French Burqa Ban

Thucydides

Sandeep Gopolan, the new head of the Law Dept. at NUI Maynooth, has just written this interesting op-ed on the reasons against any burqa ban in France.

As a commentator I would recommend all to follow his blog at http://irishlawforum.blogspot.com/ .It's hard to believe he only arrived in Ireland in September 09. Since then he has written preces for The Irish Times, Sunday Business Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times etc. I notice that he even got invited on to Newstalk / Primetime recently.

A worthy competitor for David Mcwilliams in my opinion.

Flamed Diving

Impressive bio:

http://businessandlaw.nuim.ie/people/sandeep-gopalan

I'm not sure what you mean by:

It's hard to believe he only arrived in Ireland in September 09.

You swear he was an asylum seeker, who stowed away on a boat and was dressed in rags.

Mark Hamill

Good article, I agree with what he says, particularly:

Instead [of banning the burqa], France should invest in persuading the Muslim community to discard the veil voluntarily. A combination of compulsory education, incentives and access to equal opportunities is a better way forward. Bans only breed resentment and discord.

That said, there are places where the burqa should not be allowed eg anywhere an individual would not be allowed to wear a hoodie or a motorcycle helmet.

Antbert

Are we allowed to just talk about the Burqa ban? Although I've exhausted myself on the After Hours forum...

He says this:

This is not about a fashion faux pas or women’s rights, but about sending a message to Muslims.

Is it though?

I'm going to write what I wrote on the other forum, and hopefully this time I'll be more articulate and won't have to resort to Caps Lock.

I don't agree with banning people from wearing religious symbols. It rings of oppression. I realise that the Burqa symbolises something quite oppressive, but I can't see that banning it will do any good whatsoever to the cause.

But.

If the French government is actually banning any item of clothing that covers the face, I see no reason why the Burqa should be exempt on religious grounds. Regardless of the reason for banning all face-covering clothing (hoodies, balaclavas, burqas, whataver) you can either oppose the law in its entirety or not at all. To say "Well I agree that balaclavas should be banned as they present a security threat-" (or whatever) "-But even though a Burqa presents an equal security threat, it holds religious significance and so should have special treatement from the law." I absolutely do not agree with.

robindch

Thucydides wrote: »

Sandeep Gopolan, the new head of the Law Dept. at NUI Maynooth, has just written this interesting op-ed on the reasons against any burqa ban in France.

There are plenty of reasons why the burqa ban is a bad idea, but Gopolan doesn't mention the main reason behind the ban, which is that wearing it is frequently a political statement about the wearer's belief concerning authority, or the wearer's unavoidable acquiescence to an illegitimate authority which demands it.

I don't how well Gopolan knows places like the Middle East where most countries have exerted a greater or lesser degrees of control of women's clothing -- he certainly doesn't seem all that familiar. Either way, in many of those countries, the religious insistence that women must wear, for example, what are effectively black, all-over body bags, is a direct means of exerting the kind of unpleasant political control that self-serving religious ideologies manned by unelected, self-selecting dogmatists should not have.

Antbert

robindch wrote: »

There are plenty of reasons why the burqa ban is a bad idea, but Gopolan doesn't mention the main reason behind the ban, which is that wearing it is frequently a political statement about the wearer's belief concerning authority, or the wearer's unavoidable acquiescence to an illegitimate authority which demands it.

Is that the main reason? I'm massively confused! Everything I read says something different.

robindch

Antbert wrote: »

Is that the main reason? I'm massively confused! Everything I read says something different.

Hey, it's a political issue -- nobody will agree

But more seriously, the basic issue here is that ever since the Revolution, France has traditionally -- if somewhat patchily -- promoted a pretty high degree of individual liberty. Islamic immigrants to the country, not all of whom respect these standards, have developed this strategy which uses the very freedoms provided under the french system, to exert the kind of political control over people that they would normally be denied by the existence of the freedoms in the first place.

It's basically a balancing act and the French government must strike a very careful balance in which people can continue to enjoy the freedoms that they have traditionally enjoyed, but which makes it more difficult for the religious to subvert these freedoms to their own ends.

I don't envy Sarkozy's high-wire balancing act, but what he's ultimately trying to do is to restore something that's gone out of kilter over time.

