Muslim Heretics Conference

By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

When Columbia University President Lee Bollinger introduced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at his school in September 2007, he denounced him as a “petty tyrant.”

Ahmadinejad is many bad things, including a Holocaust denier and a strong proponent of a nuclear Iran. But as recent events have underlined, Iran is not quite a tyranny, petty or grand, and the office Ahmadinejad occupies does not give him final say in Iranian affairs. That role is more truly occupied by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, head of the Council of Guardians and Iran’s supreme leader.

A real tyranny would never permit elections in the first place—North Korea never does—nor would it allow demonstrations contesting the election results to spiral out of control. Yet Iran is no liberal democracy. So what kind of beast is it? And in what ways should we want its regime to evolve?

Political scientists categorize the Islamic Republic of Iran as an “electoral authoritarian” regime of a new sort. They put it in the same basket as Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela or Vladimir Putin’s Russia. By this view, Iran is fundamentally an authoritarian regime run by a small circle of clerics and military officials who use elections to legitimate themselves.

Others think of Iran as a medieval theocracy. Its 1979 constitution vests sovereignty not in the people, but in God, and establishes Islam and the Quran as the supreme sources of law.

The Iranian Constitution is a curious hybrid of authoritarian, theocratic and democratic elements. Articles One and Two do vest sovereignty in God, but Article Six mandates popular elections for the presidency and the Majlis, or parliament. Articles 19-42 are a bill of rights, guaranteeing, among other things, freedom of expression, public gatherings and marches, women’s equality, protection of ethnic minorities, due process and private property, as well as some “second generation” social rights like social security and health care.

 

The truly problematic part of the constitution is Section Eight (Articles 107-112) on the Guardian Council and the “Leader.” All the democratic procedures and rights in the earlier sections of the constitution are qualified by certain powers reserved to a council of senior clerics.

These powers, specified in Article 110, include control over the armed forces, the ability to declare war, and appointment powers over the judiciary, heads of media, army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Another article lays out conditions under which the Supreme Leader can be removed by the Guardian Council. But that procedure is hardly democratic or transparent.

One does not have to go back to the Middle Ages to find historical precedents for this type of constitution. The clearest parallel would be the German Constitution adopted after the country was unified in the 1870s. Pre-World War I Germany had an elected parliament, or Reichstag, but reserved important powers for an unelected Kaiser, particularly in foreign policy and defense. This constitution got Germany into big trouble. The unelected part of the leadership controlled the armed forces. Eventually, though, it came to be controlled by the armed forces. This seems to be what’s unfolding in Iran today.

Compared to Section Eight, the references in the Iranian Constitution to God and religion as the sources of law are much less problematic. They could, under the right circumstances, be the basis for Iran’s eventual evolution into a moderate, law-governed country.

The rule of law was originally rooted in religion in all societies where it came to prevail, including the West. The great economist Friedrich Hayek noted that law should be prior to legislation. That is, the law should reflect a broad social consensus on the rules of justice. In Europe, it was the church that originally defined the law and acted as its custodian. European monarchs respected the rule of law because it was written by an authority higher and more legitimate than themselves.

Something similar happened in the pre-modern Middle East. There was a functional separation of church and state. The ulama were legal scholars and custodians of Shariah law while the sultans exercised political authority. The sultans conceded they were not the ultimate source of law but had to live within rules established by Muslim case law. There was no democracy, but there was something resembling a rule of law.

This traditional, religiously based rule of law was destroyed in the Middle East’s transition to modernity. Replacing it, particularly in the Arab world, was untrammeled executive authority: Presidents and other dictators accepted no constraints, either legislative or judicial, on their power.

The legal scholar Noah Feldman has argued that the widespread demand for a return to Shariah in many Muslim countries does not necessarily reflect a desire to impose harsh, Taliban-style punishments and oppress women. Rather, it reflects a nostalgia for a dimly remembered historical time when Muslim rulers were not all-powerful autocrats, but respected Islamic rules of justice—Islamic rule of law.

