Abstract
This chapter analyses the ban of the burqa and niqab. On October 11, 2010, France became the first European country to ban the full-face Islamic veil, the burqa and the niqab, in public places. These Muslim garments have attracted disproportionate attention in French politics and public deliberations. The controversy around women’s dress exemplify how during recent years, in the process of the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction process of society, the original principles of the French motto—liberté, égalité, fraternité—have been eroded. Liberty of religion is restricted. The meaning of equality has changed. National solidarity has been constricted: fraternité means supporting each other as long as the French way of life is accepted. Consequently, fraternité has been replaced with division and fragmentation. The Muslim minority in France at large feels discriminated against and marginalized. Muslim women who wear the niqab report a disturbing level of verbal abuse and sometimes physical abuse. I refute one for one the arguments that support the burqa and niqab ban, arguing that the arguments are neither just nor reasonable.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Etude relative aux possibilités juridiques d’interdiction du port du voile integral, March 25, 2010, http://recherche.conseil-etat.fr/?rub=on&q=burqa
- 3.
- 4.
Code Penal: art 4. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/id/LEGIARTI000022913250/2010-10-13
- 5.
Ibid.: art 2; see also BBC (2018b).
- 6.
- 7.
See also France: Highlights of Parliamentary Report on the Wearing of the Full Veil (BURQA), Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/law/help/france-veil.php
- 8.
See also Interview with Simone De Beauvoir (1959), YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFRTl_9CbFU
- 9.
Similar reasoning was invoked in Miriana Hebbadj v. France (2018).
- 10.
One referee noted that scholarship from Lépinard, Mazur, Revillard and others has documented French feminists’ struggles to have gender equality recognized as compatible with Republicanism, rather than being dismissed as communitarianism. This would suggest that gender equality has not always been promoted in France.
- 11.
See also Kerner (2013).
- 12.
According to BookBrowse, this proverb is of Dutch origin, and is first recorded in The Ancient Law Merchant compiled by G. De Malynes and others, and published in 1622. It was later included in a book of English proverbs collected by John Ray in 1678. https://www.bookbrowse.com/expressions/detail/index.cfm/expression_number/178/live-and-let-live#:~:text=This%20proverb%20is%20of%20Dutch,by%20John%20Ray%20in%201678.
- 13.
Evidence in support of this claim: in 2016 French police forced a woman wearing the burkini on the beach to remove some of her clothes. This led to an immediate social media campaign in which people posted photos of nuns wearing their wimples on the beach. See Campanella (2016).
- 14.
In this context, see Fleming (2017) who discusses the White supremacist nature of the French racial formation. Fleming investigates the connections and disconnections that are made between racism, slavery, and colonialism in France.
- 15.
- 16.
See also Hunter-Henin (2015), who examines two decisions by the European Court of Human Rights and the French Cour de cassation: SAS v. France (2014) a challenge to the French ban on the full-face covering in the public space, and Baby Loup (2014) in which a private nursery employee was dismissed for refusing to remove her non-face-covering Islamic veil.
- 17.
One may argue that McDonald’s is far more hazardous to health than the burqa and the niqab.
- 18.
One referee raised the possibility that legislators had criminalised Islamic dress precisely because they realised the liberatory potential of the burqa and the niqab.
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Cohen-Almagor, R. (2022). In the Name of the Republic: Banning the Burqa and the Niqab. In: The Republic, Secularism and Security. SpringerBriefs in Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94669-2_4
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