After the British army conquered the Sindh region of what is now modern-day Pakistan in the 1840s, Gen. Charles Napier enforced a ban on the practice of Sati — the burning of widows alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands. A delegation of Hindu leaders approached Napier to complain that their ancient traditions were being violated. The general is said to have replied: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. . . . You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”
The incident can hardly be commended as a model of cross-cultural relations, but it clarifies a tension. Conflict can arise between respect for other cultures and respect for universal human rights.
This is particularly true when it comes to the rights of women. Traditional societies can be deeply admirable — conservative, family-oriented, stable, wise about human nature and human society. But they can also be highly patriarchal, evidenced by such practices as Sati, foot-binding, widow inheritance and female circumcision. This is not to say that modern, rights-based societies are without their own faults and failures; it is only to recognize that multiculturalism and human rights can sometimes clash.
For the most part, these tensions no longer emerge through colonialism but through migration, which can transplant a traditional culture smack in the middle of an aggressively liberal one. The most visible areas of difference — say in dress — can spark controversy, just as the wearing of the burqa is now doing in Europe.
Belgium is moving toward a total ban on face-covering veils in public. Italian police recently fined a woman for wearing a burqa. In France, a law banning garments “designed to hide the face” is likely to be introduced in July. “The burqa is not a sign of religion,” says French President Nicolas Sarkozy, “it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.” [See articles below]
Disagreements about the burqa among Islamic women are often heated. This is to be expected because religious covering means different things in different contexts. It can be a “body bag” placed on unwilling women by threatening relatives and religious police. It can be, according to one critic, “a sad process of self-isolation and self-imposed exile.” But it can also be a way for women from traditional backgrounds to preserve their marriage prospects and family honor in mixed-sex settings. Many women who wear the burqa are fully conscious of the choice they are making.
The motives of European leaders in this controversy are less sympathetic. Some speak deceptively (and absurdly) of a security motive for banning Islamic covering. Who knows what they are hiding? But by this standard, the war on terrorism would mandate the wearing of bikinis. The real purpose of burqa bans is to assert European cultural identity — secular, liberal and individualistic — at the expense of a visible, traditional religious minority. A nation such as France, proudly relativistic on most issues, is convinced of its cultural superiority when it comes to sexual freedom. A country of topless beaches considers a ban on excessive modesty. The capital of the fashion world, where women are often overexposed and objectified, lectures others on the dignity of women.
For what the opinion of an outsider is worth, I do think the burqa is oppressive. It seems designed to restrict movement, leaving women clumsy, helpless, dependent and anonymous. The vast majority of Muslim women do not wear complete covering because the Koran mandates only modesty, not sartorial imprisonment.
But at issue in Europe is not social disapproval; it is criminalization. In matters of religious liberty, there are no easy or rigid rules. Governments apply a balancing test. A tradition that burns widows or physically mutilates young girls would justify the Napier approach. Some rights are so fundamental that they must be defended in every case. But if a democratic majority can impose its will on a religious minority for any reason, religious freedom has no meaning. The state must have strong, public justifications to compel conformity, especially on an issue such as the clothes that citizens wear.
In France — where only a few thousand women out of 5 million Muslims wear the burqa — a ban is merely a symbolic expression of disdain for an unpopular minority. It would achieve little but resentment.
By Michael Gerson
* From Tha Washington Post, Wednesday, May 26, 2010:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/25/AR2010052503969.html
* mgerson globalengage.org
Belgian lawmakers vote to ban full-face veils in public
Belgium is the first Western European country to approve a national ban, although some localities have passed such laws.
By Edward Cody
Friday, April 30, 2010
PARIS — Belgian lawmakers on Thursday passed a nationwide ban prohibiting women from wearing full-face Islamic veils in public places, the first move of its kind in Western Europe.
The unanimous vote in the lower house of Parliament came in response to growing irritation in Belgium and other West European countries over the increasing numbers and visibility of Muslims whose customs and attitudes often present a challenge to the continent’s largely Christian heritage.
The French government, after months of rancorous debate, has pledged to pass a similar nationwide ban by September, a promise denounced by Muslims as “stigmatization” of their religion. President Nicolas Sarkozy decided last week to introduce the bill despite a warning from the country’s constitutional court that a blanket prohibition would probably be unconstitutional.
“The burqa has no place in France,” he said.
Similar bills have been introduced in the parliaments of Italy and the Netherlands, where local jurisdictions have already imposed more-limited anti-veil measures. Two dozen communities in Belgium also have decreed local bans, including Brussels, the capital.