So what kind of future should we wish for Iran, in light of the massive demonstrations? My own preference would be for Iran to some day adopt a new, Western-style constitution guaranteeing religious freedom, a secular state, and sovereignty vested firmly in the people, rather than God.

But a considerable amount of anecdotal evidence (we don’t have anything better) suggests this is not necessarily the agenda of the protesters. Many of them, including opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, say they want Iran to remain an Islamic Republic. They look at the radical regime change that occurred in next door Iraq and don’t want that for themselves. What they seem to wish for is that the democratic features of the constitution be better respected, and that the executive authorities, including the Guardian Council, and the military and paramilitary organizations, stop manipulating elections and respect the law.

Iran could evolve towards a genuine rule-of-law democracy within the broad parameters of the 1979 constitution. It would be necessary to abolish Article 110, which gives the Guardian Council control over the armed forces and the media, and to shift its function to something more like a supreme court that could pass judgment on the consistency of legislation with Shariah. In time, the Council might be subject to some form of democratic control, like the U.S. Supreme Court, even if its members needed religious credentials.

Eliminating religion altogether from the Iranian Constitution is more problematic. The rule of law prevails not because of its formal and procedural qualities, but because it reflects broadly held social norms. If future Iranian rulers are ever to respect the rule of law as traditional Muslim rulers once did, it will have to be a law that comes from the hearts of the Iranian people. Perhaps that will one day be a completely secular law. That is unlikely to be the case today.

Unfortunately, Iranians may never get to make the choice for themselves. The clerical-military clique currently exercising power is likely to drag Iran into conflict with other countries in the region. This could easily consolidate its legitimacy and power. Let us hope that the country’s internal forces push for an evolution of the political system towards genuine rule of law and democracy first.

Mr. Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is author of “America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy” (Yale, 2006).

Francis Fukuyama: Iranian constitution democratic at heart - WSJ.com

Iran’s Tragic Joke

By ROGER COHEN

Published: July 20, 2009

NEW YORK — Allow me to quote the British novelist Martin Amis, writing about Persia in The Guardian: “Iran is one of the most venerable civilizations on earth: it makes China look like an adolescent, and America look like a stripling.”

Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Roger Cohen

Iranians, aware of that history, are a proud people. They do not take kindly to being played around with, nor to seeing their country turned into a laughingstock. They do not like the memory of an election campaign that now seems like pure theater, the expression of the sadistic whim of some puppeteer.

So the line I take away from the important Friday sermon of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the two-time former president who believes that the Islamic Republic’s future lies in compromise rather than endless confrontation, is this one: “We shouldn’t let our enemies laugh at us because we’ve imprisoned our own people.”

There’s been tragedy aplenty since June 12 — dozens of killings, thousands of arrests, countless beatings of the innocent — and I hope I belittle none of it when I say there’s also been something laughable.

What president would celebrate a “victory” by two-thirds of the vote with a clampdown resembling a putsch? What self-respecting nation would attribute the appearance in the streets of three million protesters convinced their votes were stolen to Zionists, “evil” media and British agents?

(The former British ambassador to Iran told me with a smile last January that Tehran was an interesting place to serve “because it’s one of the very few places left on earth where people still believe we have some influence!”)

What sort of country invites hundreds of journalists to witness an election only to throw them all out? What kind of revolutionary authority invokes “ethics” and “religious democracy” as it allows plain-clothes thugs to beat women?

What is to be thought of a supreme leader who calls an election result divine, then says there are some questions that need resolution by an oversight council, and then tells that council what the result of its recount is before it’s over?

Iran is not some banana republic. The events since the night of June 12 have been a shameful interlude. Iranians have not digested this grotesquery.

