Originally a comment by Irène Delse on More on the Big Questions.
Let me be the token French citizen and resident, here, and clarify a few misconceptions.
1) There is no general ban on the hidjab in France. There simply is not. Maybe Ms. Sahar al-Faifi was thinking of a recent law (enacted under the former president, right-wing leader N. Sarkozy) against the wearing of full-face veils, like niqab or burqa, in public spaces. (Wether this confusion was an honest mistake or deliberately done in order to generate F.U.D. about “islamophobia”, now, is another question.)
2) This law is a can of worms, that much is true. It was crafted as a way to combat Islamist (mostly Salafist) influence in the Muslim communities, and the government used a few high-profile incidents to justify what they saw as a “necessity” for this law: things like a niqab-clad woman refusing to take off her face veil to testify in court even though she was offered to do so in a side-room with a small number of witnesses. There was also a few jewelry thefts in Paris by men dressed up as female tourists from Saudi Arabia. The niqab served to hide their faces to security cameras in the luxury shops they “visited”! Of course (as could have been predicted by even the thickest of politicos if they had taken the time to think about social and historical circumstances), the law backfired and gave even more publicity to the ultra-conservative Islamists, who now can pose as “victims”. By the way, this law only entails first a cautioning, and then a fine for a repeat offense. But in some instances, it led to confrontation (also predictable) between the woman’s family and/or neighbours and the police, hence more incidents and heightened tensions with a part of the Muslim population. Sigh. There’s many reasons not to be a fan of Sarkozy, and this law is only one of them.
3) As for the hidjab or other religious garments like kippas, Sikh turbans, etc., that don’t hide the face, they are banned here in two very precise circumstances:
a) For students public schools and high-schools, on school ground and during school-organized excursions. The rest of their time, they do as they want.
b) For government workers, during their hours of work, including certain private contractors who provide a public service (like a hospital, nursing home or child-care), if they are subsidised by the national or local government.
But, and this is a very big “but”, these lregulations on religious symbols and garments have been accompanied for more than 20 years now by directives to help schools and other administrators enforce them in a conciliatory way, in order to let believers practice their religious customs (like covering their head) in a way that doesn’t attract disproportionate attention to them. For instance, a hidjab is out, but a bandanna knotted over the hair is fine, and so is any other kind of hat than a kippa. In fact, I have a colleague who is an Orthodox Jew and he’s perfectly OK with wearing a beret at work, and so is the government agency we both work for! (Berets are a commonplace style for men here, and so are bandannas and knitted hats for both sexes.)
What this means in practice is that no, a believer doesn’t have to “choose between [their] career and [their] religious/cultural identity”, as A Hermit fears, but find a style that doesn’t shout out loud “look at the religion first, but the citizen and human being last”. I hope Québec finds a way to build some similar compromise and spare themselves more political strife under the guise of religion.
Thanks for this; the kind of compromise you describe would be a welcome development in Quebec, but I’m not optimistic. The Charter proposal there is widely seen as an attempt to whip up nativist sentiment by the Parti Quebecois government in anticipation of upcoming elections. As I said in my comment, the presence of hijab wearing civil servants in Quebec is negligible to non-existent so this is very much a solution in search of a problem.
Wow, thanks once again, Ophelia, it’s an honor to be featured here. ^__^
C’est moi qui vous remercie, Irène. 🙂
I should note also that in Quebec the same people proposing the”Values Charter” are fiercely defending the continuing presence of large crucifixes in the National Assembly and other public buildings as part of Quebec’s distinct French culture and therefore exempt from the Charter ban on religious symbols…
The hypocrisy couldn’t be clearer.
This is still (a) the state dictating what people wear, and (b) treating religious clothing as a special case – if only negatively.
France is a fantastic demonstration of how to do secularism wrong.
A Hermit, so basically you are arguing:
1. Fears about “nativist sentiment trumps taking a stand on gender equality.
2. The rightwing is hypocritical about Christianity, therefore non-theist on the left should ignore issues related to Islam.
3. The presence of gender apartheid garments in the government is “negligible” and we should of course only address problems with symbols of inequality in secular governments when they become a ‘a problem’ as defined by you.
*Who thinks Canada (with its right tradition of free expression *cough*) has no laws preventing a “negligible” number of people from wearing KKK or Nazi uniforms to work? But numerous lefties have already made clear that racism/nativism/nationalism are all more important issues than ensuring gender equality.
Shatterface, secularism is an oppositional value relative to religion’s role in society. France is doing exactly what one would expect of a ‘secular’ society, opposing intrusion by religion into shared public life, in this case the inequality preached by certain religions.
And I am sure I am wasting my breath, given you anarchist avatar, but the state regulates various extremes of dress. It is a long and deeply established exception to absolute freedom in every liberal democracy, just like libel/slander laws are ubiquitous restrictions on free speech, even in the U.S..
And like I brought up with A Hermit, do you take the same absolute libertarian stance on racist garments. Can the kiddies show up school in their Jr. SS uniform* and you will go to the mat to defend them?
*Some Asians are obsessed with Hitler/Nazis in a bizarre, non-deological way, before you erroneously assume the hypothetical person would be white. Look up “Hitler chic in Thailand” if you doubt me, but the phenomenon goes beyond there to East Asia.
