Chinese authorities have banned women in the capital city of Xinjiang—an autonomous western region where Muslims account for almost half of the population—from wearing burqas in public, according to a brief article on a government-run website, Tianshan News. Local legislators for Urumqi proposed the ban in December, and now the regional legislature has approved it.
It’s not clear when the ban will go into effect. State media said only that it will be implemented after being modified to meet comments proposed in a meeting over the weekend.
Ever since a group of Uighur Muslims went on a killing spree in a train station in Kunming last March, Chinese officials have ratcheted up restrictions on a group they see as potential extremists. Xinjiang officials later banned students and civil servants from fasting for Ramadan, and authorities in the Xinjiang city of Karamy barred anyone wearing burqas, niqabs, hijabs or simply “large beards” from taking public buses.
The state-run news agency Xinhua justified the burqa ban by pointing out that burqas are also banned in France (perhaps not the best example to use, given the recent extremist attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo). The Xinhua report in English said, “Burqas are not traditional dress for Uighur women… The regulation is seen as an effort to curb growing extremism that forced Uighur women to abandon their colorful traditional dress and wear black burqas.”
QZ.COM
No comments:
Post a Comment