerns about "more radical and puritanical forms of Islam", Erlanger then spends the rest of the article offering supportive statements of the Niqab, concentrating on its liberating aspects and its signification of religious piety. This is disingenuous at best.
Last week, Naomi Wolf penned an ode to the wonders of the burqa; Phyllis Chesler devastates Naomi Wolf's paean to the burqa, and her post should be read in full:
The Burqa: Ultimate Feminist Choice?
Naomi Wolf Discovers That Shrouds Are Sexy
Women in chadors are really feminist ninja warriors. Rather than allow themselves to be gawked at by male strangers, they choose to defeat the “male gaze” by hiding from it in plain view.
...
Well, what can I say? Here’s a few things.
Most Muslim girls and women are not given a choice about wearing the chador, burqa, abaya, niqab, jilbab, or hijab (headscarf), and those who resist are beaten, threatened with death, arrested, caned or lashed, jailed, or honor murdered by their own families. Is Wolfe thoroughly unfamiliar with the news coming out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan on these very subjects? Has she forgotten the tragic, fiery deaths of those schoolgirls in Saudi Arabia who, in trying to flee their burning schoolhouse, were improperly veiled and who were beaten back by the all-powerful Saudi Morality Police?
What Wolf and Erlanger have done in their articles is to strip away and conceal the full panoply of meanings that the burqa, niqab, etc have accrued since the veil (mask) has become adopted as a symbolic representation of Islamist identity (supremacy) and the dedifferentiation of women into objects, ignored or used at will. It is unclear if, as Phyllis poses the question, the writers are "unfamiliar with the news coming out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan" but I suspect their diffidence has other roots and meanings. The most prosaic explanations would include the writers' disinclination to question the rationalizations of "the other;" after all, Westerners have no standing to claim understanding or offer criticism of "the other." As well, it has become conventional wisdom among the commentariat of the left that any criticism of Islamic practices is tantamount to Islamophobia (a phobia for which there exists no particular evidence but which terrifies the legacy media.) Holding opinions that are at odds with the conventional wisdom of their colleagues is a sure way for a legacy writer to face the opprobrium of their peers; moral courage is not a conspicuous trait of the profession.
On deeper levels, the disinclination to criticize Islam and its most egregious practices emerges from a combination of cowardice and pride. The starkest example of the combination was seen during the Danish Cartoon controversy, where the vast majority of the legacy media refused to print the images out of fear, yet proclaimed high minded rationalizations (ie, to avoid showing insensitivity to Islam) out of pride.
The burqa, etc, have become powerful symbols conveying unmistakable meaning. To deny such accrued meaning, for all that it has become de rigeur in our media, is unfortunate and divorced from reality. One wonders if Erlanger and Wolf would report on a Ku Klux Klan march that the masked marchers were freed by their masks and merely exhibiting their devotion to their Christian faith while avoiding any discussion of the multiple additional meanings of the KKK hoods? To pose the question is to answer it.
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