No, Iran is not a banana republic. It’s a sophisticated nation of 75 million people. It pretends to a significant role in the affairs of the world. It’s a land of poets who knew how to marry the sacred and the sensuous and always laughed at the idea of a truth so absolute it would not accommodate contradiction.

It’s an Islamic Republic and, as Rafsanjani said, “If the Islamic and Republican sides of the revolution are not preserved, it means that we have forgotten the principles of the revolution.”

Respecting that duality — the clerical and the republican — means that the price Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has to pay for his lifelong authority is the quadrennial holding of presidential elections that cannot remove him from office but must inform his actions.

Because Khamenei trampled on this principle, ignoring the will of the people, he created the “crisis” of which Rafsanjani spoke.

It will not abate quickly. Iranians believe the puppeteer must pay a price for such clumsy theater. Within the revolutionary establishment and within society, fissures have become chasms. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now the most divisive figure in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history.

As Rafsanjani said: “We could have taken our best step in the history of the Islamic Revolution had the election not faced problems.”

The campaign was of an exemplary openness. Supporters of Ahmadinejad and Mir Hussein Moussavi, the reformist candidate, took to the streets without incident. Moussavi, with his impeccable revolutionary credentials, was the very emblem of unthreatening change.

But a hardline faction around Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards felt threatened — in their power, wealth and world view.

They do not believe, as Rafsanjani believes, in a China option for Iran: the possibility of normalizing relations with the U.S. and preserving the system.

While Rafsanjani spoke, Ahmadinejad was speaking in Mashad. “As soon as the new government is formed, it will enter the global sphere with a power that is 10 times greater than that of the West and overthrow the West from its hegemonic position,” he said.

I heard the president say the same thing, again and again and again, over the course of a three-hour press conference two days after the election. He is suffering from a pathology. Rafsanjani is not alone in believing it is dangerous.

A succession struggle of sorts has begun in Iran. Rafsanjani, 74, is challenging Khamenei, 70. So is Mohammad Khatami, the reformist former president who called Sunday for a referendum on the legitimacy of the election. They are saying Iran is a great and proud nation: open the prisons, free the press, allow debate, do not make a laughingstock of our institutions. That, they insist, is the only form of loyalty to the Revolution.

It’s also the only action worthy of a millennial nation. The joke has been too foul to stand.

Op-Ed Columnist - Iran’s Tragic Joke - NYTimes.com

Some residents say Taqwa mosque, in Isiolo, central Kenya, preaches a radical version of Islam. Somali insurgents have been recruiting fighters from Kenya.
Heba Aly

Friends of Tawakal Ahmed gathered in his village of Isiolo, Kenya. Tawakal, who grew more and more radical, was killed in the fighting in Somalia.
Heba Aly

A woman of Isiolo, which has a wide mix of cultures, wears the ‘niqab,’ covering all but her eyes.
Heba Aly

 

Like the Somali-American from Minnesota who was killed this weekend, Tawakal Ahmed was recruited through mosques in Kenya to fight for Islamic militants in Mogadishu.

By Heba ALY | Correspondent

from the July 19, 2009 edition

Isiolo, Kenya - A smattering of wispy clouds dots the blue sky as white-robed worshipers trickle into Taqwa mosque for Friday prayers. Our car is parked outside the mosque, slightly hidden by a hedgerow of tangled savannah brush that defines the mosque’s perimeter. A cool, dry wind blows across this arid town – refreshing against the equatorial heat, but leaving a blanket of dust on the whitewashed buildings.

The car’s tinted windows are rolled up to protect against the fine film of dust – and to conceal me from sight.

Isiolo is smack in the center of Kenya, far from Somalia. But the sermon pouring out of the mosque’s loudspeakers is in Somali. We listen for a few minutes before the driver abruptly pulls away.

“If they catch us spying on them, we’ll be stoned,” he says.

AFTER ATTENDING THIS MOSQUE and another near his home, Tawakal Ahmed, a young Kenyan man of Somali descent, journeyed to Somalia. Last November he blew himself up.

