OSTENSIBLY IT is all about defending “women’s dignity”. Or that is what is being suggested by the French Government’s spokesman and supporters of President Sarkozy’s decision to ban the wearing of the full Islamic veil, the niqab. In truth, however, the extension of what was originally to be a ban simply in public institutions and transport has to do with much more than a newly discovered and most improbable feminism in the ranks of his Gaullist UMP.
Manifest here under the guise of “protecting Republican values” is an ugly combination of traditional dogmatic secularism, forced integration and an unacknowledged pandering to Islamophobia. And the security rationale, based on the idea that if you can’t see their faces, terrorists may circulate freely, is laughable.
Mr Sarkozy has decided to join Belgium which is also enacting a similar measure criminalising being in a public place with one’s face partially or wholly concealed in a way that would make identification impossible, a measure already in force in 20 out of 589 municipalities in Belgium.
But the French president, who is languishing in the polls, is being deeply cynical. He knows the measure, however popular, is contrary to French constitutional law and the law of both the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the EU, and that inevitably it will be struck down. The French council of state and ombudsman have warned as much, and in February the ECHR found that Turkey had violated the rights of members of a religious group convicted in 1997 of breaking a law against wearing religious clothing in public. Prime minister, François Fillon, has implicitly admitted as much: “We’re ready to take the legal risks because we think the game is worth the candle.”
In reality only some 2,000 Muslim women in France wear the full niqab and the “problem” appears no more substantial in Belgium where last year some 29 women were stopped in the street for wearing it. And while many believe that the wearing of the veil is demeaning to women, and some argue there is evidence of compulsion within families, to force women to relinquish it so widely is likely to drive more – wearers or not – into the ranks of extremist Islam.
At the same time, evidenced by the migration preferences of Muslims, Europe is not a cold, inhospitable place. But, it is uncomfortable with their insistence on the right to cultural practices more appropriate in the Arab world which they have chosen to leave.