Thucydides

Indeed. I was fortunate enough to attend one of his undergrad modules as a postgrad before Christmas. I remember the very first lecture. It was obvious within minutes of listening to him entering the room that this was a somebody speaking.

Very articulate, professional and knowledgable. Of course, when I went and checked his credentials this hardly came as a surprise.

One thing that did occur to me by the end of the very first lecture was a hugh sense of embarrassment. Why? the attitude of some of final year students (chatting, texting, giggling etc.) was unbelievable. I remember him shouting at a group of girls who were texting, gossiping while he was speaking to the hall. To quote him, 'You bring shame on the university! I could expell you! I've never been to a university like this before!'

Here, here! More lecturers should do the same. But talk about embarrassing all the same!

Thucydides

I just came across this well argued column in The Times by Dominic Lawson.

'Banning the burqa is simply not British'

‘As I was once strolling through the inner city, I suddenly happened upon an apparition in a long caftan with black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought ... but the longer I stared ... the more my first question was transformed into a new conception: is this a German?”

That is the passage from Mein Kampf in which Adolf Hitler describes how, walking as a student through the less salubrious streets of Vienna, he had suddenly understood the true threat that the Jews presented to the Germanic way of life. I hadn’t read those words since I was a student, but somehow they returned to my mind last week, prompted by the UK Independence party’s announcement that it would campaign to “ban the burqa”.

This is not to say that Lord Pearson, UKIP’s new leader, is a figure in the Hitler mould. Far from it. Having met Pearson on more than one occasion, I know him to be a civilised and considerate person. Yet in attempting to gain market share from the British National party in the run-up to the general election, Pearson is indulging in a lethally dangerous form of identity politics; and in his claims to be standing up for “British values”, the UKIP leader is in fact trashing them.

Pearson declared last week: “We are not Muslim-bashing, but this [the wearing of the burqa] is incompatible with Britain’s values of freedom and democracy.” First of all, he absolutely is “Muslim-bashing” — it’s of a piece with his gratuitous remarks in his first interview as party leader that “the Muslim population is rocketing; their birth rate is much higher than ours”. (In that Vienna passage from Mein Kampf, Hitler used the same old “they’re outnumbering us” tactic: “Especially the inner city and the areas north of the Danube canal swarmed with a people who even externally no longer bore a similarity to Germans.”)

Second, how is it compatible with “Britain’s values of freedom and democracy” to use the force of the state to prevent a small number of law-abiding women from wearing an item of clothing they regard as part of their religious observance, and to arrest them on the streets if they persist in exercising their conscience in a way that harms nobody?

On Thursday’s edition of Newsnight, confronted by a formidably articulate female Muslim student (who was not wearing a burqa), Pearson tried a different tack. The burqa, he claimed, was “oppressive to women” and should be banned for that reason. His interlocutor was magnificent in her incredulity: “So we should criminalise women in order to empower them? Send them to jail to free them?” She might also have noted that UKIP’s sudden embrace of feminism is desperately insincere: it seemed to have no problem with its MEP Godfrey Bloom when he declared that the problem with women in this country was that they didn’t clean behind the fridge properly.

There are legitimate feminist arguments against the wearing of burqas: that it enforces the idea that women should be ashamed of revealing themselves in public, and that it is a pseudo-religious manifestation of male prejudice against women; but it is absurd — morally and legally — to force women to be feminist against their wishes. It may be that there are some British women wearing the burqa not because they want to, but because they are forced to. I suspect this would be a nugatory minority of a minority; but how would the law establish which of these women were wearing the burqa as “an act of oppression”? Presumably their husbands or parents would have to be arrested as well.

Does UKIP — and those who support its proposition — think that there is so little genuine crime in this country that the police would welcome this as some way of filling up empty cells? It would be analogous to the legislative fiasco of the banning of hunting with hounds, which occurred largely because Labour MPs regarded as deeply offensive the sight of the English gentry dressed in red charging around on horses — exactly as offensive as Pearson and his colleagues find the sight of women in full veil on British streets.