At least that’s what his family and friends say.

Muslim militants have recruited from elsewhere in Kenya, seeking those who will help them win control of Somalia. Until now, they’ve drawn from Eastleigh (Nairobi’s Somali enclave), Somali refugee camps in Kenya, and areas along the Kenyan-Somali border. But if what Tawakal’s family says is true, he is one of the first known cases of recruitment in Kenya outside those traditional hunting grounds.

Some analysts say this case in Kenya shows that the recruiting networks of Somalia’s insurgency may be more vast than once presumed. Similar cases are also coming to light in the United States.

On Tuesday, a Somali-American 20-year-old engineering student from Minnesota was reported killed in Somalia while fighting alongside Islamic militants. His uncle, Omar Ahmed Sheikh, told Reuters his nephew, was misled by clerics in Minneapolis and persuaded to go to Somalia in November 2008. “They told him they would teach him Islamic religion … But they are terrorists and cannot claim they are Muslims,” said Mr. Sheikh.

Omar Jamal, director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Centre in Minneapolis, told Reuters Bana was one of 18 teenagers who ran away to Somalia last November after attending a youth programme at a local mosque.

ISIOLO SEEMS an unlikely place to recruit Islamic fighters. It has always been a cosmopolitan town. For decades, there have been intermarriages between tribes and ethnicities; churches and mosques share the same streets; men with sticks herd their cattle past niqab-covered women, their Muslim garb hiding everything but their eyes.

Somalis were first settled in this sleepy outpost by the British after World War I. The descendants of soldiers became Kenyans, living in shantytowns, marginalized by the Kenyan government but integrated nonetheless into this diverse town.

In the 1990s, as the civil war in neighboring Somalia intensified, refugees began streaming deeper and deeper into Kenya. Eventually they arrived here – and started to fill the mosques. With them came a new ideology, one that would change this moderate Kenyan community and the fate of at least one of its young men.

TAWAKAL’S FAMILY and friends say they know which path lead to his death. But they don’t know exactly how he died. They’ve heard different stories, from different sources. They’ve been told that Tawakal strapped on an explosive belt and walked onto the base of African Union peacekeepers in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. They’ve also been told that he was killed while fighting with Al Shabab insurgents trying to overthrow the Somali government or slaughtered when he tried to escape them.

The only thing of which they are certain is that one day in November 2008 the phone rang in their home in Isiolo. Someone speaking Somali said: “Your son is dead. May his soul rest in peace. He died in the cause of Allah.”

THE YOUNGEST of his siblings, Ta­wa­kal Ahmed was born into the Harti clan and a Somali family that had lived in Kenya for three generations. Orphaned at a young age, he was raised by his aunts and older cousins.

As a child, his friends were a mix of Kenyans – some Muslim, some Christian, some ethnic Somalis, some of the Bantu and Turkana tribes. Together, they played soccer and chewed khat, a stimulant illegal in many countries but a staple in Somali society.

Tawakal’s family and neighbors are Muslims, but not strict adherents. They don’t pray five times a day, and khat and cigarettes are an integral part of daily life. Most of Tawakal’s friends speak English better than they do Somali or Kiswahili, Kenya’s national language.

Upon graduating high school, where he was chairman of the Muslim association, Tawakal tried unsuccessfully to find a job. He started the process for getting immigration papers to find work in Europe.

But slowly, Tawakal’s course changed. First he began frequenting a madrasa, or Islamic school, in town. Within a year, he had memorized the Koran.

Then one of his more religious friends took him to the local mosque, Masjid al-Nur, just steps from his home. He began spending all his time at the madrasa or at the mosque. He often disappeared, say family members, for a month at a time. They say he was performing Tabligh, in which Muslims travel from village to village, preaching while sleeping in mosques.

He became so religious that he could no longer sit in the same room as his family members – whose smoking and chewing of khat bothered him.

