A PROMINENT French imam has said he supports the introduction of a law banning women from wearing face-covering veils.
France’s National Assembly is expected to pass a resolution soon denouncing the burqa – a term commonly used in France to describe all face-covering veils – and to consider drafting a law to ban it in certain public places.
Hassen Chalghoumi, whose mosque is in the Parisian suburb of Drancy, said women who wanted to cover their faces should move to Saudi Arabia or other Muslim countries where that was the tradition.
“Yes, I am for a legal ban of the burqa, which has no place in France, a country where women have been voting since 1945,” Mr Chalghoumi told the daily Le Parisien. He said that full veils had no basis in Islam and that “the burqa is a prison for women, a tool of sexist domination and Islamist indoctrination”.
Tunisian-born Mr Chalghoumi, a naturalised French citizen, has received death threats for his promotion of dialogue with Jews. His suburb, Drancy, was the site of a notorious wartime prison camp where Jews were detained before transport to Nazi concentration camps.
Although he criticised some of the tougher measures proposed by conservative politicians, such as imposing fines or cutting off child support payments for veiled women, the imam agreed France should not grant citizenship to immigrant women who cover their faces.
“Having French nationality means wanting to take part in society, at school, at work,” he said. “But with a bit of cloth over their faces, what can these women share with us? If they want to wear the veil, they can go to a country where it’s the tradition, like Saudi Arabia.”
Mr Chalghoumi’s views are not shared by other Muslim leaders, however. Mohammed Moussaoui, the president of the French Council of Muslims, has said the debate was stigmatising Muslims and left a sense of injustice even among those who opposed face-covering.
Their interventions came as debate intensified yesterday over how President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party would seek to limit the wearing of the veil.
Mr Sarkozy last week reiterated his view that the full veil was not welcome in France “because it is contrary to our values and contrary to the ideals we have of a woman’s dignity”.
But he stopped short of calling for a legal ban in all public places, as proposed by some members of his party.
A cross-party parliamentary committee has been studying the issue for the past six months and is due to publish its report next Tuesday.
According to a leaked version quoted in yesterday’s Le Figaro, the report will endorse the drafting of legislation to prohibit the wearing of the burqa and niqab only in public buildings, including hospitals and public administration offices, as well as on public transport.
Such a law would require individuals to show their face not only on entering one of these designated spaces but for as long as they remained inside.
Anyone who breached the law would be refused the public service they were seeking, Le Figaro suggested. A parliamentary resolution condemning the wearing of the full veil is also expected.
French intelligence services estimate that up to 2,000 women in France cover their faces, of whom nearly all are young, two-thirds are French citizens and a quarter are converts.
Meanwhile, the far-right National Front is to lose €1.8 million of public funding for this year after a successful legal challenge by one of its debtors.
The party has faced financial problems since the 2007 legislative elections, when it was unable to reclaim campaign costs after winning less than 5 per cent of the vote.