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http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905554,00.html -
TIME Photo & Article
A women
shops in a bookstore in Le Bourget near
JOEL ROBINE / AFP / Getty
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French
Move to Consider Ban on Wearing the Burqa in Public
("EarthTimes", June 19, 2009)
Paris, France - Five years after France prohibited the wearing of the Islamic
headscarf in public schools, a movement is gathering momentum here for a more
radical measure: outlawing the wearing of the burqa in public. Earlier this
month, a group of 58 law-makers introduced a parliamentary resolution calling
for the creation of a committee of inquiry into the wearing of the burqa and
niqab on French territory.
A burqa is the most concealing of all Islamic veils as it covers the entire
face and body, leaving only a mesh screen to see through. The niqab is a face
veil that sometimes leaves the eyes clear and is sometimes worn with a separate
eye veil.
Government spokesman Luc Chatel said Friday that a law against wearing the
burqa was a serious option.
"If we see, very clearly, that wearing the burqa is contrary to republican
principles, the government, the Parliament will draw all the necessary
conclusions," he told France 2 television.
Asked if that meant a law prohibiting the garment, he replied, "Why
not."
Junior Secretary for Urban Affairs Fadela Amara was more direct. "I am in
favour of prohibition" of the burqa," she told France Info radio,
describing it as "the visible and physical expression of
fundamentalists."
And Socialist parliamentarian Christian Bataille, one of the signatories to the
resolution, declared, "We have to put a stop to this phenomenon, which
reflects the growth of Moslem fundamentalism."
According to its wording, the resolution's authors believe that the wearing of
the burqa represents "an attack on the dignity of women," because
when a woman wears it "her very existence is repudiated."
The resolution further declares: "The sight of these imprisoned women is
intolerable for us when they come from Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia or
certain other Arab countries. It is totally unacceptable on the soil of the
French Republic."
The parliamentarians also affirm that "this degrading clothing"
represents both a wife's "submissission to her spouse, to the men of the
family" and "a negation of her citizenship."
The controversy over the 2004 law abolishing headscarves in French public
schools has more or less faded away. But on June 6, at a joint press conference
by US President Barack Obama and his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, it
led to an awkward moment.
Asked how he felt about the French law, Obama said, "I won't take
responsibility for how other countries are going to approach this. I will tell
you that in the US, our basic attitude is that we are not going to tell people
what to wear."
A law that bans the wearing of religious clothing in public is going to be far
more controversial.
In answering Obama on June 6, Sarkozy said that women could wear the headscarf
in public "provided that's a decision she made freely and had not been
forced on her by her family or entourage."
But such a constraint is always difficult to prove, especially if the women
maintain that they wear the clothing of their own free will.
A 22-year-old woman named Sonia, who began wearing the burqa in January, told
the daily Le Parisien, "Before, I didn't even wear a headscarf. I made my
A-levels and I worked a bit. And then I truly encountered religion... I can not
imagine dressing otherwise. It is my choice alone."
Although no data are available on the number of women living in France who wear
the garment, politicians are reacting now because the custom appears to be
spreading, particularly among young women like Sonia, who live in poor suburban
ghetto neighbourhoods.
But the movement against the wearing of the burqa has been slowly gathering
force in France.
In June 2008, the Council of State - the country's highest administrative court
- refused to grant French citizenship to a Moroccan woman wearing a burqa,
because it went against "the values of a democratic society and the principle
of equality of the sexes."
In October of last year, France's anti-discrimination authority HALDE upheld
the exclusion of a woman wearing the burqa from a French-language course
required for naturalization.
The justification for this decision was that it was necessary for "the
instructor to observe the faces of the pupils in order to see their expressions
while forming the words."
In September, a law-maker from the ruling UMP party, Jacques Myard, tabled a
bill outlawing the burqa. No action has yet been taken on it.
This may also be the fate of the resolution, because it is one thing to
legislate what pupils may wear in public schools and quite another matter to
ordain what an adult can wear in the streets.
"Everyone is free in the streets," Immigration Minister Eric Besso
cautioned. "To interfere with this balance seems risky to me."
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