“He didn’t like that company,” says a cousin who does not want to be named for fear of retribution by extremists in the community or by the Kenyan government. “He never used to talk to anybody.”

One day in 2006, Tawakal abruptly left for the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Today, some family members recall that he went to look for a job. Others say he went for religious studies. Some say that he just left, without saying anything.

Family and friends disagree over where the indoctrination began – in Isiolo or in Nairobi. But it’s clear that when he returned to his village, Tawakal was a changed man.

FOR TWO YEARS, no one heard from Tawakal. Friends say they finally learned that he had been seen attending Beit al-Mal madrasa and frequenting the Sixth Street mosque in Eastleigh, a crowded, poor suburb of Nairobi, inhabited mostly by Somalis. Family members went looking for him, without success. Then they heard he had gone to Somalia, where he was using a different name and fighting alongside Islamists.

His disappearance coincided with a heightening of the conflict in war-torn Somalia, where in late 2006, Ethiopian troops invaded to overthrow a Union of Islamic Courts that had taken power. The Ethiopians’ success sparked a new wave of insurgents among the ousted Islamists, who wanted sharia (Islamic law) installed and foreign troops off Somali soil.

Tawakal would later tell an Isiolo village elder that he’d been fighting “pagans” in Somalia.

According to the elder, Hussein Noor Roble, “He went to Somalia when the Ethiopians came…. He said: ‘I went to jihad.’ He said he was fighting with the Islamic Courts Union…. I said [to myself], ‘The boy is not the way he used to be.’ ”

Tawakal said he had been sent for training in the southern Somalia port town of Kismayo. He was then deployed to the front line in the Dinsoor area. But as government and Ethiopian troops continued gaining ground, Tawakal was pushed back with his fellow fighters to the insurgent stronghold of Raz Kamboni, the most southern tip of Somalia, on the Kenyan border. Raz Kamboni fell to the new Somali government on Jan. 12, 2007.

IN THE SPRING OF 2007, Tawakal called home. His aunt was on her deathbed and he was urged to come home. He showed up in Isiolo a few weeks later.

His aunt died the same day he arrived: April 1, 2007. He only stayed a few days. He told his family that he regretted missing the chance to speak to her, and participated in her burial service.

But he slept at the mosque, not at home. He regularly held long telephone conversations in private.

He harangued his friends when it was prayer time. He criticized them when they wore T-shirts portraying the American rapper Tupac Shakur and when they listened to music.

“He started calling me some [derogatory] names,” says his boyhood Christian friend, Frank Metro, “and telling our friends: ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s a lost one…. He’s a kafir [infidel].’ ”

Tawakal seemed to have more money than before. He had changed his entire wardrobe to costly kanzus, the knee-length garment worn over trousers cut above the ankle. He was more generous than usual, buying his friends sodas.

He avoided the subject of Somalia with his family. But he did tell Kamar Hussein, the village elder’s wife and the mother of one of Tawakal’s closest friends, that he had gone to Somalia with 15 other Kenyans and met another 20 there. “We were 36 in total from Kenya,” he told her.

His family urged him not to go back. But within a week of his aunt’s funeral, he was gone again. He told his family he was going to Nairobi to pick up a certificate from his studies. He said he’d be back in three days.

That was the last time they saw him.

TAWAKAL’S TRANSFORMATION – “We didn’t realize the magnitude of it,” says Mr. Metro – mirrors a radicalization within Isiolo and other parts of Kenya.

Over the years, newcomers from Somalia made-over two of Isiolo’s mosques with their ideologies. Visiting Somali clerics and graduates of Saudi Arabia’s theological colleges spread a more conservative, fundamentalist form of Islam.

Residents say they’re now told not to consume “infidel” products, such as Coca-Cola. Old traditions have been labeled un-Islamic. Last year, as village women gathered to celebrate the birth of the prophet Muhammad, according to the village elder’s wife, a group of young boys from one mosque stoned and beat the women with sticks, claiming that only God should be revered.

