On Monday Sarkozy threatened to make wearing a burka in public illegal in France. I wrote about this kind of thinking last year in The Guardian. This issue is related to migration, it is related to trafficking and it is related to commercial sex. Ideas about how the right kind of women should look predominate in the history of women: you’re meant to cover yourself up more, or less, or in some particular way. From the original text of Sarkozy’s speech:
Le problème de la burqa n’est pas une problème religieux, c’est un problème de liberté, de dignité de la femme. Ce n’est pas un signe religieux, c’est un signe d’asservissement, d’abaissement. La burqa ne sera pas la bienvenue dans notre République française.
From the BBC story:
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.
Note the applause from politicians when he makes these statements.
Women wearing burkas are not welcome in France. That ‘Frenchness’ should depend on clothing I find very scary. That the idea of personal identity should be institutionalised by the French state I find even scarier. The original title of the following piece was Which migrants assimilate best? How do we know?, which editors changed to
What Not to Wear – if you want to be French
The Guardian, Comment is Free, 6 August 2008
Laura Agustín
A woman from Morocco who has lived in France for eight years with a French husband, has three French children and speaks fluent French, was refused citizenship recently on grounds of being insufficiently assimilated. The Conseil d’etat said Faiza Silmi’s way of life does not reflect “French values”, particularly the goal of gender equality. The judgment claims she lives in “total submission” to the men in her life because she wears the niqab, which covers all of the face except the eyes. The decision was approved by commentators from right, left and centre. Fadela Amara, the urban affairs minister, called Silmi’s clothing a “prison” and a “straitjacket”. Predictable debates about fundamentalism unfolded in the media, with Silmi appearing as a strange, distant object.
What does Silmi herself say? The website Jeuneafrique.com has just published her first interview with the French press, corroborating another in the New York Times. Silmi’s voice emerges clearly:
I am not submissive to the men in my family nor do I lead the life of a recluse and I go out when I want. When I drive my car, I wear my niqab. I alone decided to wear it, after reading some books. I respect the law and my husband respects my decisions.
While she talked, her husband served tea.
There is no universally accepted definition of gender equality. For some, the simple act of wearing a veil proves Silmi is oppressed. Others see her as having made choices, adapted, evolved. Silmi does not proselytise about religion or gender, but she does not like men staring at her in the street. While some observers interpret her adoption of more traditional clothes than she wore in Morocco as a sign of regression, Silmi demonstrates a typical migrant desire to validate the past while finding her way in a new life. This is a process and she may well change her style again in years to come.
Candidates on dating sites like Muslima.com reveal an array of headgear. Some describe themselves as modest, long considered a positive trait. Are we now meant to believe that bare arms, face, calves, midriffs and cleavage are not simply fashion but a progressive state of dress? Societies teem with differing ideas about what kinds of clothing denotes modesty, liberation, oppression, equality, sexiness and beauty. One wonders whether the social workers and judges in Silmi’s case believe no one influences their own clothing choices.
Western societies like to think they are at the forefront of a cultural timeline that applies in the same way to all cultures. A neocolonialist predisposition to see migrant women as oppressed and backward becomes inevitable but, logically, if Silmi is insufficiently evolved then many women born in Europe also do not deserve their citizenship: those who stay with violent partners, perhaps, or who fail to work outside the home.
Many countries require longtime foreign residents to pass language and culture tests before being allowed to naturalise. It would be nice to avoid judgments based on the most superficial and cliched of markers: how women look.
The Manhattan Institute has produced an assimilation index comparing the census data of different migrant groups with the established US population. The measures are economic (jobs, education, home ownership), cultural (language, marriage, childbearing) and civic (naturalisation, military service). Most groups do better by one measure than others. In this scheme, Silmi’s desire – and two attempts – to become French would count as indicating more assimilation.
Instead, she and her husband feel alienated and rejected. What exactly did France gain with that result?
Should women wear make up?
Western societies are in fact the only ones where individual rights are respected. It has nothing to do with imperialism or colonialism to simply acknowledge the truth.
The arab and muslim states are all rogue states, there’s no doubt. First tell their governments to let women wear what they want instead of prescribing the burka which is a symbol of oppression.