A re-emergence of the burka row has followed Obama's comments on Islamic dress, writes LARA MARLOWEin Paris
MERE COINCIDENCE? Three days after President Barack Obama told a press conference in France, “In the United States, our basic attitude is that we’re not going to tell people what to wear,” French deputies requested a parliamentary commission on the burka and niqab, Islamic veils that cover the entire body.
French officialdom felt insulted by a sentence in Obama’s speech in Cairo, before he came to Normandy: “It is important for western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practising religion as they see fit – for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear.” In 2004 France banned Muslim headscarves in schools and public buildings.
Perhaps dazzled by Obama’s presence, President Nicolas Sarkozy seemed to lose the plot, saying: “I totally agree with what President Obama said, including on headscarves and veils . . . In France, any young girl who wishes to wear a veil or headscarf may do so; it’s her free choice to do so.”
Sarkozy admitted France’s status as a secular state dictated that civil servants abstain from showing signs of religious belief, and added that young girls wearing a veil or headscarf was “not a problem as long as they have actually chosen to do so”.
The French president forgot to mention the ban in schools, which has driven an unknown number of Muslims girls to home-schooling, or private Muslim or Catholic establishments. The 2004 law fanned racial and religious tensions that led to weeks of rioting the following year.
The parliamentary initiative, just after the Obama-Sarkozy exchange on the veil, was in a sense France’s response to Obama. France has the biggest Muslim population in the EU – at least five million – and the deputies sought to “define recommendations to end the sectarian drift contrary to our principles . . .”
In the two weeks since, the issue has snowballed, again making headlines, prompting Sarkozy to severely condemn the burka and niqab on Monday, and leading to the creation of a parliamentary “information mission” (one step short of the commission of inquiry the deputies requested) on Tuesday.
Thirty-two members of the National Assembly have been entrusted with a six-month mission to uncover the truth about the Voile Intégral, as the burka and niqab are known. They may well recommend a legal ban.
Draft law No 1121, presented by right-wing deputy Jacques Myard, has been around since September, but has not yet come to a vote in the National Assembly.
Myard cites as legal precedent the June 2008 decision by the Council of State to refuse French nationality to a Moroccan woman married to a Frenchman, and who is also the mother of French children, because she wears the niqab. Her “radical practice of her religion incompatible with the essential values of the French community, and notably with the principle of the equality of the sexes”, the council ruled.
The woman is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.
Myard’s draft law says no religious reason may be invoked for hiding one’s face in public, and prescribes two months in prison and a €15,000 fine for a first offence, and one year in prison and a €30,000 fine for later offences. Any foreigner who violates the law, or any foreigner who incites others to do so, could be expelled from the country.
Veiling has repeatedly inflamed French public discourse over the past two decades, because it is seen as a threat to the sacred cow of secularism – perceived as the glue of civil harmony. Editorialist Claude Askolovitch observed this week that while the rest of the world watched the Berlin Wall fall in 1989, France was obsessing about headscarves in schools.
Yesterday’s Le Monde devoted a page to Faiza S, the Moroccan woman who was refused French nationality because of her niqab. She lives in a housing project in the Paris banlieue, and has no problems as long as she stays in her neighbourhood. “It’s only outside that people call me Zorro or ghost,” Faiza S said. “When I see a child who is frightened by my clothing, I lift my veil and I tell him I’m a mama like any other.”
Faiza’s husband Karim, raised issues often heard from Muslims: “We’re shocked by things too: gay men living openly together, couples that don’t get married, women half naked in the street.”