The man who runs both Masjid al-Nur and Taqwa Mosque in Isiolo goes by the name Dalai. He came to Kenya from Somalia some years ago, as a young refugee. He was eventually appointed imam, though he was still a young man in his early 30s.

Tawakal’s friends and family hold Dalai’s mosques responsible for Tawakal’s death. In his sermons, residents say, Dalai tells youths to fight for their religion in order to go to heaven. They say the imam likely influenced Tawakal to go to Nairobi and possibly connected him to extremists there.

But analysts are skeptical that such recruiting is directed from Somalia. The most militant insurgent group, Al Shabab, is not a monolithic entity with a clear hierarchical structure and does not necessarily have strong links directly into mosques.

“Sometimes Al Shabab’s work is done for them by others, unwittingly,” says Rashid Abdi, a Kenyan-Somali analyst at the Nairobi field office of the International Crisis Group. “Al Shabab is basically tapping into a wave, a radicalization phenomenon which is happening in the Muslim world.”

Tawakal’s family warned this reporter not to contact Dalai directly because, she was told, it would be unsafe for a foreign journalist, and for them.

According to Abdul Adam, the mosque’s treasurer, Dalai denies any responsibility for Tawakal’s fate. “He says it was Tawakal’s own wish,” Mr. Adam says.

Analysts say this radicalization is happening across Kenya, but they warn against reading too much into it. “I wouldn’t place all the blame on radical Somalis,” says one diplomat in Nairobi. “It’s more diffuse than that…. Not every radical mosque is a hotbed for recruitment.”

Still, some Isiolo parents now have private Koranic lessons for their children at home, instead of sending them to the mosque. Some residents are trying to raise money to build their own, less-strident Islamic school.

“The danger is imminent because of the desperation level in all the young people and the indoctrination that is going around,” says Tawakal’s boyhood friend, Metro.

The relative wealth displayed by those who control the mosques also leaves some residents suspicious. “Whether it’s coming from the Middle East or Mars, I don’t know,” says Milgo Ahmed, Tawakal’s older cousin. “But money is there. Money is being poured all over the place. That is how our children are being used and taken away.”

Asked if a hard-line message was leading Muslim boys astray, one of the more moderate Isiolo sheikhs answers affirmatively, but then panics.

“Anyone who preaches against these people will be shot. I don’t want to be shot on the pulpit,” he says.

He begins to suspect his interviewer is from Al Shabab, or an agent of Al Qaeda. He refuses to give his phone number, and then insists that he not be identified in this story.

“If I die, it is you who killed me.”

Despite their fear, Tawakal’s friends and family say the only way to fight this perceived encroachment on their town and their vision of Islam is to speak out. “After losing him, we started to understand the magnitude of this thing – of a young man being poached to do bad things in the name of helping his family,” Metro says. “It made us realize our vulnerability.”

Ms. Ahmed, Tawakal’s cousin, worries for the five recent graduates in her home who seem to have no opportunity for the future: “Tawakal is dead. He will no longer come [back]. But many, many other Tawakals are going to have the same fate if the international community does not take action,” she says.

Her family feels helpless, she says, with no protection from extremists and nowhere to turn. Complaints to Kenyan authorities fall on deaf ears.

“We are in big trouble,” Ahmed says. “We have nowhere to go…. Our children are not safe.” •

How one youth was drawn to jihad in Somalia | csmonitor.com

By MONA ELTAHAWY

Published: July 2, 2009

NEW YORK — I am a Muslim, I am a feminist and I detest the full-body veil, known as a niqab or burqa. It erases women from society and has nothing to do with Islam but everything to do with the hatred for women at the heart of the extremist ideology that preaches it.

We must not sacrifice women at the altar of political correctness or in the name of fighting a growingly powerful right wing that Muslims face in countries where they live as a minority.

