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Burqa debate splits France but
will focus turn to turban too?
WSN Network
 Paris:
French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent remarks that “the burqa, a
sign of female subservience, will not be welcome on French
territory,” has caused an uproar across not just the Muslim world
but even India where religion is omnipresent and the wearing of
personal religious symbols is fairly common.
It would be
unthinkable for Indians to ban government servants or students from
state schools and universities from publicly wearing burqas,
turbans, religious robes, caste marks, crosses or yarmulkes.
In 2004, France
became the only country in Europe to outlaw any “ostentatious
display” of religious symbols by public servants or students in
state run-institutions. The law, which was essentially aimed at the
Islamic headscarf, also made the Sikh turban illegal in public
institutions. That was because the Stasi Commission, appointed to
look into the various religious communities that people the French
landscape, simply overlooked the country’s tiny Sikh community. Sikh
students have had to remove their turbans or opt for private
schooling. No turban-wearing Sikh can hope to find employment in a
government office in France.
France is home
to Europe’s largest Muslim population — an estimated 4.5 million.
Islam, not Judaism or Protestantism, is the country’s second most-practised
religion after Catholicism. Last week, the French Parliament set up
a special commission to look into the spread of full burqas and
niqabs among Muslim women in France.
Barak Obama in
his speech in Cairo on June 4th this year said Western countries
should “avoid dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear”.
Such action, he said, showed “hostility towards religion under
pretence of liberalism.”
Obama’s remarks
have raised the hackles of several French and European feminist
groups who saw in his words a sop to Muslim mullahs.
 France
is one of the few countries in the world to ban the wearing of the
Islamic headscarf in state-run schools, universities and other
institutions. It does so in the name of laïcité, or the principle of
separation between the state and religion.
In a major
policy speech to a joint session of Parliament and Senate in
Versailles earlier this month, Sarkozy went several steps further.
“We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners
behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity.
… That is not the idea that the French republic has of women’s
dignity. … The burqa is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of
subservience. … It will not be welcome on the territory of the
French republic.”
The Muslim
community in France has risen in protest against Sarkozy’s
declarations. The burqa debate has split France down the line.
One wonders
whether this entore focus on symbols and attire connected with
religion will help once again trigger a debate about the ban on
turbans that the Sikh students suffer from. Now that Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh is visiting France, once hopes the turban he sports
and the liberalism that his party claims to profess will inspire him
to take up the issue with Paris.
15
July 2009
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