Kemel Atatürk before that I believe, along with the Fez hat. But what people have said is true: enforcing ‘freedom’ never made anybody free, The result in Turkey was to clear women off the streets because no respectable woman would dream of showing her bare face.
Much as I dislike the burqa, certain misconceptions about it are every bit as paternalistic telling women what they should want and why as the Saudi government, perhaps more. Remove the veil and the woman’s dress is little different from traditional Arab men’s robes. Nobody goes on about those being ‘oppressive’.
Mark Tully, the BBC’s Indian correspondant for years has short stories where in one, the matriarch of the old Muslim family come down in the world that now has to rely on the relatives they despised for moving to Pakistan remenisces about the Glory Days of the British Raj when her aunt not only wore a burqa covered in embroidery and jewellery worth a fortune but had her own railway carriage with blinds pulled down which she boarded through a screened path to protect Her Mightiness from the insolent gaze of lowly porters and stone-worshippers (Hindus). On the few occasions that I’ve seen a woman dressed like this - some in black, some in white - they scare the hell out of me looking like the Spanish Inquisition!
Back about 1964 the fashion designer Mary Quant (she of the PVC miniskirt - yum!) was raving on how in the future women would go pretty much naked with their pubic hair dyed and shaved to attractive designs. How would ‘our’ women feel if a mob of foreign Quants decreed they must ‘liberate’ themselves from the implied shame of covering their body and go naked?
According to one well-researched historical fiction author (Dorothy Dunnett) there were African Muslims who interpreted the Qur’anic injunction (for [ii]both* sexes) to dress modestly as going naked as Allah formed them without ‘fripperies’ (though for men not quite as Allah formed them!). (African Gold in her House of Niccolò 15th century multinational trading octology).
And according to one Egyptian feminist, Egyptian women have been beleagured with westerners telling them to ‘loosen up’ since days when the westerners were fainting in the heat from the constriction of laced corsets and multiple petticoats, entirely unconcerned with matters of relations between the sexes, political power, poverty, the obscenity of female ‘circumcision’ common in Africa and among Egyptian Christians, and a host of issues far more important than clothes.
I agree with Sarkozy’s attitude of When in Paris do as the Parisians do or don’t come and he is not rounding on a minority with a long history of cultural difference like Jews. At the same time, revolutionary opposition to a religion solidly behind the old feudal system, when they rededicated cathedrals as Temples to Reason and had sex on the High Altar are 200 years ago.