Media
Don’t politicize women’s bodies
The Globe and Mail, August 5, 2014Online
URL: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/dont-politicize-womens-bodies/article19911349/
This summer, the European Court of Human Rights upheld France's burka ban, agreeing that the burka hinders Muslim women from integrating into French society. Several European countries, including Belgium and Switzerland, have also recently banned the niqab (face veil), reflecting a European trend that may well have an effect counter to its stated intention. Rather than integrating Muslim women – like the 24-year-old who brought the case to the court – this decision will likely increase a sense of alienation for women who want to wear the veil. And it will create an adversarial environment by forcing an artificial binary between national citizenship and religious identity.
Biography
Ayesha S. Chaudhry is the Canada Research Chair in Religion, Law and Social Justice and Associate Professor of Islamic studies and Gender studies at the University of British Columbia, where she has served on the Board of Governors. In 2018, she was named a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellow. She was a 2016-17 Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Study at UBC and she was the 2015-16 Rita E. Hauser fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is the author of Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition: Ethics, Law, and the Muslim Discourse on Gender (Oxford University Press, 2014). Chaudhry’s research focuses on Islamic legal and theological reform, with an eye towards promoting human rights by focusing on women’s rights. She is deeply committed to bridging the academic and civil society divide. In service of this commitment, she is actively engaged in civic discourse around religion. She has consulted on high-level national and international cases concerning human rights, religious freedom, and pluralism. Chaudhry works with NGOs and international development organizations to improve women’s rights and promote pluralism. She is currently working on two major projects, one entitled “Feminist Shari’a” and a trilogy entitled “The Colour of God”.