"No place here for the burqa"

“To hell with the burqa. It has no place here” said Paul Holmes in an article which directly followed two separate incidents in Auckland in 2011. Two Auckland bus drivers were given counselling and received warnings after they refused to let two Muslim women wearing hijab’s onto their buses – one of whom was asked by the bus driver to remove her veil altogether. While both of the bus drivers claimed it had nothing to do with religion, they attributed their actions to a phobia of people wearing masks “maskophobia”. In respects while this phobia may have played a role in both of the women’s refusal to board the buses, beyond the surface, aspects like Eurocentrism and Orientalism are at play in this situation.

As we have learned, Eurocentrism expresses the ideology that the West is at the centre, as producers of knowledge where Western values are normal and Eastern values are inferior. Through Eurocentrism in this certain situation, seeing the hijab automatically means foreign, different, and something that is not associated with being Western, involuntarily making the hijab and the wearer inferior to Western cultural practices. In ‘Unthinking Eurocentrism’ Shohat and Stam elaborate that Eurocentrism uses language to create binaries, flattering the West - the use of the hijab/buraqa may be described as their “folklore”  where Western cultural practices are simply “culture”.

While Orientialism is how the West perceived the East to be like – this perception is full of stereotypes which have been produced and reinforced over hundreds of years to the extent where they have become ‘common sense’ and so naturalized that these stereotypes often go largely unquestioned, we can attribute this to the long running and on-going portrayal of Muslims in the media. Muslims are frequently portrayed as violent (ABC’s Lost), oppressed (CSI) and violent (Raiders of the Lost Ark).

The discourse of the ‘West and the Rest’ is also a factor, as Stuart Hall has explained, all non-Western countries are lumped together becoming inferior to Western countries. In a lot of situations we see this as Muslims are continually stereotyped as terrorists and many group them together as so, based on as previously mentioned what is seen in the media and the actions of only a few.

Following both bus incidents, the New Zealand Herald released an article posing the question as to whether should be allowed in New Zealand? For the majority, there was without a doubt the burqa/hijab did not belong in New Zealand as it was seen ‘scary’, a way of oppressing the wearer and was simply not a part of our culture. Paul Holmes extended on these points in his article I have mentioned above, where he claimed the hijab makes a statement implying “I am not part of your filthy heathen community… but I don’t really approve of you all and have no desire to be a part of you”, I think it’s farfetched to believe just because someone embraces wearing a burqa/hijab in a nation that is not dominantly Muslim they do not want to be part of a community. To hold onto and maintain ones own cultural values and beliefs ie. wearing a hijab/burqa enhances cultural hybridity and resists Eurocentricism as Suzanne mentioned in Lecture 3.

As our country becomes an increasingly multi-cultural nation it is important that we learn to tackle situations we may not be comfortable with, accepting other peoples beliefs and cultural practices is important if we ourselves want to be accepted in these ways.