France’s General Assembly will be deciding fairly soon on if they will ban women wearing burqas. This ban could range from fines on women caught wearing the things in public to simple bans on using public and government services to…well, who knows?
While I know this question has been debated from the perspective of if this is a good move or not, the question I have is what effect will this have on France’s local Muslim population? What effect on external militant groups like Al Qaeda? Any French 'dopers want to weigh in and give their thoughts on this stuff?
xtisme, do you mind if I ask them a question too? What has the French government professed to be the positive outcome of banning the burqa? I can only think of negatives ones, but there must be something they hope to gain that will outweigh the forseeable outrage this will stir up.
There are two obvious ways to avoid the ban: not wearing the burqa or not going out in public. I get the feeling too many of the people affected would choose the latter rather than the former.
Why would you assume there’s a positive aspect to it ? No matter what the PC reasons given for it are, the underlying reason is and remains : “This is France. Women don’t wear burqas here. Assimilate, or go back to *your *country, brownie”.
Note that this latest iteration of the controversy is more spineless than the previous actions against *all *kinds of veils : extremely few Muslim women actually wear burqas around here. More than ever before according to the news (thanks to the war in Afghanistan, I guess), but they’re still an insignificant minority. I’ve never ever seen one in the streets, and I live in the Paris 'burbs. Hijabs aplenty, chadors galore, no burqa. Is it a coincidence that all photos used to illustrate the news about the affair are either the same one picture, or shots taken from the *back *? I think not. So, it’s a non-issue.
But one that does let the Sarkozy government broadcast the subtext : “See, Front National voters ? We’re tough on Muslims too. Vote for us !”
The moderate right’s line is “these women are being oppressed by their parents/husbands/imams, we’re liberating them !”.
The crypto-far right with a moderate tag on argues it’s a security issue - how can the police do their job if they can’t see everyone’s face at any given time ?! Why, these women could all be criminals & illegals !
The far right is pretty much upfront about the assimilate or fuck off thing, only they wrap it in dire warnings against the so-called Islamisation of Europe.
The Communists are against religion, period, so they’re for the ban as well, but then again there must be 3 Communists left, total :p.
The centre Left is calling a boycott/filibuster on the vote, arguing that the well of that debate is terminally poisoned by questions of national identity (direct quote. I assume this is an accusation of xenophobia, I’ve never been one for decrypting political jargon).
The Greens are dead against it on practical grounds : they argue it would condemn Muslim women to de facto house arrest.
Not sure about the minor leftist parties lying left of the Socialist Party (actually centrist/moderate) and right of the hardcore Communists either. I’m going to WAG they’re against the ban, since they’re usually social liberals and pro-minorities. Also, in the opposition :).
About the covering the face argument - that people shouldn’t go around in public with their faces covered - does this apply to all sorts of headgear or just Burqas? Would you be able to go around in public with a ski mask or a Savoyard on your head but not an item of religious significance?
(in all three of the countries I’ve lived in, I learned the native language, and behaved in accordance with the native culture. Or else I went back to my country. Works pretty well, actually.)
When they were banning religious symbols (read hijabs and burqas) in schools, I was told that the main reason behind it had a lot to do with this very reason. Gangs of Muslim boys were going around “enforcing the burqa rule,” that is to say, beating the shit out of girls that were dressing like a hedonistic Westerner. I haven’t been able to verify that story, so take it with a grain of salt. Banning all religious symbols was a way to protect young girls that did not want to wear a burqa or hijab, but were affraid not to.
I could see a similar line of reasoning being put forth in this case. If we in the west decided that women should be free to go bra-less if they so chose, but a culture of oppression prevented them from doing so, an outright ban on bras could push things forward.
Neither of those are points I propose to be my own so there isn’t any need to attack me directly. Like when Switzerland banned minarets, there could be a sane and logical answer to it, some nuance of local culture we aren’t aware of. Or it could just be bat shit crazy.
I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with xenophobia and intolerance.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it puts the blame and burden on the victim rather than the aggressor.
Consider a hypothetical city where gangs are enforcing an arbitrary “bra rule” by beating up girls who let their beautiful boobs swing free.
Hmmm…Sorry, got distracted for a second, there.
Would the favored line of action be broadcasting far and wide the message that this is shit up with which society shan’t put (and acting against the gangs), or mandating all girls wear/not wear bras to protect them from assault ? If good ol’ boys beat up on gays, is it be better to arrest the good ol’ boys, or telling gays to quietly remain in the closet to avoid trouble ? You get the idea.
If Muslim tough guys go around bullying Muslim women who don’t wear the veil (which I’m sure happens to some extent*), then ISTM the correct line of action is to punish *them *and endeavour to correct the macho tendencies which are the root cause of the issue, rather than dealing with the symptoms. And let individual Muslim girls decide however they want to dress for their own reasons (be they religious, or cultural, or rebellious, or communitarian, or based on modesty/respectability concerns, etc…)
*although the “no veil in school” laws were ostensibly set up to address an entirely different issue : Muslim girls refusing to take off their veils when prompted by teachers, and parents arguing that their tykes were exposed to “religious proselytism” at school, simply because classmates were wearing a prominent religious symbol.
The woman can wear a face covering veil. However, on top of their heads, they can carry an LCD screen, with a photo of their face exposed!
Man, I have to patent this!
The problem with your analogy is that there are only a few thousand women in France wearing niqabs and 90% are under 40. Most are not immigrants, but 2nd or 3rd generation French nationals whose mothers did not cover their faces.
So a better analogy would be that a few women chose to go braless in KSA or some other muslim country, but cultural oppression prevented them from doing so, and then they banned it outright.
Absolutely no problem whatsoever. It is not France’s job to be a multicultural melting pot with all the misery that causes for its native inhabitants. And for sure that sucks for immigrants but if the average native is less happy with these kind of changes I see no reason at all they should put up with them.
I thought about this a bit further, and it starts to sound a lot like employment equity and affirmative action laws.
You have a situation where employers were being racists/sexist, which like bullying, should be dealt with. But instead, very heavy handed laws were passed that in effect forced all employers (racist or not) to hire women and minorities.
And as a non-smoker I see the smoking bans in the same light. Bars had the freedom to be smoke free but couldn’t because of social pressure, as a result I didn’t have the freedom to go to a smoke-free bar. The only way to level the playing field was to bad smoking in all establishments.
Although I seriously doubt any thought or logic went into this, and any reasons stated would be after the fact. Xenophobia and intolerance are the only two reasons, maybe with a slathering of ignorance and heaping of “playing to their base.”
That’s basically what I think. If a bunch of Westerners showed up in some Arab country and started walking around half-naked and drinking in public and roasting pigs in their yards, do you think the people there would just say, “hey, we should be tolerant, live and let live!” Fuck no. They would try to preserve their own culture.
That’s partly why western countries have traditionally been considered nicer places to live.
If the argument is you want to make the west less tolerant like some Arab countries, well…I guess you could argue we are fostering international togetherness by adopting mutual levels of intolerance :p.
Argent’s post got me thinking and it’s true, we wouldn’t really expect other cultures to adapt to us, the “civilized” Western world is always bending over backwards to try to not offend these more, frankly, backwards countries. If France thinks this is the best way to preserve their culture, then go for it. I prefer French culture to Arab culture any day of the week.