“It is not that we wear the burqa (veil) because it is shameful to go without it, but because it is beautiful to go with it.”

This is a quote of an Arab Bedouin woman from Oman in the book entitled “Behind the Veil in Arabia” by the Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan. Wikan lived with and wrote about the women of the Sohar region of Oman in the early 1970s. She devotes a whole chapter to the issue of the burqa or veil on Arab women in that area. Her perspective offers a very different view on the veil from those views normally presented in the current debate fueled by the comments of British politicians Jack Straw and Tony Blair.

Straw and Blair see the veil of Muslim women in England as a negative and others, following their lead, place the veil only as an oppressive symbol in society. Here is how Wikan saw the veil in the Arab Muslim context in Oman through the eyes of local women. She states, “Ingeniously fashioned to cover some select parts of the woman’s face in a design that serves exquisitely to enhance her individual beauty, yet properly to cover her when in the presence of strangers before whom she feels shy, the burqa epitomizes female modesty and pride. It is an integral part of the woman’s self; like no other garment, her burqa she handles in complex ways, time and again every day, to communicate to the world her sense of being a beautiful, modest and honorable woman as well as her personal feelings of ease or embarrassment in a give situation.” This is clearly a very different outlook on the veil from that of Straw and Blair

As this debate erupted, my thoughts turned to my previous experiences with the veil in Western society. My recollections took me back to church when I was growing up in rural America. It was very common then to see women wearing lace veils over their faces when attending church. In fact it was almost obligatory for the older ladies in the church to wear their veils and hats to cover their heads.

The most common veil seen frequently in Western society is the wedding veil. Most Western women going down the aisle to pledge their wedding vows arrive at the altar with their faces covered with a veil not that different from the Muslim woman’s. They either have the veil removed by their father or by the groom when they arrive at the altar.

So veils in Western society do exist. But the debate rages at a time when the “clash of civilizations” and differences between the Muslim world and the Western world are daily news topics. What is going on here and why are these issues so prominent in the news today?

How big of an issue is the veil worn by Muslim women in reality? First of all, how many people does it really affect? In the United States, various estimates are given for the number of Muslim citizens. Let’s take the conservative number of about five million Muslims. That is about 1 1/2 percent of the total US population. Of that number, let’s assume that half are female and of that half, another half are old enough to wear the veil. The figure given for the percentage of Muslim women actually wearing veils is usually less than 2 percent.

So now we are down to a very few American Muslim women who might choose to wear the veil. That figure becomes less than 4/100 of 1 percent of American Muslims and 7/1000 of 1 percent of the population of the United States. The numbers are similar in England yet one would think that this issue is as important and affects as many people as world poverty by looking at the news.

Upon checking the media attention to this issue and particularly reading the letters to the editors and the blogs, one sees growing patterns. First of all the real flames of this debate are being fueled heavily by the neocons and their allies. The neocon-oriented publication National Review Online recently held an online symposium titled “An Unveiling.”

Extreme views are held by all of those participating in this symposium. There is general support for Straw and Blair and gratitude to them for bringing the issue to the forefront. However, the most extreme racist comments of the whole group which includes Daniel Pipes and William Bennett come from nationally syndicated columnist Mona Charen.

Charen states: “The controversy over the veil is one of the first flickers of European awareness after decades of somnolence. The data are well known: Native Europeans are failing to reproduce in anything like the numbers necessary to sustain their societies. Someone however must pay for their corpulent welfare states. Enter the Muslims, who have become a mortal threat. They are a threat for two reasons: 1) the average Muslim woman in Europe has 3.5 children compared with an average 1.4 for native Europeans, which means that in a few years, they will become a majority (a T-shirt popular among Swedish Muslims reads “2030, The Year We Take Over”); and 2) European Muslims are among the most radical and Islamist in the world. Rather than assimilate into European society, many European Muslims are insisting that Europe change.”

So the debate over the veil devolves into the threat of Muslims ultimately outnumbering “native Europeans.” This sounds so very familiar to the racist statements one hears from Israel regarding the potential “demographic bomb” of Arabs eventually outnumbering Jews in Israel. All of a sudden, democracy might not work in this context and the reality of the oxymoron phrase “a Jewish democratic state” becomes evident.

So read between the lines as the debate surrounding the veil goes on. However you feel about this issue, don’t fall into the “clash of civilizations” trap that some would lead us into.

And take note of an old Madagascan proverb, “Justice is like fire; if one covers it with a veil, it still burns.”