Word: dressing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...power. George W. Bush knew the symbolic potency of the veil, too, citing the discrimination of American 'women of cover' during post 9/11 tensions. Now two Presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama, have taken up the veil, framing it as a topic in radically different ways. Sarkozy used Muslim dress as a nationalistic prop, seeing it as a threat to France's eternal values. Obama used it as a chance to set out a new approach to U.S.-Muslim relations, based on a framework of freedoms. Both attitudes are flawed; both ignore the struggles of Muslim women over matters...
...women as "not welcome on French territory." Obama's speech in Cairo took a different tack. His concern was not the hijab - the Muslim woman's head covering - so much as a woman's right to wear it if she so chose. Western countries, Obama said, cannot dictate the dress of Muslim women. "We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism." (See pictures of the women of Cairo...
...clutch of Western countries have put curbs on burqas and niqabs, the full-face veils that leave only a slit for the eyes. The Irish have banned the burqa from classrooms, and in June, the Michigan Supreme Court gave judges the power to direct how witnesses dress for court, after a Muslim woman refused to take off her niqab while testifying. The French, however, have gone beyond practical arguments, saying that face veils don't just gum up processes in courts, surgeries and schools, but are an affront to the republic itself and its traditions of secularism. In 2004, France...
...wear the headscarf in what has been painted as a landscape of cruel, racist taunting. Her death has also become the latest weapon in the controversy over remarks made last month by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in which he equated the most conservative style of Islamic women's dress, the burqa, with subservience. "This is cowardly act supported by many western politicians like Sarkozy ... We should stand against such an inhumane act," wrote one man on the message board of a Facebook group titled Defending the Rights of the Late Marwa El-Sherbini, which claims more than 1,000 members...
...more salient than the women's-dress issue is the manipulation of Sherbini as a symbol of Islam in a perceived standoff between the Muslim world and the West. "She is a martyr of Islam, and justice will be served on the day of judgment," wrote one man on the wall of another Facebook group, Marwa El-Sherbini "Muslim Martyr." Even Iran, Egypt's traditional adversary, has joined the fray, holding a symbolic funeral for Sherbini in Tehran on Friday and summoning the German ambassador to the Foreign Ministry to hear Iran's formal protest over the attack...