The following is an article written by the regional director of the Canadian Islamic Congress on Quebec’s legislation forbidding Muslim women from wearing the niqab while requiring public services. The CIC (Mohamed Elmasry’s old stomping ground), continues to work diligently to ensure sharia law finds it’s ‘cultural’ place in Canada.

From The Saskatoon Star Pheonix

By Dr. Ahmed Shoker, The StarPhoenix

April 8, 2010

Following is the viewpoint of Shoker, a professor of medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, past-president of the Islamic association of Saskatoon and regional director of the Canadian Islamic Congress.

Premier Jean Charest’s government in Quebec recently announced its commitment to secularism and gender equality, and proposed legislation that essentially bans the niqab — a full-veil covering worn by a few Muslim women — from all government bodies.

Under common Islamic interpretations this bill is unnecessary. The government’s move is inflammatory, and let me tell you why.

In Islam, it is a divine inscription that adult women should, as do Muslim men in other ways, exercise modesty in public places. They are expected to cover their beauty, which includes either wearing the commonly seen veil that covers the hair but not the face, or (in accordance with a minority of scholars) a niqab that covers both the hair and face.

This Islamic law of modesty may seem to contradict western standards of equality by removing the individual identity of women in their daily lives. However, Muslim scholars agree that it is allowable for a woman to prove her identity by revealing her face as deemed necessary. During activities where showing her face is unnecessary — shopping, watching a sports event or listening to a speaker — a woman need not do so.

Thus there shouldn’t be a problem between the Muslim face and the Quebec government. The proposed bill, however, stamps a negative expression on many Muslim’s faces, and for several reasons.

Deep behind the niqab is the reality that Muslims consider modest dress as one among many symbols required to show obedience to God.

Muslims are uncomfortable with the subtle implication in the bill that face-cover equates backwardness or gender inequality. Perhaps the bill could also be seen as a politically slippery slope that leads to the scrutiny of other religious traditions, by creating a perception that face cover is alien to “us Canadians.”

First, exactly how do we apply such a subjective law as entailed in this bill? For how long should a Muslim woman show her face, and how much?

More than 100 articles and letters on the niqab over the past six months in western media make it hard for Muslims to accept that the problem with the niqab lies only with facial identification. It’s abundantly clear that requiring niqab-wearing women to disclose their faces to receive public services is consistent with Islamic law (as a majority of Islamic scholars agree) and isn’t worth debating.

Second, there is no inconsistency or contradiction in the Muslim mind between the freedom to practise faith or perform our daily duties. And third, the Quebec bill attacks the visibility of Muslims in Canada rather than address issues of building bridges with Muslim communities.

The niqab makes but a rare appearance on Quebec’s streets, yet the antagonistic government response is so intense that even other national policy-makers hesitate at the notion that Canadian Muslims are equal neighbours and citizens.