Swiss Lawmakers Reject Burqa Ban

Swiss lawmakers have voted against a ban on the Muslim women burqa (face veil), putting an end to plans made by far right parties several years ago. “Today in Switzerland, wearing this type of clothing for religious reasons doesn’t pose any problems in daily life and is a rare practice in the Swiss Muslim community,” centre-right Radical Party parliamentarian Hugues Hiltpold said. Following a March Senate vote with the same result, the lower house of the Swiss parliament rejected the motion pushed by the canton of Aargau in a vote of 93 to 87.

The burqa ban proposal was first made by far-right Swiss People’s Party (SVP) under the title “Masks Off”.

It proposed a ban on wearing of face-veils, which is also called Niqab, on public transport. The bill also allowed authorities to “ban or restrict access to public buildings to such individuals in order to guarantee the security of other users.” Far right lawmakers had argued that the ban was necessary for public safety. But opponents said the proposal was excessive because so few women wear burqas in Switzerland.
The wearing of face-veil has been the focus of growing debate in the West in recent years.While hijab is an obligatory code of dress for Muslim women, the majority of Muslim scholars agree that a woman is not obliged to wear the face veil. Scholars believe it is up to women to decide whether to take on the veil or burka, a loose outfit covering the whole body from head to toe and wore by some Muslim women.
Hurting Muslims
Speaking for the majority, Hiltpold said banning the burqa would be excessive and would encourage tourists from Muslim countries to have negative opinions of the country. Affecting the country’s image abroad, he added that a ban on Muslim face veil would have bad effect on the countries Muslim minority. “Banning the niqab or the burka in Switzerland would have adverse consequences for Swiss Muslims.”
The proposed ban on burqa is not the first move by far right politicians against the country’s Muslim minority.
In 2009, the SVP has championed a ban on the building of mosque minarets in the European country.
According to the CIA Factbook, Switzerland is home to some 400,000 Muslims, representing 5 percent of the country’s nearly eight million people.

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Pornography and the Shariah: Why must things be banned in society?

Islam possesses the most heightened sense of this balance between the rights of the individual and those of the society. Thus the domain in which the individual roams free and is accountable, does not encroach upon the domain of the societal mores with its own criteria of decency, order, beauty, mental health, and so forth. So if it is good for one or more individuals to cut down trees and  build tall cement structures, malls, and parking lots, for example, society also has the right to demand green space, playgrounds, and  healthy building material for people to live in, even if it curtails those individuals' right to profit or, as you eloquently said, "the only condition being that they do not hurt or offend anyone else."
It is the same with the control of the high-profit industries whose sole benefit is to indulge the lusts: alcohol and tobacco, drugs, gambling and prostitution, pornography. We may notice that (i) they all go together and (ii) are run mostly by the criminal element of  society known as "organized crime" families. With regard to tobacco,  Muslim authorities and societies have by and large thrown in the  towel. It is truly a pandemic running amok in the Muslim world  despite the valiant efforts of some of the Ulema to prohibit it.  With regard to alcohol, drugs and gambling the prohibition is much stronger as it has the word of the Qur'an as its basis.
With regard to prostitution it is widespread but kept out of sight except in certain Gulf mini-States whose rulers fear not Allah nor the Day of Judgment, and whose subjects are like cattle or dumber.
With regard to pornography it is an on-going battle in the Muslim world slavishly panting after its "Sexual Revolution" beginnings  in the West in the Sixties, which culminated with the Supreme Court decisions in the US in the Nineties first banning, then giving up  on banning pornography in the name of individual liberties - and damning the liberties of society and the family to hell.
We may call the nature of control a lid of public decency. As  long as these activities remain clandestine they remain shameful but if they are allowed to mix with broad daylight all shame is lost. For example, the Sultanate of Brunei has the words "Death for all drug traffickers under Brunei Law" written on every immigration landing form but turns a blind eye to cross-dressing on the street corners of its capital at night, as I was stupefied to find out during a late night drive through Bandar Seri Begawan.
The battle is not without hope in the Islamic world because there is still a deep-seated sense of shame and decency in individuals and their societies. There is also a deep-seated sense in most those countries if not all of them, that Religion is not a matter of individual choice and practice but a lifestyle that englobes the collective in all possible senses of the word: psychologically, historically, culturally, politically, legally. It is, to say the least, difficult for a Westerner to understand this unless he has lived in the East for a while and drunk in those values that  otherwise remain an anachronism if he is kind, and an affront to  his modernity if he were, like his modernity, born yesterday.
As to the important Question, "should Sharia law apply to everybody (not just with respect to porn, but also with things such as alcohol consumption, female dress code, etc.) including non-Muslims like  myself," as a theoretical Question the answer is yes, the Shari`a is ideally quite Spartan with respect to those issues, somewhat like Singapore or Switzerland with respect to public cleanliness, traffic, and other issues of societal rights. However, in practice, these things are treated with leeway in all Muslim countries including the most puritanical, as long as one indulges them out of sight and does not undress, imbibe, or fornicate ostensively.
Otherwise, it is really not an infringement on individual liberty nor a defeat of the battle for hearts to expect the man in the street to respect the public norms of decency in every culture. As you said, "people should be free to choose their own way of life, the only  condition being that they do not hurt or offend anyone else." The hubris of globalization is to try by all means to violate those norms in the name of "freedom" when we know that the real reason is money.


COURTESY BY
Shaykh Gibril F Haddad

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