In July 2010, the National Assembly of France passed an ordinance which prohibited the complete concealment of the face in public spaces. Helmets, balaclavas and masks were banned along with the face-covering veils like naqabs to help in public identification. The statute was extended to include a ban on burqas. When challenged before the European Court of Human Rights, the French government upheld its decision to impose the ban by stating that it was a part of its attempt of incorporating all people into its society, based upon a ‘certain idea of living together’.
This ‘idea’ which eventually helped turn the case in the favour of the French state was seemingly predicated upon a commitment of secular forces towards dispelling the inequality between men and women in the large community of Muslims. The burqa, as the emancipated liberal Western society perceived, was a symbol of oppression and regressive conservatism that prevented the development of women. The ban on the burqa therefore was largely appreciated, even applauded, in many liberal circles, which perceived the burqa as an instrument of coercion.
Most observers however missed an obvious point of reference: the traditional habits of the Catholic nuns, every bit as restrictive of movement and concealing as the burqa however curiously remained beyond the ambit of the concealment-ban.
The garment-ban politics has a curious link with concerns of national security as it resurfaced again in France in the wake of a slew of devastating terrorist attacks across the country. In November 2015, suicide bombers blew up parts of the Stadé de France during a Germany-France football match in the worst-ever attack on Paris. In January 2016, a man wielding a meat cleaver attacked police officers in the Goutte d’Or district, injuring one officer severely before he was overcome. In June, a police officer, his wife and secretary were killed at home and in July, an Islamist drove a truck into the Bastille Day celebrations while shooting into the crowd. As the government of Francois Hollande escalated their war efforts against jihadists and Islamic terrorism, mayors of French cities hastily started imposing bans on burqinis at swimming pools and beaches. In one stroke, burqas and burqinis, both women’s dresses, became synonymous with sympathy for and identification with jihadist ideals. As the government aggressively backed such bans, it also became apparent that terror attacks across France had some inexplicable yet incontrovertible links with the women in burqinis strolling across the beaches in Cannes and Nice.
When Aheda Zanetti first designed the burqini as a negotiation between traditionalist religious edicts and a liberal social life to allow Muslim women to swim or play along the Australian beaches, she only conceived of it as a comfortable piece of clothing. As the French Minister for Women’s Rights, Laurence Rossignol, perceived it however, the burqini is “not some new line of swimwear, it is the beach version of the burqa and it has the same logic: hide women’s bodies in order to control them better” (as reported by the French Le Parisien newspaper). Similarly, Rudy Salles, the Deputy Mayor of Nice declared in an interview that the burqini is a “provocation from Islamists” and the ban as a part of the attempt to integrate the Muslims, particularly women, into the fold of the French society.
It was self-evident that France, as a nation, was fighting fundamentalist Islam while her government was trying to eliminate all facets of Islam, which are out-of-sync with its liberal, secular domain of operation.
There have since been many reports of compliant officials humiliating burqini-clad women in public. The staff of a swimming pool recently refused to allow a woman wearing a burqini to enter the premises unless she changed into something more appropriate – like ‘proper’ swimwear. At a beach in Nice, policemen armed with tear-gas forced a woman in a burqini to disrobe while her daughter wept and other people looked on. The logic of assimilation has little space to incorporate these narratives of coercion, especially because investigations conducted into the backgrounds of these harassed women have failed to yield any proof of inclinations towards ISIS, or even matters like lack of hygiene.
Burqas and burqinis are predominantly Islamic codes of dressing, as the government correctly identifies. The ban rhetoric then is not simply retaliatory or Islamophobic, as is easily gauged, but also deeply anti-woman. When wearing the burqa and burqini are symbols of identification with and adherence to the principles of Islamic extremism, the French government is obviously exaggerating the import of the garments as religious symbols besides equating the entire Islamic faith with radical fundamentalist elements.
The highest administrative court in France recently ruled against these bans by upholding the inability of the government to prove a threat to public security.The State Council termed the ban as “a serious and manifestly illegal attack on fundamental freedoms”, which include the right to move in public and the freedom of conscience(The Guardian).
Even so, mayors in many towns have refused to withdraw the bans while Nikolas Sarkozy, the former French President, has stepped up his demands for a complete ban on burqinis.
Even though the Court’s ruling in favour of personal freedom in matters of dressing and religion is to be lauded, the politics of ban is unsettling. It is difficult to argue against the French minister’s claim that the burqinis are an expression of medieval oppression when images of jubilant Muslim women tearing their veils off in the areas freed from ISIS control surface in the media. While ISIS would mutilate and kill the women who dared oppose its edicts, the French State responds to a flouting of its own prohibitionary measures by shaming and fining its women. The insistence upon imposing a uniform code of conduct upon the women, varying by several degrees, is disturbingly similar in both the societies.
The government’s justificatory exhortation that their banning project aims at liberating women since, “[the burqini] is not just the business of those women who wear it, because it is the symbol of a political project that is hostile to diversity and women’s emancipation” (Rossignol, as quoted in the Le Parisien) is also deeply problematic.
On the one hand is the smug-faced identification of all religions (except Catholic Christianity), particularly Islam, as essentially conservative. On the other is the assumption that all women who adhere to their religious diktats in matters of dressing are essentially coerced into giving up the higher claim to liberation.
There seems to be little recognition of the independent volition of women as individuals, for whom Islam is a way of life chosen as an extension of their personal identities, much like Catholic nuns who roam the beaches around the world in their habits.
It is also implied that women are, in effect, unable to decide what to wear, on their own. By taking it upon themselves to emancipate the Muslim women by forcing them to give up their traditional attire therefore, the French government is also stepping in to decide, on behalf of these women, what the appropriate attire is.
Emancipation stands to gain little from such forcible impositions of clothing regulations. In effect, the ban ignores the element of choice invested in the women who are a part of a so-called liberal society.
The concerns of discomfort with exposing the body, unavailability of bikinis for a certain body-type or even medical necessities to cover the body are over-looked.
A secular state is supposed to accommodate the expression of religious difference while an egalitarian society is expected to allow women to exercise their freedom of choice. France seems to be walking in the opposite direction in its adoption of discriminatory policies towards women’s dressing, insisting upon homogeneity of body-exposure with no concern for the women’s personal choices in that matter.Under the dictatorship of the secular against a larger communitarian Islamic identity, the anti-feminist policies of the French state have converted dressing into statements of political opposition. As a video compiled by The Independent claims, the visibility of women in burqas has gone up since the ban and terrorist outfits have begun garnering support by citing the ban as a symbol of France’s opposition to the Muslim identity as a whole. The rules which are being touted as a war for ‘good morals’ is rapidly being complicated by presuppositions of the helplessness of women coupled with a blanket Islamophobic attitude coursing across Europe and America. While Donald Trump calls for a complete ban on the admission of Muslim immigrants into USA and former French President Nikolas Sarkozy alleges that minorities and migrants are a threat to the French national identity, xenophobia seems to have scripted a powerful return in conjunction with anti-feminist tendencies that few people in their liberalist suspicions seem to comprehend. Outlawing particular ways of dressing is merely holding women hostage which gravely endangering the claim of heterogeneity that upholds the structure of populist secular liberal politics.
A proper solution to the problem of rising terrorism would lie in the effacing of the deeply imbued hues of suspicion and mistrust between the Islamists and other communities. Seeking to regulate the Islamic practices according to a fixed notion of emancipation is derogatory and deeply humiliating for all the followers of the faith. In addition, it remains to be understood that fighting extremism by banning women’s dresses is as laughably preposterous as promoting public morality by banning porn.
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