Post date: Nov 11, 2016 9:26:23 PM
This article published on “Al Huffpost,” the Huffington Post’s French-language Moroccan outlet, is a Moroccan sociologist’s deconstruction of the issue of the “burkini” (the modest swimsuit for Muslim women that has been in and out of international news since 2009 after it was controversially banned in France). Dialmy opens with his own criticism of the burkini on the grounds that “it implicitly accuses the woman of being the source of debauchery and public disorder. The burkini reduces her to being nothing but a body to cover.” The author manages to look past his own thoughts to analyze the copious opinions that have kept the burkini in the news and in politics, but although professing to take a feminist stance, the article does not give much of a voice to women’s perspectives and reactions on this issue. Some French city governments condemned the garment as representative of Islam’s enslavement of women, but it is important to remember that most if not all women wearing the burkini have made that choice to do so themselves. Whether intended as a religious statement or not, the recent popularity of the burkini is one manifestation of a ‘pious modern’ as described by Lara Deeb in An Enchanted Modern.
In the 1960s and 70s, mixed-gender beaches and typical swimsuits were not a problem at all in Morocco. At that time, Dialmy writes, “the challenge was to modernize Islam and to show that Islam is compatible with modernity.” But today the burkini is showing Islam’s compatibility with modernity in a different way, again reflecting some of Deeb’s anecdotes of Shi’a women defining their own pious modern, reflecting in practice their understanding of an ‘authenticated’ Islam.
Dialmy challenges the assumption that Western culture is always the one associated with liberty by citing the fact that the Moroccan government has not placed restrictions on women’s beachwear, “[defending] liberty of dress on public beaches by protecting women in swimsuits without preventing the ‘pro-bikini’ from wearing the burkini…France must do the reverse by protecting the civil and civic rights of those women who wish to wear a burkini” (However, this argument is compromised by the fact that in 2014 the burkini was actually banned at a handful of Marrakech resort hotels catering to tourists). Unfortunately, in concluding that “those who wear [the burkini] embody, independently of their intentions, a moderate, middle-ground Islam that lies between radical Islam and radical modernity,” the article does not break out of the trope of dichotomizing Islam and the West, but also draws a crucial comparison between Islamic and Western restrictions of liberty in the ‘modern’ world.