In April of 2011, under the direction of President Nicolas Sarkozy, France became the first nation to outlaw the covering of one’s face in public. Set in motion nearly two years ago, the ban’s current legislation asserts that anyone found wearing a face covering be charged a sum of 150 Euros and requires that they remove their veil. The ban most specifically targets the traditional burqas of Afghan women, which completely shroud the wearer, but also includes the niqab, a similar veil that reveals only the eyes and is common among Islamic women in the Middle East. Careful to avoid targeting these pieces directly, the law, according to the French Constitutional Council, does not prevent the free exercise of religion in a place of worship and therefore does fall within the limits of the constitution, technically, but as Kim Willsher writes for The Guardian of London: “despite the ban's deliberately general wording, there is no doubt that its target is very specific: Muslim women.”

Sarkozy offers a myriad of validations for the Burqa Ban, as it has come to be called. On the one end, he argues that veils are impractical—impairing vision for driving and walking—and are unstable for security purposes and identification. Kenan Malik, while adamantly opposed to the ban, writes for New Humanist: “practical concerns center around worries that the burqa [or other face coverings] might make it easier for terrorists to evade security checks, and harder for people to perform certain jobs” (NH). On the far end of the spectrum, Sarkozy shifts from security to assimilation and the need to liberate the oppressed peoples of France. He claims the ban is an attempt to maintain French culture and better integrate the growing Muslim population into French society. Posed as liberator of repressed women, Sarkozy offers a multitude of defenses circling around women’s rights. According to the Huffington Post, Sarkozy says, “the veils imprison women and contradict this nation’s secular values of dignity and equality” (HP). Sarkozy’s argument here stems around the notion that burqas and niqabs are incompatible with a society that is open, liberal, and tolerant. But is revealing one’s face truly any more French? Is forcing one to show what lies beneath any more liberal than allowing one to express one’s faith and identity through ceremonial dress? Does revealing one’s face truly reflect an open, liberal, and tolerant society as Sarkozy declares France is? President Sarkozy claims the Burqa Ban arose from an attempt to maintain French culture via smooth integration and assimilation into the French society, but what is French culture actually? Is culture defined by what a nation or a government or a people want it to be? Is it defined by what they think it once was? Or is it defined by what actually is, by the citizens, by the people, all of the people, who live and work there, and what they actually think and feel and do? Is dictating and regulating French culture to be a certain way not also repressive? Is the requirement to take off the veil not equally as oppressive as the requirement in some cultures to put one on? The 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen defines liberty, one component of France’s three part motto, “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” as “being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man or woman has no bounds other than those that guarantee other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights” (Wiki). Sarkozy’s ban is a clear infringement on every French citizen’s very basic right to liberty. To assert otherwise very plainly goes against the French constitution and contradicts the secular values of the nation itself.

Sarkozy, nevertheless, maintains his position as liberator. He argues that the women in France who wear the burqa or niqab do so out of fear of their husbands. Ahmed Moor writes for Huffpost World, “many supporters of the ban argue that the veil is an expression of patriarchal control: a woman would only cover herself in such a manner if a man had intimidated her into doing so” (HP). Assuming, as Sarkozy wrongly does, that all women who wear the burka or niqab do so as a consequence of patriarchal domination, it doesn’t follow that men, like Sarkozy, ought to command women not to wear it. Is that too not an expression of patriarchy? Is that too not an imposition of masculine power? In its proposed effort to restore women’s rights, the Burqa Ban ironically restricts them. It very clearly demonstrates the oppression of one group by another more powerful party. This oppression is centered on the axis point of our freedom of expression and in that our freedom of dress.

