It is rude to wear a full-face veil at work. - By Anne Applebaum - Slate Magazine

Anne Applebaum has an interesting column in Slate. I think she's wrong, as I explain below. Here's one paragraph, but it's worth looking at the whole thing:

Link: It is rude to wear a full-face veil at work. - By Anne Applebaum - Slate Magazine.

And yet, at a much simpler level, surely it is also true that the full-face veil—the niqab, burqa, or chador—causes such deep reactions in the West not so much because of its political or religious symbolism, but because it is extremely impolite. Just as it is considered rude to enter a Balinese temple wearing shorts, so, too, is it considered rude, in a Western country, to hide one's face. We wear masks when we want to frighten, when we are in mourning, or when we want to conceal our identities. To a Western child—or even an adult—a woman clad from head to toe in black looks like a ghost. Thieves and actors hide their faces in the West; honest people look you straight in the eye.

I think Applebaum is wrong. And, I think she's wrong because her argument for rudeness relies on an analogy between tourism and citizenship.

We might structure the opposition in the following way: the tourist is not at home, but away; the tourist visits, but does not participate in a collective way of life. The tourist will leave; the citizen stays. The tourist is not one of us, and does not expect to be. Thus, the tourist adopts a practice momentarily, as a way of passing through the life of others. The citizen, on the other hand, adopts practices that are shared by those living together. These are not temporary acts of courtesy, but practices of everyday life.

Applebaum says that as a visitor, she adopted a local custom when visiting a Balinese temple. But, the woman at issue in the British case is a citizen, not a tourist. She is not visiting elsewhere. Instead, she is at home. Applebaum's argument requires that we treat the Muslim woman as a visitor, as someone from afar, who is venturing into our space.

Accordingly, Applebaum constructs our space as filled with Western practices. Apparently, ours is not a space with multiple, differentiated practices; instead, there are, at bottom, some to which all must be made to comply.

It also seems that Applebaums's version of the West is relatively unitary and unchanging, unable to encompass different perspectives and practices and always and everywhere the same. To me, this seems historically false. And, the emphasis on the face as the single element marking Western-ness seems arbitrary. If there are a variety of practices of display and concealment, practices that change over time, then covering or revealing the face should be understood within this larger field of variation.

Kids can get used to teachers in a niqab. In fact, this doesn't seem to have anything to do with the kids at all--despite the rhetoric. Instead, it involves trying to install firm markers of separation between the so-called West and Islam.

A better analogy than Applebaum's tourism might be gay teachers. The crazed right says lesbians and gay men shouldn't teach. Yet, we all know that sexual orientation has nothing to do with teaching. Neither does the niqab. To say that it does reiterates the same logic of division, a division installed to produce the pure 'us' of fantasy, employed by the religious right.