In effect, UKIP, which purports to be a libertarian party as far removed as possible from new Labour busybodyism, is appealing to the same lamentable culture of offence to which this government has so shamelessly pandered. As Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, recently pointed out, this “political and legislative culture that conflates irritation, offence, alarm and distress has promoted a general fear of difference and dissent”.

One could see a glimpse of this effect on the national character during BBC1’s Question Time last week, when the mooted burqa ban was discussed. A member of the audience declared that she was “intimidated” by the sight of burqas. Cue sympathetic nods from the panellists. Since it is not done for politicians to show irritation with any member of the studio audience, no matter how inane the remark, none of them said what needed to be said: get a grip, woman, and if you are genuinely terrified of your neighbour because she is wearing a full veil, see a psychiatrist about your unusual phobia.

Perhaps, however, this woman had merely been reading Pearson’s letter in The Times the previous day, in which he warned darkly that “one of the 21/7 bombers escaped wearing the burqa: the hidden face can also hide a terrorist”. That’s right: any of those veiled women you see on the high street — I’m not speaking from experience, but then I live in East Sussex — may not just be buying groceries; they may instead be casing the area to see which shops would be easiest to blow up. On the other hand, if they were not wearing the full veil, then the neighbourhood would be safer, since we might (according to Pearson’s reasoning) be able to tell by staring at their uncovered face whether or not they were a terrorist. This is, again, absurd, even if you believe that the true purpose of UKIP’s policy is to prevent Islamist terrorism; in fact, its purpose is much less constructive — to channel the fear of it in the pursuit of votes.

Nicolas Sarkozy, so transparently a mountebank, is attempting a similar burqa ban in France; it follows the banning of all “ostentatious” religious emblems, including the veil, from schools and public buildings. France, however, since its bloody revolution, has had a determinedly anti-clerical political culture, regarding religion as something that has no place whatever in the public realm. That is not the British way; we evolved — not least as a result of our own historical experience — a much more tolerant approach to open expressions of religious difference, which can be summarised by the phrase “live and let live”.

Christians in this country understand this well, which is why a ComRes poll last week reported that 85% of self-described Christians agreed that, whatever your faith, the law should protect the right to wear its symbols, provided they do not harm others. If the would-be populists of UKIP think that the average British churchgoer would be enthused by the attempt to stamp out the visible manifestations of a minority’s adherence to Islam, in effect to criminalise religious conscience, they are much mistaken.

In fact, they don’t even carry their own party united behind the new policy. One online UKIP forum contains the following comment from a party member: “This call to ban the burqa is simply pandering to those who might just vote BNP. I think in future we as frontline members will now find it a touch more difficult to convince the public that we are not the BNP in blazers.”

Precisely so; and it would be nothing less than UKIP’s leadership deserves. Shame on you, Lord Pearson. You have betrayed the very British principles of freedom and liberty that your party swears to defend.

Permabear

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Sam Vimes

donegalfella wrote: »

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Sure you can. Freedom of speech means I should be free to do, say or wear whatever I want but that's because I do, say and wear the right things. It doesn't apply to people who do, say and wear things that I disapprove of :rolleyes:

robindch

donegalfella wrote: »

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Yes, but the French are not looking to ban the burqa entirely from the country, but simply to ban it from being worn in places which the state owns and runs -- effectively enforcing a dress-code for its own property (granted there's a lot of that).

donegalfella wrote: »

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Yes, ideally that's the case.

But what's happening in this case is what I mentioned above -- namely, that religious leaders are using the freedom provided by the french state to deny the same freedoms to their client populations. In this case, I think there's a good case to be made that the state should step in and stop this from happening, at least on its own property and restore the freedoms that the religious leaders have suppressed.

It's also interesting to see that there doesn't seem to be much organized opposition to the proposed, limited, ban from religious leaders in France.

Permabear

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robindch

donegalfella wrote: »

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Two items here:

1. The state already does control dress-code on its own property elsewhere, as in the tits-out-over-the-Seine argument above. The state is not trying to control what people wear (or get up to) in their own mosques, churches, bedrooms, cellars etc.
2. Religious leaders are using the freedoms provided by the idea of "free expression" to deny the same freedoms to their clients.