@ Shatterface: It can be argued that religious clothing is already a special case, because religious organisations call for it being so! So all the state is doing is dealing with the situation. And so far, it’s worked, except for religious extremists (who want to be the only ones to have power over believers) and xenophobic/racists types who agitate over the simple presence of brown people who practice Islam on European soil, and try to torpedo any kind of reasonable, workable agreement that the majority of Muslims are O.K. with, by asking always more restrictions. Like what happened with the decision to ban niqabs in public.
BTW, I find it funny when Western secularists blast this or that policy they don’t agree with, but forget that non-Westerners, including Muslims, can be secularist too…
1) No.
2) No.
3) No.
Really, if you managed to quote any of those points from A Hermit’s posts, I’ll eat my hat.
I honestly don’t know. However, I have 2 minor points:
– There is no ban on Nazi Flags, though law enforcement may intervene in cases where hatred is incited.
– There is literally a town named “Swastika.”
No, I’m arguing that the wearing of a headscarf or skullcap or turban by a clerk in a motor vehicle licensing branch in no way impinges on my liberty, but demanding that individuals who feel they have an obligation to wear such items forgo them impinges on their liberty.
Should Sikhs in government jobs be forced to shave their beards too? Where do we draw the line?
I don’t want the State telling me what I can and cannot wear so I cannot defend them telling others what to wear or not to wear.
And please don’t confuse this issue with the segregation debate; its really a separate question entirely. In fact one of the arguments being made against it in the National Assembly today is that enforcement of such a policy in effect deprives a subset of Muslim women of the option of working outside the home, thus increasing their isolation, especially if this opens the way for private businesses to enforce the same kind of restrictions.
If an accommodation of some sort like the one described by Ms. Delse above were included in the charter I’d be more inclined to support it, but as it stands it seems to me to be too restrictive, it doesn’t address any real problem, it is not being uniformly applied as long as that fucking crucifix is hanging over the speaker’s chair in the NA and the whole issue seems to have been whipped up to distract voters from real issues like corruption by appealing to the racial fears of conservative anti-immigrant “pure laine” voters. If you want comparisons to the KKK and the Nazis that’s a more appropriate place to look…
It’s not really funny, but for some reason this made me laugh. I had visions of pantomime Frenchmen.
I think this proposed charter in Québec is a bit of a smokescreen. It lets the government not address the fundamental issue, i.e. that religious people and/or organizations condone and impose behaviour that are discriminatory by their very nature. A religion that refuses to ordain women priests is guilty of sexual discrimination. A religion that maintains that the testimony of a women is half as worthy as that of a man does exactly the same. If a woman is not allowed to pray before the same wall as men, the same situation obtains.
Human rights organizations should go to court against religious organizations on these grounds. They can but win, otherwise Charters of Human Rights will be shown to be window dressing, This is the fundemantal issue, not what you wear or where you wear it.
Shatterface,
I absolutely agree with you. I think that regulating what religious garments people wear, even with the “compromises” named, is still not okay.
I teach at several colleges. I have had many, many students who wear religious clothing, from fundamentalist xian girls who wear long dresses, to Muslim girls who wear the hijab or, very occasionally, the burqa, to men who have long beards and dress modestly because of their beliefs. I would never think to criticize what they wear or tell them that it is inappropriate in my class. If there is attention drawn to them, then the problem is with the person who’s so flabbergasted by a person who is a different religion than they are that they are drawing attention to it, not with them. I think this is why cross-cultural communication is so badly needed in the public sphere. Saying that religious garb “attracts disproportionate attention” and therefore the GARB must be banned is punishing the victim. What should be done instead is education so that people with little experience with religious garb don’t make assholes of themselves by creating a scene about it.
Shatterface, secularism is an oppositional value relative to religion’s role in society. France is doing exactly what one would expect of a ‘secular’ society, opposing intrusion by religion into shared public life, in this case the inequality preached by certain religions.
No, secularism opposes religious privilege: it doesn’t make religion a special case where any expression is stamped out.
When religious people winge about ‘intolerant’ secularists it’s France which provides them with their evidence.
BTW, I find it funny when Western secularists blast this or that policy they don’t agree with, but forget that non-Westerners, including Muslims, can be secularist too…
Who the hell denied that?
@ Shatterface: It can be argued that religious clothing is already a special case, because religious organisations call for it being so
Some call for growing beards too: maybe you should strap them down and shave them.
And making people dress in berets is taking the piss. It’s a cartoon parody of Frenchness. They might as well force them to wear strings of onions round their necks.
Oh, and what is France’s position on Jesus and Mo t-shirts? The Flying Spaghetti Monster? A ban on religious symbols would hit us too. And what about death metal t-shirts featuring Satanic images?
People who support bans are usually the first to come bleating when the laws they call for are turned on them.
Shatterface @17:
Um.
You write of cultural symbols as if they were also religious, like the veiling, and thus comparable.
Bah.
(And you do realise that neither is any of those other things gender-exclusive like the veiling is, right?)
France’s ban on religious symbols in government buildings applies to all religious symbols, not only gender exclusive symbols.
Oh yes, white men telling me that my “veiling” is cultural and not religious. That’s not oppressive at all.
Late to this party, but even so perhaps a little bit à propos of pantomime: Yellow ‘bandana’ trick by Carl-Einar Häckner
John’s point was that the hijab is religious, while Shatterface’s examples were merely cultural.
Though I admit that I fail to see how mislabelling hijab’s as cultural rather than religious is oppressive.