As disagreeable as I often find French President Nicolas Sarkozy, he was right when he said recently, “The burqa is not a religious sign, it is a sign of the subjugation, of the submission of women. I want to say solemnly that it will not be welcome on our territory.” It should not be welcome anywhere, I would add.

Yet his words have inspired attempts to defend the indefensible — the erasure of women.

Some have argued that Sarkozy’s right-leaning, anti-Muslim bias was behind his opposition to the burqa. But I would remind them of comments in 2006 by the then-British House of Commons leader Jack Straw, who said the burqa prevents communication. He was right, and he was hardly a right-winger — and yet he too was attacked for daring to speak out against the burqa.

The racism and discrimination that Muslim minorities face in many countries — such as France, which has the largest Muslim community in Europe, and Britain, where two members of the xenophobic British National Party were shamefully elected to the European Parliament — are very real.

But the best way to support Muslim women would be to say we oppose both racist Islamophobes and the burqa. We’ve been silent on too many things out of fear we’ll arm the right wing.

The best way to debunk the burqa as an expression of Muslim faith is to listen to Muslims who oppose it. At the time of Mr. Straw’s comments, a controversy erupted when a university dean in Egypt warned students they would not be able to stay at college dorms unless they removed their burqa. The dean cited security grounds, saying that men disguised as women in burqa could slip into the female dorms.

Soad Saleh, a professor of Islamic law and former dean of the women’s faculty of Islamic studies at Al-Azhar University — hardly a liberal, said the burqa had nothing to do with Islam. It was but an old Bedouin tradition.

It is sad to see a strange ambivalence toward the burqa from many of my fellow Muslims and others who claim to support us. They will take on everything — the right wing, Islamophobia, Mr. Straw, Mr. Sarkozy — rather than come out and plainly state that the burqa is an affront to Muslim women.

I blame such reluctance on the success of the ultra-conservative Salafi ideology — practiced most famously in Saudi Arabia — in leaving its imprimatur on Islam globally by persuading too many Muslims that it is the purest and highest form of our faith.

It’s one thing to argue about the burqa in a country like Saudi Arabia — where I lived for six years and where women are treated like children — but it is utterly dispiriting to have those same arguments in a country where women’s rights have long been enshrined. When I first saw a woman in a burqa in Copenhagen I was horrified.

I wore a headscarf for nine years. An argument I had on the Cairo subway with a woman who wore a burqa helped seal for good my refusal to defend it. Dressed in black from head to toe, the woman asked me why I did not wear the burqa. I pointed to my headscarf and asked her “Is this not enough?”

“If you wanted a piece of candy, would you choose an unwrapped piece or one that came in a wrapper?” she asked.

“I am not candy,” I answered. “Women are not candy.”

I have since heard arguments made for the burqa in which the woman is portrayed as a diamond ring or a precious stone that needs to be hidden to prove her “worth.” Unless we challenge it, the burqa — and by extension the erasure of women — becomes the pinnacle of piety.

It is not about comparing burqas to bikinis, as some claim. I used to compare my headscarf to a miniskirt, the two being essentially two sides to the same coin of a woman’s body. The burqa is something else altogether: A woman who wears it is erased.

A bizarre political correctness has tied the tongues of those who would normally rally to women’s rights. One blogger, a woman, lamented that “Sarkozy’s anti-burqa stance deprives women of identity.” It’s precisely the opposite: It’s the burqa that deprives a woman of identity.

Why do women in Muslim-minority communities wear the burqa? Sarkozy touched on one reason when he admitted his country’s integration model wasn’t working any more because it doesn’t give immigrants and their French-born children a fair chance.

But the Muslim community must ask itself the same question: Why the silence as some of our women fade into black either as a form of identity politics, a protest against the state or out of acquiescence to Salafism?

As a Muslim woman and a feminist I would ban the burqa.

Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian-born commentator on Arab and Muslim issu

Op-Ed Contributor - Ban the Burqa - NYTimes.com