Muslim Dress in France: Misguided Equality

I had a brief conversation with a fellow on Reddit recently in the comments on an article in the Sydney Morning Herald. The French, citing unusually strict sanitation rules for their public swimming pools, have banned the use of so-called Burqinis, a portmanteau of Burqa and Bikini. The French have been particularly stringent in maintaining the secular nature of their republic, banning the hijab and other religious symbols from schools in 2004. Adding another dimension, the French state has also framed the restriction of dress in terms of individual right. President Sarkozy stated on June 22 that

The problem of the burqa is not a religious problem, it’s a problem of liberty and women’s dignity. It’s not a religious symbol, but a sign of subservience and debasement. I want to say solemnly, the burqa is not welcome in France. In our country, we can’t accept women prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity. That’s not our idea of freedom.

Which leaves us with several distinctions: The hijab, a head scarf which many Abrahamic religions wear a variation of for modesty purposes, is a religious symbol and, as such, is banned from schools. Presumably male Jewish children are restricted from wearing the yarmulke as well. The burqa is a tool for oppression, not a religious symbol and, as such, should be banned outright. The burqini is merely a sanitation hazard. This is reasonable enough. However, using this classification scheme, what is a burqa that is appreciated by the wearer? Reddit user Paqza writes

On of my friends who is fairly liberal on most things recently converted to Islam and wore a burqa while teaching in Yemen. She says that surprisingly, she really appreciated the experience because she actually noticed that people started appreciating her more for her intellect and less for her body.

I took the surprise felt by Paqza’s friend to imply that she did not normally wear a burqa in her home country and did so in Yemen to adhere to the local, more strict religious custom. She enjoyed the dress as her intellectual identity was no longer obscured by her physical appearance, the former she values equally or more so than the later. This, using the French scheme, would make the woman’s physical appearance, in a not-trivial regard, a “screen” that deprives the woman of her intellectual identity and her physical appearance a “debasement”. Though I imagine the woman’s identity is roughly composed of equal parts between the two it is interesting that the French scheme removes this choice.

Attacking a firm distinction, presumably in the West, that Paqza did not strong imply insomniac84 replied

Yes, because as a woman no one cares about your intellect if you don’t wear a burqa.

He goes on to say

She had no chance to be respected for her intellect without wearing the covering. That’s the culture. So it is no surprise when she covered up she finally should be looked at as a human in that country. That is how the religious country works.

Here insomniac84 is refuting my earlier conclusion. In going to Yemen, he asserts, she wore the burqa under duress by the culture at large. The Britannica notes a variety of female dress custom, though they are invariably modest. I tend to doubt insomniac84’s assertion that she was forced to wear the burqa, though I have no conclusive cultural evidence to the contrary. He continues

Now when muslims move to a non religious country, they too should follow local customs and dress. It should be a two way street, but there religious fanaticals offer no respect to anything that isn’t their religion. Even if they moved to a different country. Instead they try to push their oppressionist beliefs on others no matter where they go.

A message of cultural assimilation, an argument that fails almost entirely. How does one define local dress and why should it necessarily be adhered to? Western women, by custom, once wore long, concealing dresses for the purposes of modesty. They no longer do, however, choosing to wear a wide variety of clothing. Religious groups in the US still advocate very modest dresses for women. Is this oppression? I hardly think so. Yet such groups, following insomniac84’s line of reasoning, are outside of the cultural norm and, so, should dress in a normal fashion. Perhaps the key is the pushing of “oppressionist beliefs on others”? This does not hold either. Paqza never stated that his friend now insisted that all women should wear the burqa, or, indeed, that she continued to do so outside of Yemen. Similarly, I have read nowhere that French Muslims are lobbying to enforce strict dress on the country at large. In fact, the woman in the article which spawned this discussion in the first place was a French convert to Islam. It is not at all unlikely that she chose to adhere to a more traditional Muslim dress code.

Taking issue with the claim of cultural imposition Reliant replied

Should Scots be prohibited from wearing kilts outside of Scotland because that would be forcing their culture on others?

hiscifi quickly replied

no but should they be forced to wear kilts regardless of whether they want to?

Reliant’s rejoinder

Forced how and by whom? Burqas aren’t worn by all Muslim women. (…) What if inside a Scottish cultural group in North America, when they have a family party, all the men in their family must wear a kilt or get disowned. Is that enough to ban kilts?

At this point I jumped in. Though I basically agreed with him I felt that his analogy was flawed. I told him so

Expand family out to include several million people and reword disowned to be “violent reprisal” than, yes, perhaps. The situations simply aren’t analogous. However, such an outright ban does negatively affect those that would choose, of their own free will, to wear such a traditional garb.

The conversation continues on from here, but the key issue, to my mind, is this: How does society at large protect the rights of individuals living unwillingly in restrictive communities without trampling the rights of those that choose to live in such communities? The problem of the burqa, burqini or hijab are not so much the clothes themselves as what they may represent. To ban them outright, as Reliant later points out, is to shuffle this problem under the rug. The basic coercion still exists but it is merely hidden away from public view. Indeed, the outright ban of traditional clothing is equally a coercion of dress for those women that would choose to wear such clothing but may not.

Proscribed fashions in clothing, hair, activity or diet are not, in and of themselves, worthy of legislation. Instead, it is the cultural assumption that one group of people may dictate an individual’s presentation through force that is the actual problem. Reliant sums it up nicely

[I]f the victim isn’t willing to help, how far should the government go to protect someone for their own sake? If a woman is married to someone who is willing to threaten physical violence over the wearing of a headscarf, what other things that would the husband threaten physical violence over? Even if you ban it, the problem doesn’t go away, it only hides it from being seen.