Saturday, October 31, 2009

The burqa debate continues in France

Several months ago a number of French députés called on Sarkozy’s government to launch a parliamentary enquiry, with a goal to determine the place, if any, that the burqa has in French society. Not so long earlier a Moroccan-born female had been denied French citizenship, on the basis that wearing the head-to-toe all-encompassing Islamic garment put her at severe odds with the values of a fiercely secular society.

The debate on the burqa continues to fan public outcry in the French republic, as the parliamentary enquiry around a subject that hits the core of the French republic: secularism, or laïcité.

France outlawed the wearing of any conspicuous item in the public schooling system in 2004. Education should be secular, and as atheists and humanists have already stated, there is simply no such thing as a Muslim child, a Christian toddler or a Jewish teenager.

Children are indoctrinated first by their parents, and later by official religious teaching. The argument runs: I am a child of Christian parents and I am too young to have made any decision governing my convictions. The argument is without flaw and the lawmakers were judicious in banning religious garment and symbols from the school ground.

Nevertheless, if we put aside woman who are coerced into donning the burqa, which present an altogether alternate set of issues, what about the woman who chooses to do so? Is the French republic so scared of a backwards-looking minority sect that it would introduce legislation to ban it altogether?

There is no place for fear and ignorance in the legislation of the world’s greatest democracies. Prohibition rarely works.

Still, France does have a minority of Salafists, those who follows the pure ways of the earliest descendants of Mohammed. Salafism is the uglier face of ‘them and us’ religion; reactionary, exclusivist and degrading to women. Sects are by name unable to integrate and indeed reject society as a whole. Salafism equates with obscurantism and its spread should be arduously watched for by other nations.

France should not ban the burqa. It should simply take a step back and think about who it is letting into the country. The country with Europe’s largest population of Muslims should acknowledge clearly that the majority of that population are peaceable and originating from northern Africa, where the burqa is equally seen as a sectarian anachronism.

Banning the burqa puts all Muslims in the same pot, when they are clearly as varied as any other faith.

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