France Ponders Ban on Burqas

This is the kind of story that has me basically torn between hating a custom, but also respecting the right of people to adopt that custom:

From CNN:

The French National Assembly announced Tuesday the creation of an inquiry into whether women in France should be allowed to wear the burka, one day after President Nicolas Sarkozy controversially told lawmakers that the traditional Muslim garment was "not welcome" in France.

A cross-party panel of 32 lawmakers will investigate whether the traditional Muslim garment poses a threat to the secular nature of the French constitution. They are due to report back with their recommendations in six months.

Last week 57 lawmakers -- led by communist legislator Andre Gerin -- signed a petition calling for a study into the feasibility of legislation to ban the burka in public places.

On Monday Sarkozy declared in a keynote parliamentary address that the burka, which covers women from head to toe, is "not welcome" in France.

"The problem of the burka is not a religious problem. This is an issue of a woman's freedom and dignity. This is not a religious symbol. It is a sign of subservience; it is a sign of lowering. I want to say solemnly, the burka is not welcome in France," Sarkozy told lawmakers.

I have highlighted what President Sarkozy said about the burqa because this is pretty much how I feel about the head-to-toe concealment of women as well. It is possible to be modest without being invisible, or to wear one's faith in action by word and deed without wearing it all over one's body. Although the burqa is treated as traditional women's garb, it is not universal for Muslim women, and has not even been historically--it is a very strict adaptation of the Koranic requirement for a woman to dress modestly. My impression of the wearing of such a costume is that it takes away from the visual identity of the individual woman underneath, as if nullifying her individuality, and I resent that. This may be a particularly western bias (although I doubt it), but I think we appreciate a person's point of view better when we can read his or her body language and see the facial expressions.

Also, I don't care for what the burqa implies about the visual impact of a woman's body or face, or hair. It places the "blame" on women for male arousal. Arousal isn't about "blame"--it's a fact of life. What matters is self-control and personal conduct. It is strange for me, as a person who has been exposed to an awful lot of nudity, to read about someone being inflamed to passion by the sight of....hair. It reminds me of Victorian poets going on about necks and ankles in an age when western women wore a good deal more than we do now. What is hidden is fetishized and ascribed a kind of power--but it needn't be that way, and I think it shouldn't.

At the same time, I can appreciate that it might be a woman's choice to reflect her religion by wearing the burqa, and I don't think it should be universally banned. I absolutely see the necessity of a bare face for things like photo identification, and the security requirement in certain public buildings like courtrooms. But banning it entirely is to remove the choice of women for whom it is their personal expression of who they are. I imagine it must be a hot, cumbersome, and constricting thing to wear, and as for myself, I've always expressed my individuality by way of clothing, accessories, and so on that show me off--but I wouldn't impose my values for something like that on everyone, especially where wearing a burqa doesn't do harm to anyone else. (Regarding any custom that is harmful--I would of course feel different, personal choices be damned!)

Also, I think this proposal singles out a specific religious group, which I don't think is helpful for domestic relations. If the idea is to minimize the impact of more religious Muslims, one could hardly do worse--this could be construed as a specific offense and create a backlash. And that is a thing that doesn't help.

(I know, this might seem a reversal given my support of the cartoonists who criticized Islam--but I definitely consider there to be a difference between the individual or private offense, which I see as protected speech, and the nationalizing of offense by making singling out a group a government policy. A democratic government just has to be held to a higher standard of impartiality. I could elaborate, but I'm a blogger, damn it, not....you know, someone who elaborates about that kind of thing.)