Wednesday 20 Apr 2016 - 14:00 Makkah mean time-13-7-1437
Liga Legzdina, 27, who goes by the name Fatima, near Riga, Latvia. She is one of a tiny handful of women who wear the niqab in the country. Image from The New York Times.
Riga, Latvia (IINA) – The Latvian government is planning to ban face veils, or what called niqab, for all three women who wear them in this Baltic nation, of which the population is less than two million, including about 1,000 practicing Muslims, according to government estimates.
Only three women in Latvia are believed to wear the face veil. But for Latvia’s Ministry of Justice, that three are too many, New York Times reported.
Citing a desire to protect Latvian culture and to address security concerns at a time of rising migration to Europe, the government is working on proposed legislation, inspired partly by similar restrictions on head coverings in France that would ban face-covering veils from public spaces. The proposal would not ban the wearing of headscarves that do not cover the face, like hijabs, the coverings most commonly worn by Muslim women.
“A legislator’s task is to adopt preventive measures,” said Justice Minister Dzintars Rasnacs, a member of the anti-immigration National Alliance party, whinch predicted that the law would win overwhelming backing in parliament and would be in place at the start of 2017.
The legislation in Latvia is one expression of a broader concern about immigration in general and Muslims in particular across the Central and Eastern Europe, as migrants flock to the Continent from Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa.
Hungary, Slovakia and Poland have been among the countries most strongly opposed to taking in large numbers of migrants, reflecting anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim strains in their societies. Even in remote Latvia hardly a top destination for migrants, given its frosty winters and threadbare welfare system a darkening swirl of fear has emanated from politicians, the news media and the wider population.
Take the case of Legzdina, 27 year-old, who is not a migrant but a native Latvian who converted to Islam after a trip to Egypt as a teenager.
Now a medical student at a university in Riga, the capital, Legzdina, who goes by Fatima, comes to Zaube each spring and summer on vacation with her two young children. Her husband, Viesturs Kanders, followed her into the Islamic faith on their wedding day.
Other than her clothing, prayers and regular fasting, her life in Zaube matches Latvian country life almost to the point of cliché, including picking flowers or mushrooms depending on the season, a strong Latvian tradition.
“I love my country,” she said with pride. Yet she said she felt threatened by the way people responded to her appearance.
“People have become much more aggressive than before,” she said. When she is not vacationing in Zaube, she lives in a suburb of Riga, where her daily commute, she said, is becoming littered with verbal abuse. Interactions on buses and trams, she said, often involve her being told to “go back to where you come from,” and tend to end with awkward moments when she replies to the person confronting her in perfect Latvian.
“If they are so afraid,” she said, “it shows they are not strong, and they don’t believe in their own culture.”
Rasnacs, the justice minister, said the law was not about the number of people covering their faces in Latvia, but had more to do with ensuring that prospective immigrants respect the norms of this small and homogeneous country.
Like other countries in the region, Latvia has been reluctant to take in sizable numbers of the migrants who have arrived on the Continent over the last year, with more than a million ending up in Germany. After protracted negotiations, Latvia agreed to accept up to 776 refugees over the next two years, under the European Union’s faltering effort to resettle refugees among all of its 28 member states.
SM/IINA
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