If Sarkozy’s concern is truly one of liberating women, of maintaining those values of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” that France prides itself on, why have the garb and traditions of no other religious group or cultural sect been addressed? Why has the fact that Catholicism allows only for male priests not been attended to? Why are nuns allowed to flock the streets in their long, black robes? And what of monks? Are they, too, not deprived of their manhood for wearing robes just as women are supposedly deprived of their femininity and identity for wearing theirs? Sarkozy and his supporters argue that because their faces are revealed, the garb of nuns and monks does not threaten security the way the burqas and niqabs do, and thus is not subject to this sort of ban. That is true and may hold strong if security was Sarkozy’s only defense for the Burqa Ban, but the man says it himself: “in our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from social life, deprived of all identity. The burqas are not a religious sign, [but a] sign of subservience, a sign of debasement—I want to say it solemnly. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic” (NH). Sarkozy claims that burqas and niqabs deprive women of their identities. If that is true then so too do the traditional robes of nuns and monks. Sarkozy’s liberation, assimilation, and security defenses, especially when used in conjunction, fail to address these conflicting standards, fail to comply with the principles that the French Republic of yesterday and today was built on, and in that, fail to appropriately support and justify Sarkozy’s ban. Ken Malik writes again: “a burqa unquestionably creates a myriad of practical problems [like security]. It is, after all, a piece of clothing designed for feudal life not the modern world. Practical problems can usually be solved, however, on a case-by-case basis. Airports already require veiled women to reveal their features when passing through security. If burqas are incompatible with the needs of particular jobs, then employers can legitimately bar them. It’s one thing, however, to accept the need for specific measures or dress code, quite another to insist on a state ban” (NH). As far as security goes, the defense simply doesn’t hold up. Many feel Sarkozy’s actions are actually politically-motivated. Some say he implemented the ban under the false alleged justification of security as an attempt to gain those far right anti-immigration votes. Bearing that in mind, I feel the question, the real issue at hand, then, is not whether a burqa or niqab adheres to modern society or weather it threatens security, for, as Malik writes, those issues can be addressed on a case by case basis, but rather, the real controversy at large here is why we feel the need to assimilate and to integrate in the first place.

Why must French culture be maintained, be preserved and mandated into Sarkozy’s very particular mold. Who even has the right to define and dictate such terms? Is the French Republic not a society built on the premise of liberalism and tolerance? Do “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” the rights of the citizen as declared by France in 1789, not remain true today? France separated church and state in 1905 but “has struggled in recent years to integrate a growing Muslim population and the nuances of the Muslim faith” (HP). Why do we even have this unyielding need to assimilate—to make sure we are all the same? Where does this fear of otherness come from, and how is the need to define and shape those we encounter linked with the need to define and assert ourselves? We saw it in the Age of Exploration, we saw it for centuries and still do today in the many wars of religion, and now we see it, though more buried, in the form of this ban. Zehra Rizavi, a writer at Almuslimah, but most notably, a Muslim woman who chooses not to wear the niqab, said in an interview, “the hostility towards Muslims, in particular, Muslim women and their garb, appears ubiquitous in Europe these days and can only be described as a step backwards in Western society” (Almuslimah). When we see something that is different, something that is other, we turn our gaze, we look away, pretend it doesn’t exist because it is not like us. When we are eventually forced to confront the other, we try to subsume, to make it like us. Rather than embrace that strand of this intricately woven world, we try to deny it, unravel it, peel it away, change it so we don’t have to face it. As a result, the way we encounter, the way we interact with this world, with each other, and with ourselves, is horribly conflicted, convoluted, clouded to the point that we can no longer see clearly or think rationally about issues such as this ban.

And so we strip our citizens of their right to choose, we rob them of the liberty that is fundamentally theirs. And worse, we blindly believe we are right. The very small number of French Islamic women who wear burqas and niqabs proudly assert that they chose to do so, they feel in touch with their faith and empowered by their dress. A French Islamic woman named Oumkheyr writes in an opinion piece for CNN: “Why am I, as a Muslim woman, targeted unfairly, when there are less than 2,000 of us in France who wear the burqa? Where is my freedom of clothing or expression? France prides itself as a country that upholds the rights of man but where are my rights? Why am I not free to wear what I want” (CNN). Oumkheyr is a single woman in her thirties who has been wearing the burqa for ten years. As a teenager in France, she resisted the burqa because it made her different, but eventually sought to learn more about her Muslim faith and has been wearing the burqa ever since. She goes on to say, “if France succeeds in banning the veil on its streets, I will never take mine off…I would rather move to another country where I can worship in peace. I obey the laws of God not the laws of man” (CNN). Just as men in the Middle East should not have the right to force such dress upon women, Nikolas Sarkozy should not and does not have the right to take that choice away, to rob French women or any French citizens of the choice that is theirs. The absence of that choice, the stripping away of a woman’s dress and a citizen’s right of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” is truly less French than anything else.