According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S.-based advocacy group, political figures in Switzerland and Austria have suggested that legislation such as Belgium’s would be a good idea in their countries as well. Farther north, Denmark’s government issued a statement in January saying the full-face veil was out of sync with Danish values, but decided against legislation because few women wear such garments.
Swiss voters, in a referendum in December, barred Muslims from building minarets, or towers, to call the faithful to prayer. Their vote, widely decried as anti-Islamic by Muslim and human rights groups, generated favorable comment from conservative French politicians along with suggestions that France should impose a similar minaret ban.
But nothing has aroused more resentment than the sight of women on the streets of European cities covered from head to toe in dark robes with only a slit or a screen at eye level. Despite the consternation, women wearing the veils are seen infrequently, even in suburbs with large Muslim populations.
The French Interior Ministry reported that fewer than 2,000 women wear full-face veils in France, out of a Muslim population estimated by the ministry at more than 5 million. In neighboring Belgium, which has a Muslim population of 400,000, no estimates have been published on the number of women who wear veils. But police in Brussels last year stopped 29 women who were seen on the street with their faces covered, in violation of the municipal ban.
The full veil has been condemned by European politicians of the right and left as an affront to the dignity of women and, because it hides a woman’s face, as a security risk in schools, banks and government offices. André Gerin, a member of Parliament who led a nine-month inquiry into the full-face veil in France, also qualified it as the tip of an iceberg behind which lurk radical Islamic preachers seeking to impose a fundamentalist and politicized vision of their religion on French Muslims.
The vote in the Belgian Chamber of Representatives marked a rare moment of accord among the country’s political parties. They have been so bitterly split in a feud between Flemish speakers and French speakers that Prime Minister Yves Leterme’s government collapsed last week.
In principle, Leterme’s cabinet is only handling current affairs pending probable new elections. But the anti-veil measure was put on the agenda Thursday because it was voted out of the Home Affairs Committee unanimously last month and was considered high-priority.
* Fred Ernst/associated Press
Italian police fine woman for wearing burqa in public
Richard Owen, Rome
The growing European row over bans on Muslim veils spread to Italy yesterday after a Tunisian-born woman was fined for wearing a burqa, the first time such a penalty has been imposed in the country.
Amel Marmouri, 26, was stopped by carabinieri officers in a spot check outside a post office in Novara in northern Italy and given a 500 euro (£431) fine, payable within 90 days. She at first declined to lift her veil to be identified because the officers were male, but agreed when a municipal police patrol which included a woman officer was summoned.
The fine was imposed under a city ordinance introduced in January in Novara banning any clothing which “prevents the immediate identification of the wearer inside public buildings, schools and hospitals”. It marked the first time the regulation had been enforced.
Massimo Giordano, the Mayor of Novara, said the regulation was based on a 1975 national anti terrorist law making it illegal for men or women to be in public place with their faces covered. Similar local regulations have been passed at Treviso in the Veneto, Fermignano in the Marche and Montegrotto Terme near Padua.
Ben Salah Braim, 36, the woman’s husband and a building worker, said he would respect the regulation, but would have to confine his wife at home since the Koran forbade other men to see her face.
“Amel may not be looked at by other men,” he told Corriere della Sera. “Our religion is explicit on this,” he said. “If this is the law in Italy, what can I do? I don’t know how I am going to find the money to pay the 500 Euro fine.”
He said he had been aware of the local ban on burqas, and accepted that it was a general ban and “not against my religion”.
He said the incident had occurred last Friday in the suburb of Sant’ Agabio, which has a high immigrant population, when he and his wife were on their way to the local mosque to pray. “I thought that at least on Fridays the burqa might be allowed.”
However, Izzedin Elzir, an imam in Florence and head of the Islamic Community and Organisations Union in Italy, said it was a “matter of interpretation” whether the Koran forbade women to show their faces in public. ’We are for the freedom of women and against veils of any kind,” he said, adding “Italian laws must be respected.”
Mr Giordano is a member of the anti-immigration Northern League Party, which has campaigned against the building of mosques in northern Italy. He said he had issued the new regulation “for reasons of security, but also so that people who came to live in our city respect our traditions and customs”.
He added: "The regulations in Novara specifically cover people wearing clothing that prevents them from being identified in a public place, and a post office is a public place. The same would also apply to a motorcyclist who walked into a post office wearing a crash helmet. The people of Novara do not want to see people walking around in the city wearing a burqa.”
Mr Giordano said the ordinance was “the only tool at our disposal to stop behaviour that makes the already difficult process of integration even harder. Unfortunately it is apparently not yet clear to everyone that clothes preventing the wearer’s identification can be tolerated at home but not in public places, in schools, on buses or in post offices”.
