The
Burqa Challenge to Europe
by Paul Cliteur and Machteld Zee
The
burqa is a recent phenomenon in the West, virtually unseen before the year
2000, but, some ten years later, donned by approximately 1,900 women in France.
The practice is controversial, not only due to its extreme nature but also
because some Muslims question whether it is truly Islamic. The four Sunni
schools of jurisprudence differ regarding the obligation for women to cover
their face, with the Hanbali school, prevalent in Saudi Arabia, the strictest
observer. For their part, Shiite Muslims do not believe that the face of a
Muslim woman is a part of the body that needs to be covered in public although
Iran’s current theocratic rulers insist that women wear the chador, a cloak
that leaves the face open, in public.
In
Turkey, Lebanon, Tunisia, Malaysia, and before the civil war, in Syria, the
face veil has been subjected to bans, mostly in public and educational
institutions, as it is con- sidered to run counter to national values and
traditions. Yet
while women in Muslim- majority countries had been progressively un-veiling for
most of the twentieth century, this practice has reversed due to the Islamist
resurgence of the last four decades.
It
is in the West that the most outspoken Muslim critics of full-face veiling are
active. Sihem Habchi, for example, president of the French feminist movement Ni putes ni
soumises (Neither
whores nor submissives) has stated passionately and categorically: “As a woman, as a
French citizen, and as a Muslim woman, I demand that the Republic protect me
from the vilest fanaticism that is infecting our public space.” These
sentiments were echoed by French Muslim women’s rights activist Fadela Amara
who wrote that it “is a mistake to see the veil as only a religious issue. We
must remember that it is first of all a tool of oppression, alienation,
discrimination, and an instrument of men’s power over women. It is not an
accident that men do not wear the veil.” Thus in the eyes of burqa opponents,
the state must fulfil its positive obligation to protect human rights: Women
should be made safe from severe pressure to cover.
At the same time, women,
including many converts, voluntarily choose to cover their faces. When the
French burqa prohibition came into force on April 11, 2011, S.A.S. found
herself in a dilemma: Either obey the ban and compromise her personal beliefs,
or ignore it and risk criminal charges in the form of a €150 fine. Instead, she
decided to put her faith in Strasbourg.
“Vivre Ensemble”
When
the ECHR rendered its decision, it essentially echoed the reasoning found in
the “Gérin report”
of 2010. This derived from a June
2009 decision by the
conference of presidents of the French National Assembly, which established a
parliamentary commission comprising members from various parties and presided
over by the left-wing politician André Gérin, with the task
of drafting a
report on “the wearing of
the full-face veil on national territory.” In January
2010, the commission published its findings on the topic based on interviews
with more than two hundred witnesses and experts.
The
report criticized the practice as being “at odds with the values of the
Republic,” as expressed in the maxim “liberté, egalité, et
fraternité”
(liberty, equality, and fraternity), and of violating the fundamental French
value of laïcité or
secularism. Full-
face veiling, it argued, infringed on the principle of liberty by being a
symbol of subservience that negated both principles of gender equality and the
equal dignity of human beings. Moreover, by setting up a significant barrier to
contact with others, this practice was a denial of fraternity and a flagrant
infringement of the French principle of living together (le vivre ensemble).
An explanatory memorandum
accompanying the burqa ban bill states that the “voluntary and systematic
concealment of the face is problematic because it is quite simply incompatible
with the fundamental requirements of ‘living together’ in French society” and
that the “systematic concealment of the face in public places, contrary to the
ideal of fraternity ... falls short of the minimum requirement of civility that
is necessary for social interaction.” Hiding one’s face in general—not just by means of
a burqa—therefore, is at odds with the “respect for the minimum requirements of
life in society,” and banning the full veil can be linked to the legitimate aim
of the “protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”
Note:
Source: Middle East
Quarterly, Spring 2018 pp. 1-8
Authors:
Paul Cliteur is professor of jurisprudence at
the University of Leiden and visiting professor of philosophical anthropology
at the University of Ghent. His book The Secular Outlook (Wiley-Blackwell,
2010) is in translation as La visione laica del mondo (Nessun Dogma, 2014).
Machteld Zee is a political scientist and
legal scholar. She holds a Ph.D. in jurisprudence from the University of
Leiden. Her most recent book is Choosing Sharia? Multiculturalism, Islamic
Fundamentalism and Sharia Councils (Eleven International
Publishing, 2016).
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