The Burqa Challenge to Europe

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).