Nazish Brohi

The 1958 conflict between the colonists and colonisers was referred to as the Battle of the Veil. The asymmetry of seeing without being seen was the essence of power, and the colonial desire was articulated as that to unveil Algeria

I wonder how Michel Peyrard is reacting to the burqa ban controversy in his homeland. He was the French male journalist who entered Afghanistan wearing a burqa while the Taliban regime was in power. He was caught, because his accent gave him away. The Taliban, it seems, while averse to looking at women, were willing to listen to women in the burqa. More then can be said about France.

The debate in France points that the attire threatens the gains of enlightenment. I would assume, so would the patriarchy of secularism. It may be possible to contextualise this standoff within the limits of ability to go beyond the domination resistance dichotomy. One of France’s greatest modern philosophers, Michel Foucault, gave to the world brilliant insights on the instrumentalities of control and how they govern the body. Yet, during his visit to Iran during the Islamic Revolution, he extolled the virtues of the revolution and celebrated its “political spirituality”, with Khomeini as “the destitute exile… the man who stands up bare handed and is acclaimed by a people”. Ironically, Khomeini spearheaded a regime that best illustrated Foucault’s exposition of how power is exercised in the “capillaries” of society.

Louis Althusser, another French philosopher, spent his professional life writing against repression and violence, and then killed his wife. The French immortalised the maxim liberty, equality and fraternity, then banned personal freedoms. Any equivalence there?

The communists in France have decried the burqa as the “ambulatory prison”. Aiding collective uprisings breaking out of prisons holds a special place in the imaginary; as the storming of the Bastille heralded the French Revolution, let’s hope in this case yet another reign of terror does not follow.

But this debate is substantially different from a Western country’s exoticising and in that, miscalculating the ‘other’. It is not simply the misplaced romance that the French had, for instance, with Ahmed Shah Massoud in Afghanistan, where he was lionised, nominated by the French parliamentarians for the Nobel Peace Prize and a series of official postage stamps commissioned in his memory. To date Revolutionary Afghan Women’s Association (RAWA) remembers him as a butcher under whose guard countless women were raped and people slaughtered and Kabul city was decimated in the infighting between Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

It is significant that this debate and politics is being played out in France, and not any other random European country. It cannot be discounted as just another chapter in Orientalism or in Islamophobia. France is intimately acquainted with the burqa, the veil and in fact, has been imbued with and caught in its polysemic politics and semiotic dynamism.

President Sarkozy has recently determined the attire is “unwelcome on French soil”. But its public prominence and political instrumentality dates back to decades to when the French themselves were unwelcome on what was then French soil — Algeria — where the veil became a metaphor for colonisation.

Women used the veil for camouflage — to carry grenades, manifestoes, revolvers and mines. The colonising authorities were insistent then too for liberating women from the oppression of it, and French generals dragged Algerian women out into the street to unveil them, while acknowledging that veiled women were unseen warriors. In fact, the 1958 conflict between the colonists and colonisers was referred to as the Battle of the Veil. The asymmetry of seeing without being seen was the essence of power, and the colonial desire was articulated as that to unveil Algeria.

The civilising process, earlier a justification of colonialism, is now applied to immigrants. Strains of racism can be detected as France knows better than the naiveté of accepting pre-narrated space of the burqa as repression, as it has been in the past a symbol of liberation wars that ended the French empire.

According to the French Internal Security Service, 2,000 of the 1,500,000 adult Muslim women in France wear the burqa. Aside from the ludicrous image of intelligence officials counting naqaab-posh women, this governance of Muslim bodies stands in contrast to the attempted deregulation of Muslim money. For three years, France has been attempting to attract Islamic financial institutions. Its Sénat has held discussions on how to integrate the country in the global network of Sharia-compliant finance, started changes in its taxation laws and processes and held the Second French Forum on Islamic Finance to turn its five million strong population of Muslims into a productive asset.

I do not wear the burqa; in fact, I oppose it. Years ago, I wore it for 15 very long days to understand it. Without documenting every detail, I found it oppressive. I would celebrate any woman’s decision to cast it off. I also know that some women do not have a choice and are forced to wear it. Yet the ban logic is a short circuit: justifying forcing people not to wear a garment on the basis that they are being forced to wear it and therefore need to be forcibly freed.

Feminists have grappled with this also through the debate on pornography, which, if the burqa ban logic is consistently applied, should then be banned in France.

And beyond notions of global sisterhood and solidarity, my concern on the French burqa debate is far more immediate, and verges on panic. If I accept that the state has a right to tell women what to wear, the proclivity of the Pakistani state and its historical conjunctions would place us here at the opposite end, with the state making the burqa mandatory. Ostensibly, decrees curtailing individual liberties were part of the list of grievances against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Nazish Brohi is a social activist and an author. She can be reached at nazishbrohi@hotmail.com