Michael Privot astutely notes in the Times of India that France has now “joined Iran and Saudi Arabia in that exclusive but unenviable rare club of countries to impose a dress code in public domain” (TOI). It is clear that fear and racism are masquerading as liberalism because there is absolutely nothing liberal about targeting a community over a form of dress. Privot continues with an insightful proposition: could it be that many European governments’ insistence on “banning the veil under the false pretext of defending women’s freedom is [actually] an example of the imperialist mind frame?—the civilized ‘white man’ has a mission to liberate the colonized from their inferior and outdated traditions” (TOI). This law serves as an incontrovertible step back in history, thought, and tolerance, and to argue otherwise is not only insulting to the people the law targets but also to the citizens of humanity it claims to support. The Burqa Ban, though it stakes itself on security issues and efforts to liberate woman, is truly based on the French Republic’s inability to understand what it means to be French and further its unyielding need to find a way to define that. For in its efforts to unify a nation, the ban actually “slices [the] country’s population in two” notes Ken Malik, “one group’s unfounded fears about the other are confirmed by the prohibition, while the other resents the secular government vilifying what the group considers either its religious obligation or its cultural tradition. Further, the law only reinforces the already delicate pretext that the two identities—Muslim and European—are irreconcilable. If European policy makers are using a dress code as a social engineering tool aimed at developing a more homogenous society, then they are just further pushing an already marginalized immigrant community to the side” (NH). In terms of functionality, the burqa and niqab’s places in the modern world may be questionable, but as Malik asks, “is the medievalism of the burqa best confronted through the illiberalism of a state ban?”(NH). Very plainly the answer is no and thus the invalidity of the pro banner’s functionality defense is confirmed yet again, as is the absurdity of the notion that the cultural tradition, cultural identity, of one nation, France, rests on the oppression of another group, and that group is the small segment of French Muslim women who choose to cover their bodies and faces as sign of faith to their god. The Burqa Ban has “become a symbol of the crisis of identity that besets many Western nations. Unable to define clearly what it means to be British or French, politicians have taken the easy step of railing against symbols of ‘alienness’” (NH). If France’s identity is threatened by a piece of cloth, there are probably much larger issues at stake. If successful cultural integration depends also on that same piece of cloth, we must again infer much more deeply rooted problems for France. The burqa and veils like it represent one manifestation of the oppression of women in certain parts of the world. The burqa is not, however, the source of that oppression and that is key. Ridding the Middle East of burqas does not relieve those societies of female oppression. Likewise, nor does robbing a woman of her right to choose lead to a culture that is exclusively French, or a society freed from oppression. Banning a symbol of otherness doesn’t make the other go away. It doesn’t promote a homogenous society nor does it unify anyone. The Burqa Ban not only contradicts the liberal society France claims to be in that it robs its people of their right to choose what they wear, but it also reinforces what has become the great divide, the great wall between Muslims and non Muslims, West and East.

Most fascinating then is our omnipresent need categorize in the first place—our need to not only be part of a group, but our need to push those of other groups away. Why must there always be the “other?” Can we not all just be one rather than one against all the others? I feel the answer lies in the bed of fear. Toni Morrison’s piece “Strangers” explores this notion of fear, raising provocative questions about identity and the way we see ourselves. Morrison recounts her experience with a woman at a river place she bought. Walking in her yard, she saw a woman “sitting on the seawall at the edge of the neighbor’s garden” (117). She remembers speaking to her for sometime, recalls the old men’s hat and shoes she wore, the long fishing pole that arced so easily into the water, the feeling of welcome that consumed her. Morrison writes, “I imagine more conversations with her. I will invite her into my house for coffee, for tales, for laughter…I imagine a friendship, casual, effortless, elegant” (117). She remembers also, though, and with great hurt, the woman’s failure to show up the next day as she promised, and the day after that, and that. She recounts the confusion she felt upon learning that her neighbor had no knowledge of any such fisherwoman, nor did anyone else in or around town. And finally she recalls the very peculiar feeling of betrayal by the fisherwoman. She did not know her, after all, spoke with her for some fifteen minutes, and yet, she felt strangely violated by this woman’s absence, felt taken advantage of. Morrison says, “She had come into my space (next to it anyway—at the property line, at the edge, just at the fence, where the most interesting things always happen), and had implied promises of camaraderie…of protection and protecting. Now she is gone” (117-118). Morrison, it seems, like so many of us, projected a fantasy onto this woman, an expectation of friendship, though unwarranted. We all do it—see another and then see ourselves in them, with them, see what could be. We create utopian worlds with these strangers, ideals. Without ever knowing them we categorize them into one subset of what we believe to be our tightly bound, neatly controlled lives. When our idealized visions of friendship fail to hold up, fail to be, we are shattered, broken, feel violated, hence our willingness, then, our tendency to react in the opposite way, to make culprits of these strangers and carry that with us, to hold on to the betrayal. We are resentful and angry, hurt and alone.

