Sarkozy to Veil-Wearing Women: Stay Home

Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, says "veils suck." I agree. I find veils oppressive, sexist, regressive and insulting, whether they're worn by Muslim women or by Christian women in, say, the mountains of Lebanon, where my own mother and grandmother wore them for Sunday services years ago.

But (and forgive me for using the same terminology as one of the greatest writers in English) here's what would suck more: abrogating individual liberties, including the wearing of the veil, in the name of some nebulous and contradictory notion of liberty or freedom from oppression. Whatever one's personal beliefs about veils happen to be, they're irrelevant when it comes to people's choice--to wear them or not to wear them. It cuts both ways. No one should impose the wearing of the veil. No one should prohibit it, either. (For simplicity's sake let's just agree here that the veil means the face covering, the head-to-toe covering, the niqab, the burqa: the lot, even though there are a great many distinctions between them all.)

The problem, of course, is that in many Muslim societies these days, the wearing of the veil is beyond mandatory. It is a punishable crime, by lashing, beating or worse, not to wear it (as it is in parts of Pakistan controlled by the Taliban, in Iran, and, with American protection, in Afghanistan.) Not only the wearing of the veil is in itself the reflection of a reprehensible and inaccurate Islamic edict (convenient myths aside, the Prophet Muhammad never forbade women to go uncovered, and even if he had, it would have been one of his many errors worth correcting: no prophet is infallible), but the imposition of the veil is even more reprehensible. It's that imposition, I think, that makes veils so distasteful, such symbols of freedom and individualism denied. (Yes, many women who wear the veil feel it empowering, too, but there's no room here to get into that perversely subservient justification of the unjustifiable.) So I can understand the occasional outbursts against the thing.

But there's a difference between Rushdie-like exclamations and turning those exclamations into laws. Especially in western societies. France has been Europe's leading example of cultural "purity" gone haywire. France forbids the wearing of the veil in public schools. But now there's worse. Some 65 legislators, right-wingers and left-wingers both, have asked for a commission to study the effects of the veil on French society. It would be the first step toward a law that would ban the wearing of the full-body burqa and niqab in public. And today, speaking to a joint session of parliament in Versailles (the first such address by a French president in 136 years), Nicolas Sarkozy declared himself on the side of the prohibitionists. He used a historic address to declare himself against individual freedom by pretending to speak for women's rights.

“In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” he said to rolling applause. “The burqa is not a religious sign, it’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement – I want to say it solemnly: It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.”

Once again, I agree with the characterization. But I find revolting its potential translation into national law, or even now, its vilification as de facto national policy. Sarkozy and the prohibitionists are doing nothing less repressive and distasteful, by lending the state's weight against the wearing of the veil, than are Iran's mullahs who use the state's weight to enforce the wearing of the hijab.

In either case, not surprisingly, men are wielders of alleged virtue.

How stupid such a law would be in France, not least because it would do nothing to diminish the wearing of the veil. But it would very much diminish the freedom of those women who do wear the veil to go out in public anymore. The law would be every "traditional" Muslim man's joy, as it would become his accomplice in forcing women to stay home, where their repression is even less visible, their opportunities to get away nil, and their ability to experience life in a less asphyxiating environment (an opportunity that may well lead to veil-chucking) withdrawn.

For what? For French men to pretend to stand up for women's rights, civil rights and liberties. What a joke. And what shame, answering religious fanaticism with its secular equivalent.

See Also:

• Forum: Do Veils "Suck"?
• The Muslim Veil and the Law
• Turkey At Loggerheads With Itself Over Veil Ban
• French Citizen Denied Driving School for Wearing Muslim Veil
• Leila Sahin and Turkey's Battle Over the Islamic Head Scarf
• Does the Quran Require Women to Wear the Veil?