Paolo Cortese, the chief of police in Novara, also said the fine had been handed out because a post office was “a public building.’ However Nicolo Zanon, a constitutional lawyer, said the legality of the “excessive” Novara regulation was “debatable” since it affected “individual rights and religious sentiment”.
Asked if his new ordinance would prove counterproductive if husbands closeted their wives at home, Mr Giordano said “husbands must take into account that in Italy men and women are equal and freedom is a fundamental right. If people do not respect our values, why do they come to live here?”
He said he was “not a racist. The racists are those who force their wives to dress like this.”.
Isabella Bossi Fedrigotti, a novelist and social commentator, said any husband who forced his wife to stay at home would pay the price by having to “take the children to school or the doctor, do the shopping, pay the bills and go to the bank or post office”.
The Northern League, an increasingly powerful ally in Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling centre Right coalition, has tabled a Parliamentary amendment to the 1975 anti terror law altering the wording specifically to prohibit “the use of female garments common among women of Islamic faith known as burqas and niqabs”.
Last Friday Belgium’s lower house voted unanimously to prohibit women from wearing full face veils in public. If the bill is passed by the Belgian Senate it will become Europe’s first national ’burqa ban’.
The French Government of President Nicolas Sarkozy is also drafting a bill that would make it illegal to wear the burqa.
* From The Times May 5, 2010.
France moves to fine Muslim women with full-face Islamic veils
By Edward Cody
PARIS — The French government decided Wednesday to impose a $185 fine on women who wear a full-face Islamic veil in public, pushing ahead with a controversial ban despite signs of tension between France’s Muslims and the Christian-tradition majority.
President Nicolas Sarkozy said his government was forwarding the legislation to parliament because it had a “moral responsibility” to uphold traditional European values in the face of an increasingly visible Muslim population, estimated at more than 5 million, the largest in Western Europe. He called the course chosen by his government “demanding” but “just,” and he said the law was not intended to stigmatize Muslims.
France is one of several Western European countries seeking to forbid the full-face veil, called the burqa in Afghanistan and the niqab in North Africa. Belgium’s Chamber of Representatives last month approved a nationwide ban, which must now be considered by the Senate. Legislators in several other countries have introduced similar bills, and the Swiss government has vowed to impose a ban administratively.
The French proposal has drawn heavy support, with up to 60 percent of those questioned in opinion polls saying restraints are necessary. But Muslims here have complained that they feel singled out for a practice that, according to an Interior Ministry estimate, concerns fewer than 2,000 women in a country of 64 million inhabitants.
The tensions boiled over Tuesday evening during a debate on the law in a Paris suburb with a large Muslim population. Members of the pro-Palestinian Sheik Yassin Movement tried to shout down the speakers, and scuffles broke out, leading to intervention by police officers who were called in by the organizers.
Last week, a woman wearing a full veil filed a legal complaint against a lawyer who she said insulted her religion in the Atlantic Coast town of Saint-Nazaire, according to local media reports. The lawyer, also a woman, filed a counter-complaint, alleging she was beaten by the veil-wearing woman, the reports said.
Mohammed Moussaoui, head of the government-approved French Council for the Muslim Religion, said recently that 15 mosques have been defaced since the beginning of the year and that Muslim tombs in two cemeteries have been vandalized. In addition, a halal butcher shop was sprayed with automatic weapons fire in Marseille, he said.
The French legislation approved by the full cabinet is scheduled to come to a vote in the National Assembly in July and in the Senate in September. Sarkozy’s conservative coalition has comfortable majorities in both houses.
The measure was expected to draw support from some political figures in the Socialist opposition as well, although the Socialist hierarchy has called for narrower legislation. A resolution condemning the full veil as contrary to the values of the French republic passed with an overwhelming majority last week.
The Constitutional Council, France’s highest constitutional court, has issued two opinions warning that the full public ban will be vulnerable to challenge in the courts as an infringement on religious freedom. It also could be challenged in the European Court of Human Rights, the council said. But Sarkozy vowed to move forward anyway, saying the government will have to deal with legal challenges as they arise.
After six months of what officials described as “pedagogy” to educate the public after the expected Senate approval, the new law would go into effect about a year from now. It would give police the right to demand that women lift their veils to identify themselves. If they refused, police could hold them for up to four hours for an identity check. If cited for wearing the veil, women would be referred to a prosecutor, who could fine them, force them to attend “citizenship classes” or both.
* From The Washington Post, Thursday, May 20, 2010.