A Burkini in Brooklyn
By: Robert A Stribley
Tags: Immigration, Islamophobia, Muslim, Donald Trump, Burkini

Red Hook Park Pool — photo by Malcolm Pinckney, NYC Parks, 6/30/06

A Burkini in Brooklyn

A diverse scene at a Red Hook pool speaks to what really makes this country great

Trying make the most of the last days of summer, I’ve been visiting the Red Hook community pool, which turns out to be the better public pools in New York City. This weekend, among a couple of hundred people there, three Muslim women splashed in the Olympic-sized pool with their daughters. All three wore “burkinis,” which covered them from head to toe with sleeves which reached down to their hands. They played with the two younger girls without comment or interruption from anyone around them.

I might not even have noted this blissful little scene, but it came in the wake of a week or two of stories from France where some cities made had made the burkini illegal. The French High Court reversed the rulings, saying they were an obvious infringement on freedom and that “there is no evidence that there were any risks that public order was disturbed by people’s choice of bathing garment.” An appropriate response to that might be, “No duh.”

Nonetheless, burkini-related stories permeated our news cycle, no doubt due to our own ongoing irrational discomfit with the presence of Muslims in our society, as well as some of the more unhinged fears of “creeping sharia” in certain quarters here. So this scene at the Red Hook pool turns out to be a great metaphor for how these United States, how New York specifically, can be a model for integration and the assimilation.

Which made me think: If you want to make America “great,” Donald Trump, take a look around the city you live in. Hop on a train (or a limo, more likely) to Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx or even the Lower East Side and take a gander at the neighborhoods, at the medley of people living side by side. Take a drive down Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn towards Coney Island where you can pass through alternating Hasidic and Muslim neighborhoods. Look, I’m not suggesting New York is a perfect paragon of racial and religious harmony: There are hate crimes here, yes, against people, sadly for their religious beliefs and their sexual orientations, too. But largely, day by day, this city does provide a working model for both diversity and assimilation.

Some might argue that the sight of these women in a pool wearing their distinct and discreet garments runs counter to the idea of assimilation, but assimilation doesn’t have to mean a complete abandonment of one’s culture and beliefs. And those beliefs vary. It only takes a quick search to find advice for Muslim women that swimming in public pools “frequented by men and women, this is a great evil.” Of course, you can also find advice that wearing a hijab while swimming is an acceptable solution for women wanting to swim with their families at mixed-gender beaches. In other words, interpretations of the Muslim faith vary as much as interpretations of Christianity do. (And you can easily find Christians who don’t believe in mixed bathing in the United States, too.) You could simply reach this conclusion, though: The burkini encourages integration, as it allows Muslim women to participate in activities they otherwise couldn’t in a more secular society.

In fact, that’s what the inventor of the burkini hoped. Designer Aheda Zanetti, a Lebanese-Australian, first devised the “hijood,” which Muslim girls could wear to play sports, such as netball. Writing in The Guardian, she says, “When I invented the burkini in early 2004, it was to give women freedom, not to take it away.” The word “burkini” conceivably could reinforce misunderstandings of Muslim culture, since a burqua is quite distinct from a hijab, the former arguably being more severe than the latter, as it completely covers a woman’s face. Zanetti, however, is apparently Muslim herself, though she didn’t start wearing a veil until after she began designing these outfits with her niece in mind. When she began designing swimwear for Muslim women, she simply found the fusion of the two words “burqa” and “bikini” irresistible. Her creation has been enormously successful. Now, she says, 40 percent of burkini sales are actually to non-Muslims. And sales have spiked since the French ban. (A reader points out that Zanetti didn’t invent Islamic swimwear for women, though her specific, trademarked design has captured the public imagination.)

One might also argue the entire concept of wearing hijab or burqa is oppressive. But freedom means not just preventing women from wearing such an outfit but also allowing them to decide whether they want to wear it or not. I might hope that those young girls at the Red Hook pool grow up feeling free to abandon the hijab or the burkini. Beyond that, it’s none of my business. In contrast, those most fearful of immigrant diversity would undermine this experiment in nurturing both freedom and diversity and attempt to homogenize our culture to ensure their own feelings of safety.