The story of the seven year-old Singaporean Muslim schoolgirls facing a tudung (heads scarf) ban during school hours tugs at the heartstrings. Disobedience means expulsion. The schoolgirls belong to a minority community comprising of some 453,000 persons or 15 percent of the population, most of whom are Malays.

It is reported that at least one of the affected students would opt for a madrassah education, a project which has seen skirmishes between the Singapore government and the minority Muslim community in the last two years. In the current tudung issue, the Singapore government had insisted that the ban was necessary for the maintenance of racial harmony.

The Singapore government had on several occasions perceived the Malay-Muslim community as having conflicting loyalties to the state. These past incidents included Malay-Muslim opposition to the invitation of the government to an Israeli leader to visit in 1986 and the non-appointments of Malay pilots in the Singapore Armed Forces, which was raised in 1987.

Ethnic and religious consciousness (and resentment) is a frequent result of oppression by the state or a majority community. It should be possible for civil rights groups to recast the government race card into a more inclusive challenge on fundamental liberties, a matter which has constitutional sanction.

There is a myriad of interesting legal points that lawyers can mull ad infinitum, such as the right to education and equality in treatment based on difference, that is the accommodation of differences or past disadvantages for substantive equality to prevail.

Concerned groups may even think of walking the unbeaten track to the Presidential Council on Minority Rights, if that avenue is still available and not repealed because of disuse.

Taboos and laws

The legal discourse on rights is a mainstream discourse. Even then, it has not really captured the imagination of lawyers and human rights activists on both sides of the causeway because of the race, racial harmony, religion, public order and national security taboos that have been with both countries since independence.

There are of course several ways of engaging the state on the issue. Legal strategies form one option. Discussions among concerned communities and civil society groups with the state to re-negotiate government positions or to negotiate the competing claims should be a real possibility. Malay-Muslim Singapore MPs and community leaders may have to work harder to earn the trust and respect of the minority constituency. These leaders are sometimes seen as the states instruments in the construction of consensus on major policy issues of the government.

The Singapore legislature has passed a religious harmony law in 1990. This law allows the issuance of restraining orders against an official or member of a religious group for, among other things, engaging in activities to promote a political cause. A preventive detention law, the Internal Security Act is still very much alive in the island republic.

It remains to be seen if the Singapore government will open the space for engagement or foreclose it, by the use or threat of the use of these laws. More importantly will Singaporeans as a whole embrace the incident as a civil society concern and not be bought into the unity in crisis spectre, so often mooted by the state?

Statement of modesty

There is a level of discussion often missing in a legal discourse on rights related to religion and culture. A legal discourse on rights which adopts the strategy that a certain type of dress for its women believers is central to the identity of the group or collective is problematic.

There are statements (of mostly male speakers from both sides of the border) arising from the Singapore schoolgirls case, suggesting that the tudung is recognised as a legitimate dimension of Muslim womens dressing around the world and is the religions (Islam) statement of modesty.

This importance attached to dress indicates that women continue to be repositories of tradition, culture and religious values of the group. The identity of the group is constructed through women and womens bodies. The womans individual rights or self-determination is subsumed by her groups religious identity.

This proves problematic when women choose to raise challenge to the dominant ideological construction of the group with regard to dress. We cannot discount the fact that there will be women who are strong adherents to the tenets of their religion claiming the right of choice and who will challenge the groups hegemonic ideology.

It must be noted that there are current opinions among Muslim theologians and legal scholars that constructions of the Muslim dress in the Arabian peninsular where Islam was born are practices rooted in religious interpretation or construction of sacred text. Interpretations are not infallible. In any case the methodology used by past jurists in arriving at an interpretation is still subject to review and scrutiny.

This line of thinking by no means dismisses the right or self-determination of women themselves to observe her groups ideological construction of the right dress as her own.

Foreclosing options for women

Thus in developing legal strategies and advocating for certain actions, we should always consider if the choice of one strategy would foreclose another, especially if both should always remain as options for women.

The other point to be carefully considered in building legal strategies for women is the possible appropriation of legal discourse and equality rights by groups with less progressive agendas.

Womens rights advocates would do well to recheck and remind themselves when groups with less progressive agendas deploy the language of rights that such groups or agendas do not at the same time attempt to inscribe women into an ideological frame that they cannot agree with.