The French parliament's vote to ban the niqab has aroused international controversy. Meanwhile, Syria's attempt to ban the niqab in schools has attracted less attention. The Economist saysabout 1,200 teachers are affected and some of them have been transferred to other jobs.

Joshua Landis discusses the move on his Syria Comment blog, noting how the popularity of Islamic clothing has grown over the last 40 years or so. He writes:

Many theories have been offered for why Islamic clothing has spread. Some of these theories are: it is due to the failure of secularism and materialist ideologies, such as communism and socialism; a protest against corrupt and authoritarian rule; in Syria, it has been argued that it is a “Sunni” protest against the dominance of Alawis, who are viewed to be lax Muslims (Alawi women do not wear the headscarf as a rule). I have heard other explanations, as well: fashion, western clothing is too expensive, the growth in women’s literacy has led to greater piety and familiarity with religion.

He also quotes a reader's comment which makes some interesting points:

One of our most miserable failures, as secular Arabs, was not to focus on a large marginalized segment of our society in the deep rural areas. So long as our cities looked more like western cities, with a tolerable amount of head-scarves, and so long as the rural only showed up in the commercial sector of our cities, or during their visits to city doctors, we thought that progress was happening as we had no idea, or we did not want to realize the extent of our failures in bringing true development, education, modernization, and progress into these rural areas. We may have brought electricity, built a few schools, facilitated rapid and excessive and unsustainable exploitation of land and water resources, but true enlightenment, i guess, we did not bring. The story is the same in most Arab “secular” republics.

With this failure, and as a significant segment of rural Arabs left their forgotten villages and came to the cities in search of better economic life, and in many cases, were even forced to do so through the extreme centralization prevalent in our societies, the cities started to reflect more of the true societal differences, and the more conservative leaning of the country, than they did when they only held about 15% of our “more affluent” westernized population. No secular Arab thinker dares to bring this issue, for it highlights our 70 year failure in affecting real, non-cosmetic progress. Tribal mentality remained the same, and it has by now spread into the cities where the narrow circles of old-urbanites , that used to be able to pretend that they represent the entire society, can no longer do so. Hence their nostalgia to the old days.

A population that remained more susceptible to wahabi ideas now constitutes a significant segment of Arab City dwellers, especially in Megacities, where traditionally, more cosmopolitan, enlightened strands of Islam was previously practiced. Ignoring the migrants after they migrated to the cities and leaving them to fend for themselves without real help exacerbated the problem and made more of the city now even more susceptible to Wahabi ideas. The same story can be told in countless Arab countries. It is not the Wahabi idea that is gaining, it is our failure to bring a large segment of our society into a level of development that can confront these ideas is the cause of what we now see.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 16 July 2010.