This sort of resentment remains insides us and gives way for a bitterness that was not always there, a bitterness that manifests itself in new relationships, in new realms of our lives, a bitterness that makes itself known in the form of a wall, a “fence”, as Morrison calls it, a “property line” that keeps others apart, separate from us. We project that fence unto our lives, unto those around us. We feel that wall inside us and as a result, we see it in everyone around us—see it in a veil, for example, see it in anything that is other. We do this because we are afraid, afraid of being let down, of being broken. Our past experiences and the experiences of others have taught us to build our fences out of bricks not pickets. Morrison says, “isn’t that the kind of thing we fear strangers will do? Disturb. Betray. Prove they are not like us?” (118). We experience each other through the images that we see. Morrison writes: “my instant embrace of an outrageously dressed fisherwoman was due in part to an image on which my representation of her was based. I sentimentalized and appropriated her. I owned her or wanted to” (118). In truth, we fail to see what is before us because we cannot see what is within. We are so scarred, so fragile, so desperate to assert ourselves as ourselves that we fail to see what could be learned from the other, fail to see the many ways in which other is not so different from self, fail to see that “there are no strangers,” like Morrison says, “there are only versions of ourselves, many of which we have not embraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from” (119). We enclose ourselves behind a wall. We find our own hidden insecurities and fears, anxieties and issues manifested in the form of the other and in that “we deny [the other] the very personhood, the specific individuality we insist upon ourselves” (119). It seems our tendency to both fantasize and reject the unknown serves actually as an indicator of the issues in us. Our inclination to turn away and hide, to ridicule and attack is a defense mechanism, an act of fear in an attempt to remain invulnerable in this world. After all, “why would we want to close the distance when we can close the gate?” (119).

But we can’t think like that, for we each do have a space, a gated area, and in that space we are free to discover, to encounter, to wonder, to uncover who we are and what we are meant to do. Each of us is required, though, to protect the space of another. We must allow for the creation of these spaces and the changes they may face and we must forever protect them. Nationhood, then, community, is about the protection of the right to have that space, not the dictation of what goes inside it. And in return, the walls of our spaces must be malleable. In return for that security, for that protection, our gates, though not always open, must at least remain unlocked. In exchange for that protection of our space we must be open to encounter with the spaces of others, with the walls and fences beyond and within our own. In his efforts to make a nation of France, Nicolas Sarkozy has barred his gate shut, has closed off his space from others and in that denied them of theirs. Liberty can never be reached like this. Freedom cannot exist within a society built on padlocks. The unity Sarkozy strives for can only be reached if Sarkozy himself knocks down his own wall and opens his gate. Until then it is an act, until then the fear of other remains, looming always in the distances between us.

Works Cited

Rustici, Camille. “France Burqa Ban Takes Effect; Two Women Detained.” Huffington Post 04/11/2011: n. pag. Web. 05 May 2011

Wong, Curtis. “Richard Dawkins Likens Burqas to Trash Bags, Speaks of ‘Visceral Revulsion’ To Islamic Veils.” Huffington Post 08/10/2010: n. pag. Web. 10 May 2011

Fakhraie, Fatemeh. “Recent interviews on Belgium’s Burqa Ban.” Altmuslimah 05/07/2010: n. pag. Web. 8 May 2011

Horn, Heather. “France Bans Burqa, Fueling Further Debate.” Atlantic Wire 09/15/2010: n. pag. Web. 06 May 2011..

Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin, and Malik Kenan. “Should Britain ban the burqa?.” New Humanist 10/05/2010: n. pag. Web. 11 May 2011.

Anonymous. “Opinion: Why I’m proud to wear the burqa.” CNN World. CNN, 02/04/2010. Web. 10 May 2011.

Agencies. “Belgium votes to ban burqa in public.” Time of India 05/01/2010: n. pag. Web. 02 May 2011.

CNN Wire Staff. “2 arrested as France’s ban on burqas, niqabs takes effect.” CNN World 04/12/2011: n. pag. Web. 02 May 2011.

Morrison, Toni. “Strangers.” New Yorker. October, 2008: Print.

Striving the Way

Monday, October 3, 2011

lalalala time for tea

Friday, September 23, 2011

reflect tcelfer

Good morning, world.

Monday, September 19, 2011

September

Monday, June 6, 2011

Unveiling the Burqa Ban

Works Cited

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Me at 17

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Systems

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Oak and Phoenix Feathers

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Today is the day

Blog Archive