 | There’s a lot in the papers today, (Times, Daily Express, Daily Mail) regarding the speech
of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday in which he pledged
his support for a parliamentary commission to debate a possible ban on
the wearing of the burqa/niqab in France. |
Sarkozy said that the burqa represents the “debasement of women”.
He went on:
“In our country we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity.”
His comments reflect the attitudes that informed the proceedings and outcome of the Stasi Commission and its recommendation on the banning of headscarves (conspicuous religious symbols) in French schools.
The Commission, in its choice of females and others testifying to the symbolism and effects of the headscarf on Muslim identity and female participation in French society, echoed much the same. Feminists and others that gave evidence to the Commission argued against the headscarf portraying it as a symbol of female subjugation, of submission to patriarchal authority, and as restrictive to the movement of women in the private and public spheres.
The irony of course was that while the views of critics of the headscarf were amplified and magnified in the Commission and in public debate, the subjects themselves, headscarf wearing women, were largely absent.
Few were willing to hear the voices of headscarved women decrying popular imagery of them as ‘deprived of identity’, or lacking in autonomy. And while feminists and others were keen to advance their cause as one of liberating ‘subjugated women’, their own subjugation of these same women, forcing them to conform to dress codes of another’s choosing, didn’t seem to register on liberty’s radar.
Sarkozy said:
“The burkha is not a religious sign. It is a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement”.
Which begs the question, who determines the meaning of religious garb and symbols, state authorities or members of the religious community? Is the President of the Fifth French Republic, or any other official for that matter, the best person to inform Muslims, Christians or others, what their religious dress means?
President Obama in his Cairo address squared off those who claim to advance liberty by curtailing the liberty of Muslim women to choose their dress. Obama said, ‘We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism’.
To which Sarkozy is said to have responded:
'It is not a problem that young girls may choose to wear a veil or a headscarf as long as they have actually chosen to do so, as opposed to this being imposed upon them, be it by their families or by their environment.'
What then does the French president have to say of an ‘environment’ that refuses women the right to choose, or which interprets their choice as 'debasing' and 'subservient'?
A strange form of liberty this, that puts the state in the position of deciding when and how a Muslim woman is made free.
< Click below to see this article on the Engage Website >
http://www.iengage.org.uk/home/1-news/402-french-president-sarkozy-calls-for-the-banning-of-the-niqab-and-burqa
TIME
