At the urging of the United Nations, the international rules board for soccer’s world governing body (FIFA) has unanimously approved a proposal to overturn a 2007 ruling that barred women from wearing headscarves in international competition. That restriction had reportedly led to the banning of Iran’s international women’s team from competing in this summer’s Olympic Games. FIFA has held that the ban on headscarves was enacted for safety reasons, rather than out of any religious or political concern, but the ban has been controversial for its effect on the eligibility of female Muslim athletes, and even interpreted by some as an act of Islamophobia.
Whether or not FIFA’s burqa ban is rightly viewed as politically motivated, the situation is reminiscent of many other attempts to legislate physical markers of difference. And be they legal or cultural, efforts to enforce societal homogeneity have been on the rise in recent years. In The New Religious Intolerance, a book we’ll publish next month, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum brings her deeply humane perspective to bear on “the politics of fear in an anxious age.” She focuses on the fear driving episodes such as the controversy surrounding the proposed Muslim cultural center in Lower Manhattan, and the initial media inclination to blame Islamic extremists for the murder last year of 77 Norwegians.
Nussbaum’s interest in doing such a book was sparked by the reaction to a New York Times piece that she wrote about the proposed bans of the Muslim burqa in Europe. We recently asked Nussbaum about how the comments received by that piece shaped her thinking on the subject:
Some of the comments were insightful, but most showed just what Socrates thought wrong with democracy in his time: haste, prideful boasting, a lack of careful examination, and an unwillingness to listen to the opposing position. I became even more convinced that Socrates was right: patient attention to argument makes democracy work better.
She went on to offer her perspective on why this historical moment has seen the emergence of what she considers to be new forms of religious intolerance:
People are justifiably insecure about many things: the global economy, jobs, safety in an era of terrorism. It is difficult to understand these large-scale problems, much less to fix them. It is far easier to convince oneself that the problem stems from the presence of new minority groups, and that some simple remedy, such as a ban on minarets or the burqa, can fix it.
As noted, FIFA has held that its burqa ban was a safety issue, seemingly freeing it from the taint of religious intolerance. As Nussbaum explains in the book, though, the problem with such safety (and, frequently, “security”) concerns is that they are applied inconsistently. In general, Nussbaum writes, “what inspires fear and mistrust in Europe and, to some extent, in the United States is not covering per se, but Muslim covering.”
At the meeting in which the new FIFA proposal was discussed, Jordan’s Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein, a member of the FIFA Executive Committee, reportedly made “an impassioned plea to the Board to allow the wearing of headscarves by female players.” The proposal is expected to be ratified at the Board’s Special Meeting in July, pending an accelerated review of health and safety issues, during which the use of Velcro-fastened headscarves will be tested. As FIFA Secretary General Jerome Valcke remarked, “If women cannot play because of headscarves then we at FIFA are very happy to authorise them so women around the world have access to football.”
