From the Independent:
The parliamentary leader of the ruling French party is to put forward a draft law within two weeks to ban the full-body veil from French streets and all other public places.
Extreme? Right-wing? The article continues:
Some senior figures on the left have supported the idea of a legal ban. So has Fadela Amara, a left-wing campaigner for the rights of Muslim women who entered Mr Sarkozy’s government in 2007 as minister for urban development.
Most moderate Islamic leaders have sharply criticised the burqa but suggested that it was such a limited phenomenon in France that legislation was unnecessary and might alienate moderate Muslims.
The burqa, per se, is an Afghan tradition allowing a woman only a narrow gauze-covered eye-opening. It is little found in France. The Arab equivalent, the niqab, which has a narrow opening at eye-level, is only slightly more common.
A study by the French internal security services last year suggested that the total number of women wearing both types of full-body veil in France was around 2,000 — out of a total French population of adult, Muslim women of about 1,500,000.
Two questions immediately come to mind:
1) In the middle of the worst economic crisis in living memory, how can France’s ruling conservative party justify focusing its legislative energies on banning an item of clothing worn by 0.1 per cent of the French population of adult Muslim women (or 0.003 per cent of the French population as a whole)?
2) Why did the “French internal security services” commission a study on the burqa/niqab? Is it now deemed to be a national security risk? Do French intelligence agencies have nothing better to do with their time? No other threats to deal with, apart from 2,000 Muslim women with covered faces?
Then there is the matter of the clothing itself and distinguishing between the various types. I’m no fan of the burqa or the niqab myself, and have yet to be convinced of the Islamic legal reasoning behind either garment, but I do recognise the difference between the burqa and the niqab, on the one hand, and the hijab on the other.
Does Yasmin Alibhai-Brown? In her short comment piece on the Indie‘s news story, and in support of the French ban, she writes:
The use of the burqa has grown like a virus across the continent. Children as young as four are now dressed in hijab.
I like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I admire her columns and the clarity and passion of her arguments, even if I don’t always agree with her. But if even she cannot distinguish between the burqa and the hijab, two very different garments, how then can she criticise journalists and politicians, on other occasions, for misunderstanding Islam and Muslims?
Yasmin says she endorses the French approach:
I don’t like the way the French state or its right-wing parties operate but sometimes there are some good unintended consequences.
I would ask her: isn’t this exactly what pro-war liberal lefties said when they got into bed with George W Bush over the Iraq war and the removal of Saddam? And we all know how that turned out . . .
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