On Oct. 9, Zunaira Ishaq, an immigrant from Pakistan, finally took her citizenship oath and became a Canadian. Her refusal to take the oath without niqab, or a face veil, has been a subject of legal battle between Canada’s courts and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government. This controversy has become a backdrop for Canada’s parliamentary elections today. Having lost legal challenges that would have prevented Ishaq from taking the oath while veiled, Harper’s Conservative Party is now vowing to pursue a niqab ban during citizenship ceremonies and to consider a wider ban for all public employees if re-elected. His opponents, the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau and the New Democratic Party’s Thomas Mulcair, have dismissed the niqab issue as a distraction and oppose such bans. Harper’s fear-mongering reflects Canada’s growing distance from the “respect for multiculturalism” and “freedom of religion” enshrined in its own Charter of Canadian Rights and Freedoms. A Conservative victory in today’s polls would express an endorsement of Islamophobia and a xenophobic fear of the immigrant “other.” It will also show that the country’s commitment to women’s right to choose does not extend to Muslims who wear the face veil.

Excluding Muslims

A Canada that votes for Harper will be a scared nation capitulating to nativist political demagoguery and to the belief that Muslims can never be real Canadians.

The flawed logic of Harper’s Conservative Party is clear: Canadian Muslim women’s freedom and right to make their own decisions ends when their choices fail to align with the party’s positions. It is a shrewd construction that seeks to privilege real Canadians — whites and non-Muslims — whom it hopes to enlist via its hotline. The use of this political sleight of hand transforms xenophobia into saviordom, and racist repugnance into the self-righteous regard for Muslim women’s freedom. Muslim men, already suspect for their terrorist potentialities, must now be watched for their misogyny and their likelihood of abridging the self-expression of women. The Conservative Party’s paternalistic leadership feels it knows what’s best for Muslim women and that it can abridge their choices because it imagines them as being perpetually in need of saving. At the core of their position is the premise that only disavowals of faith and culture, especially when they are foreign and Muslim, can be feminist acts. In their eyes, Ishaq’s insistence on her right to define her own public religious practice is not feminism at all. To everyone else, their absurd position purports to champion women’s freedom while at the same time insisting on limitations to it.

Islamophobia and elections