Paris:
Secularism is the religion of contemporary France. And the enforcers
of that faith have a new target.
“Today... we are confronted by certain Muslim women wearing the
burqa, which covers and fully envelops the body and the head like a
moving prison,” said Andre Gerin, a Communist Party legislator who
joined 57 others on Wednesday in signing a motion for a
parliamentary committee to study possible legislation to ban the
wearing of the traditional costume in public. The legislators said
the garment amounted “to abreach of individual freedoms on our
national territory.”
France, home to Europe’s largest Muslim minority, is strongly
attached to its secular values and to gender equality, and many see
the burqa as an infringement of women’s rights which is increasingly
being imposed on women by radicals. The country has been divided by
debates about how best to reconcile those principles with religious
freedom.
“We have to be able to open a frank dialogue...about the place of
Islam in this country...taking into account the slide towards
fundamentalism (of some Muslims),” Gerin said. He said a growing
number of Muslim women in France, not only in big cities but also in
rural areas, were wearing burqas. The deputies did not say how many
women were wearing burqas, though anecdotal evidence suggests there
has been a rise.
The legislators’ proposal echoed a controversy that raged for a
decade in France about Muslim girls wearing headscarves in class.
Eventually, a law was passed in 2004 banning pupils from wearing
conspicuous signs of their religion at state schools. Critics say
the law stigmatized Muslims at a time when the country should be
fighting discrimination in the job and housing markets that has
caused a rift between mainstream society and many youths from an
immigrant background.
(The Times of India)
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