only about 2000 women in france wear niqab, many of them french converts

Hannah Bell

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sun Aug-08-10 05:00 AM
Original message

only about 2000 women in france wear niqab, many of them french converts

Edited on Sun Aug-08-10 05:04 AM by Hannah Bell

Thus putting the lie to the ideas that the ban is about public safety, or about oppressed women in fear of their male relatives.

The lower house of the French parliament passed a law on Tuesday which, according to the interior ministry, would directly affect fewer than 2,000 people out of a population of 64 million...

Set to one side legal doubts about whether this law is compatible with guarantees of religious freedom and equality, as interpreted by France's constitutional council. In principle � and, indeed, in the forum of the European court of human rights � the twin test must be whether the measure, first, has a legitimate aim (public security or promotion of gender equality, perhaps) and, second, whether it shows proportionality. Is the measure proportionate to the aim being achieved?

It makes the dress illegal on the grounds that it constitutes a challenge to public order � making it harder for police to conduct identity checks. All this is chaff, designed to deflect public opinion from confronting the real issues: what is it about the invisibility of a woman's face that is so challenging to western European identity? What is so important about the niqab that gives the state the right to intervene? Users of the metro or underground learn instinctively to avoid looking each other in the eye. It is regarded as an intrusion. And yet no state legislature would think about passing a law that bans the wearing of sunglasses indoors on the grounds that it poses a threat to national security.

So what is it about the niqab, worn by so few, that threatens so many? And what values, exactly, are being protected? One of the achievements of the European Enlightenment was to liberate the public space as a forum where different cultural identities could interact and negotiate free from the censure of the church... From now on if you see niqab in France, you are encouraged to believe by the state that it because the wearer has something to hide. There could be a bomb lurking underneath. Is this message of fear going to advance the harmony and understanding already in short supply in a multifaith society where 5 million citizens are Muslim?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/15/france-niqab-veil-ban-law

Veiled threats: row over Islamic dress opens bitter divisions in France

Once a fervent Catholic, Winterstein converted to Islam at 18. Six months ago she began wearing a loose, floor-length black jilbab, showing only her expertly made-up face from eyebrows to chin. She now wants to add the final piece, and wear full niqab, covering her face and leaving just her eyes visible. "But this week, after Sarkozy announced that full veils weren't welcome in France, things have got really difficult," she said... "It's difficult in this country, there's a certain mood in the air. I don't feel comfortable walking around."

This week, France plunged into another bitterly divisive national debate on Muslim women's clothing, reopening questions on how the country with western Europe's biggest Muslim community integrates Islam into its secular republic... Yet the actual numbers of niqab wearers in France appears to be so small that TV news crews have struggled to find individuals to film. Muslim groups estimate that there are perhaps only a few hundred women fully covering themselves out of a Muslim population of over 5 million � often young French women, many of them converts.

Horia Demiati, 30, a French financier who wears a standard headscarf with her business suits, said: "I really fear an increase in hatred." She recently won a discrimination case after she and her family, including a six-month baby, were refused access to a rural holiday apartment they had booked in the Vosges. The woman who refused them argued that she was a secular feminist and didn't want to see the headscarf, "an instrument of women's submission and oppression", in her establishment...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/26/sarkozy-france-paris-islamic-veils

That's some interesting "feminism" there.