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http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/europe/53533-141206-to-wear-or-not-to-wear

Also via Human Rights without Frontiers

 

GERMANY, WITH SECOND LARGEST MUSLIM POPULATION IN EUROPE, GRAPPLES WITH CALLS FOR BURQA BAN

 

A woman wearing a burqa ( Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP )

 

Julia Klöckner, vice-chairman of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU), stirred a public storm in Germany this week when she called for a ban of the full body Muslim veil in public spaces. "Burqas don’t stand for religious diversity," she told German media, "but for a degrading image of women." The politician referred to the German constitution, emphasizing that women and men are equal, and described the act of looking at other people’s faces as a key feature of an open society.

AFP

AFP"Muslim women wearing various type of Islamic veils, a hijab (top L), a niqab (top R) a tchador (bottom L) and a burqa"

 

German politicians have repeatedly called for a ban on the burqa in the past months, following a ruling by the European Court of Justice which held up the ban instituted in France. This is no surprise given that Germany has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe after France.

The vice-president of the Social Democratic Party, Axel Schäfer, has also claimed that the burqa "does not belong in our culture." Others, both from the left and the right, followed and in February 2011, the west-central state of Hesse became the first in Germany to ban the wearing of burqa in public places.

In Frankfurt, a city of 700,000 residents, including a large Muslim population, the issue has split Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU Party and the Greens within the ruling coalition. Currently, staff in the city administration are not allowed to wear veils at work.

A burqa is a full body veil, which leaves open only a tiny slash for its female wearer’s eyes. It is most common in Muslim countries like Afghanistan and goes back to a strict interpretation of the Koran. But burqas aren't solely Islamic. Some years ago, a fringe group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women near Jerusalem began wearing similar full-body-veils as a symbol of piety.

In France, where Muslims make up about eight percent of the population, many of them being first- and second-generation immigrants from France's former colonies, the ban became state law in 2010. Belgium and parts of Switzerland followed the French model. Earlier this year, the European Council for Human Rights (ECHR) affirmed the decision. "The question of accepting or not that the full veil can be worn in public is a society's choice," it ruled, explicitly declaring the French ban to be legally justified.

AFP/ Torsten BLACKWOOD

AFP/ Torsten BLACKWOOD"Men and women dressed in burqas from the group ‘Faceless’ call for the banning of the conservative Muslim apparel throughout Australia during a rally in Sydney on April 2, 2012. The group says the complete covering of a woman’s face leads to cultural isol"

 

This ongoing European debate highlights tensions between those who claim to defend women's rights not to cover their faces and others concerned about growing racism in Western Europe – racism disguised as an enlightened critique of religion.

In fact, anti-Islamic sentiments have had a notable revival in the recent months, especially in Germany. Since the increased media attention to the Islamic State organization and its recruitment of Europeans, racist undertones are unmistakable.

In the East German city of Dresden, up to 5,500 people of the "Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident," many of them neo-Nazis, marched against the alleged "Islamization" of Europe last week. The fact that Klöckner called for the burqa ban now is no coincidence, argues German journalist Christian Bangel.

In an article for ZEIT-Online he accused her of pandering to voters in the light of the rise of the German AfD-party, whose position on immigrant integration is farther to the right of the CDU. In Neukölln, a Berlin district with up to 20 percent Muslim population, one can frequently see burqas on the streets. The area is said to be a proof of the supposed unwillingness of Muslims to integrate into German society. "How does this fit with the fact that Neukölln is today seen as one of the most desirable places to live in by Israelis, Americans and Europeans?" asks Bangel.

The danger that some advocates of the burqa ban have repeatedly pointed to – that women do not really have a free choice on the matter given their surroundings – seems evident. However, it is similarly unclear if forbidding women to wear the full body veil would emancipate them from their husbands - or rather lock them up at home. In a contribution on the subject in the Frankfurter Rundschau , German publicist Hilal Sezgin suggested that instead of prohibiting women from wearing a certain garment, they should be provided with translators in order to increase their scope in society.

Dr. Meral Avci, who researches international relations, migration and gender at the University of Aaachen, questions the status of the burqa as a symbol of religious freedom. "Women's rights and the wearing of a burqa pose a contradiction," she comments. "The Koran determines a hierarchic precedence of the man in front of the woman. The burqa represents this hierarchy that clashes with our fundamental values. In Germany it is the person itself that matters. I think it is just natural that we want to be able look into a person's face", she told i24news.