As I said in the first post, basically, the French are really trying to strike a balance here between two different manifestations of the right to free expression, one of which has a tendency to trump the other. You're never going to keep everybody happy -- the religious, the irreligious, the "rights" people and so on -- all you can do is just decide on a utilitarian position which grants the greatest degree of what you believe is most important to the greatest number of people.

And finally, if the ladies of Paris want to desport themselves topless along the banks of the Seine, then I for one will march in support of their right to do so, hopefully close by. These fine women are the A+A crew of the bra-brigade -- "If atheism is a religion, then wearing no bra is a fashion statement".

Permabear

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robindch

donegalfella wrote: »

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I'm not sure you're getting the point I'm making Which is that the wearing of a burqa is a political statement of submission to the religion, as interpreted by the authorities who claim to be able to do so on behalf of the woman. There is a strong element of social coercion here and the French state is simply stepping in to prevent this, on behalf of the people who are socially unable to. The situation is different at Halloween, since nobody's coercing anybody to wear witches outfits.

The allegation of discrimination is inappropriate too -- using the metaphor of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, is it really "discriminatory" to discourage people from falsely shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater?

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

LilOc

donegalfella wrote: »

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WTF?! ANY ostentatious religious sign is forbidden in any building or for any employee of the Republic in service in any circumstance. Whether a veil, a kippa, a visible cross or Jesus sign, a sikh turban or whatever!

It's not because of flesh, it's because of it being a religious sign.

Now, second element, as much as sects are monitored and seen with a bad/suspicious light by the French State, the burqua is monitored the same way, but that's another debate irrelevant to the ban.

Nobody whether student or teacher, State employee, policeman or policewoman, soldier, public employee, city hall employee etc...can show ostentacious religious signs in the State buildings or on service. The Res publica takes precedence.

Now, in the personal sphere it's another matter and anybody can do as they want.

You're talking about a the former hyper Catholic "eldest daughter of the Church", now the most multiconfessional country in Europe... Biggest Jewish population in Europe, 3rd in the world alongside the biggest Muslim population in Europe, with a sizeable Protestant community, plus a push of Evangelists, and Buddhists, some Sikhs etc etc etc... That's without mentioning the different historical and endemic multiethnicity, additioned to the one resulting from waves of immigration. And according to polls, we're doing pretty well in living all together and that's because when it matters, all those differences are put aside for the common good, when it is needed, they are shared and mixed in the personal sphere (a lot of mixed marriages etc etc...).

One part is about effectively running a State and having common symbols, another is about accumulating cultures etc...

Plus if that makes it more difficult to have extremists coercing girls into wearing the burqua, or having volunteer burqua wearers realising that this sign, is treated like ALL OTHERS and they have to comply to State laws like everybody else, then all the better.

MrPudding

Sam Vimes wrote: »

Sure you can. Freedom of speech means I should be free to do, say or wear whatever I want but that's because I do, say and wear the right things. It doesn't apply to people who do, say and wear things that I disapprove of :rolleyes:

This kind of thing is now governed in Europe by the European Convention, with respect to religious paraphernalia I am not sure that freedom of speech is the right you are looking for. Article 10 covers freedom of expression, but it quite clear that it is not an absolute right. It can be curtailed and restricted by governments

European Convention on Human Rights wrote:

...in the interests of national security. territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention or disorder of crime, for the protection or health of morals...

I am sure the French can find a justification in there.

Article 9 seems more appropriate, it covers religion specifically, and includes the worship, teaching, practice and observance of them. Again though, it is not an absolute right and has similar restrictions can be applied as for freedom of expression. So it is hard to say. It would appear that countries, on the face of it, can ban head scarves and burkas and still be within the law. But I think there is a big difference between putting a ban in place and having it hold up in court.

Turkey has a ban on the wearing of head scarves in Universities, and by civil servants in public buildings and this was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights.

That said, given Turkeys history they have a well placed fear of religion interfering with politics and are a fiercely secular country. Their history probably had a lot to do with the ban being upheld, but I am not so sure France could rely on that.

MrP

Xluna

Everytime I see someone with a burqa I can't helped but be reminded of those cheesy 80s ninja movies.:)

MrPudding

I saw a woman on a treadmill near London wear a burka, strangest site.

MrP