Sikander Amani

A state flirts dangerously with authoritarianism once it starts dictating how women should be dressed. One might add that it is perhaps high time lawmakers of all countries, Muslim countries and France alike, stop obsessing about women’s clothing and women’s bodies

It is no small irony to see women in burqa suddenly come under the spotlight. After months of auditions, a French parliamentary commission recommended on January 26 adopting a law barring women who wear the full veil (naqab or burqa) from using public services, including schools, hospitals and public transportation. Since then, such women, who admittedly shy from the public sphere, have become the centre of it, and any self-respecting French media outlet is scouring the country in search for fully veiled women to interview — quite a feat indeed, given that no more than an estimated 1,900 women, of a total population of 65 million, cover themselves fully. In the wake of the Swiss referendum on minarets, it becomes difficult not to feel an increasing unease, or even an intolerance, about religion in Europe, skillfully (or less skillfully) manipulated for reasons of political opportunism by the various governments in place — singularly so in Mr Sarkozy’s France. It is no less tempting to manipulate the debate the other way around, view it as a case of discrimination targeting Muslims, or worse, frame it in over-simplistic Huntingtonian terms of “Islam vs. the West”. No doubt the extreme right in France or in Europe is happy to present it in such terms as well.

A ban on full veils would, no doubt, be deeply unsettling, on several grounds. First of all, as stated, only an infinitesimal minority of women in France (and a tiny minority of Muslim women) wears a full body veil. The claim that the fundamental values of the French identity are jeopardised by the practice thus sounds rather hollow: is French identity so vulnerable that a mere 1,900 people could threaten it by their mere attire? In which case, not only would the burqa ban not solve the issue, but it would in effect act as a cover-up, a pretext, to avoid a deeper reflection on a changing national identity. Also, one can only regard such a tailor-made law with extreme diffidence: a law based on a single-group issue runs a high risk of being discriminatory, just as it distorts the spirit of lawmaking, which should be general in scope and universal in principle. The content of the law would be discriminatory, and its form, a debasement of lawmaking itself. Not to add that it comes in a context of frantic legislating by the Sarkozy administration, which has come under severe criticism (and considerable mockery) for its spastic yet inefficient proclivity to adopt laws about basically anything under the sun. Most importantly, of course, is the contradiction between the proposed ban and individual freedom: if a state takes individual rights seriously, as France claims to do, then it is extremely problematic to ban a particular outfit, however disturbing one might find it. A state flirts dangerously with authoritarianism once it starts dictating how women should be dressed. One might add that it is perhaps high time lawmakers of all countries, Muslim countries and France alike, stop obsessing about women’s clothing and women’s bodies. Amazing as it may appear to some, women are free and rational too.

It is noteworthy in this regard that most law professors and legal specialists auditioned by the parliamentary commission concurred that it would be very tricky, under French law, to find a suitable legal foundation for the ban, in light of the constitutional protections of individual liberty. Little solace, alas, in this: as soon as they were made aware of the problem, the members of the august commission openly discussed the possibilities of circumventing this most troublesome obstacle of individual rights. A most surreal debate ensued (in which, sadly, dissident voices were painfully rare): instead of reflecting on the reasons why the legislator had adopted such strong guarantees for individual rights in the first place (hmm, might it have been to prevent this type of senseless legislation?), it all centred on the best legal strategy to thwart these very guarantees.

The irony is compounded by the claim, made by the commission, that the moral grounding of the proposed ban is women’s freedom; in the minds of the members, wearing a burqa must necessarily have been imposed by brothers, husbands, fathers. Although the full body veil certainly is no great hallmark of women’s liberation, banning it in the name of freedom is an oxymoron at best, a scandal at worst. Then again, France is Rousseau’s country, who famously stated that the citizen may “be forced to be free”. A ban on the burqa would be a grotesque pastiche of the great Rousseau’s polity.

To be fair, some of the opponents of the law make it equally thorny to feel comfortable siding with them. It is no small irony to see some of the most reactionary, anti-liberal and anti-feminist forces in French society suddenly spring up in defence of women’s individual rights. The contradiction in their discourse reeks of political opportunism and nauseating hypocrisy: human rights are a Western concept, not adapted to Islam, they claim, yet all of a sudden they are their staunchest defenders. Their instrumentalisation of human rights is as little palatable as the patronising tone of the authorities. An imam in the north of Paris, Hassen Chalghoumi, known for his good relationship with other religious communities in France, notably the Jewish community, received death threats in his mosque a week ago after he came out against the naqab and in favour of the ban. Some 80-odd fundamentalists showed up in his mosque during the Friday prayer, took over the microphone, insulted the Jewish community and the French republic, then directly threatened the imam after having accused him of apostasy. Difficult indeed to feel any affinity with such fascist thugs.

It is also worth noting that many of the critics of the proposed ban take a wrong aim when they attack France for its illiberalism — since France never claimed to be liberal. Indeed, contrary to the oft-repeated and deliberately simplistic view of the “West” as a unitary, monolithic entity, there are some essential distinctions between the political cultures and underlying philosophies of its various nation-states. If political liberalism, based on civil liberties as the condition of legitimacy of the polity, constitutes the essence of English-speaking countries, France is founded on a different set of principles, encapsulated by the term Republicanism (unrelated to the US political party of the same name): freedom does not lie in the exercise of individual rights as much as in the political participation in the formation of the law. As legislating citizen and member of the public sphere, the individual reaches “true” freedom. This does not mean that individual rights are not important, simply that they are not the fundamental element of citizenship: political rights are considered far more crucial than civil liberties. This partly explains why a burqa ban does not raise the same outcry about trespassing individual rights in France as it would, say, in the UK or in the US: a veiled woman is understood to detract from the public sphere, to willingly refuse to engage with it; in other words, she is understood as a person whose existence is limited to the private sphere, who lives solely as a private person. And this is the part which is considered at odds with the French identity: not the dress in itself, but the underlying desire to exist exclusively in the private realm (which is also why the burqa ban differs fundamentally from the ban of headgear in schools, to which the full-body veil ban is often compared), whereas the French republic is based on the premise that it is only as a public citizen that you acquire genuine liberty. And indeed, there is little doubt that the full body veil is an obstacle to authentic public community, insofar as it is precisely designed as a separation, as a refusal of communication.

Ultimately, it might not be a clash of civilisations as much as a clash of interpretations. While the French parliamentary mission is animated by the idea that women who wear the full body veil must be dominated, oppressed and helpless, it seems that many women in France who wear it do it out of a free, uncoerced choice — often against the wish of their family and environment. So much so that they also defeat another misconception, that of traditionalists: women in France who wear the burqa have done so out of an individual, often rebellious motivation — and based, in any event, on a very “Western”, individualist concept of the self. In these ambiguous times, and in this muddled polemic, what is required above all is a fresh look, new concepts, and an innovative perspective, on both the meaning of the polity, as on women.

The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at sikander.amani@gmail.com