01 September 2016
Burkini Ban
Intolerance or safeguard?
by Lynda Goetz
When I first heard about the burkini ban a few weeks ago, my reaction was mixed. My first thought (like that of so many others, I am sure) was that it sounded like an unacceptable intolerance on the part of a right-wing French mayor ‘pandering to the Islamophobia of… far-right counterparts in the Front National’, as my colleague Richard Pooley put it. However, as the furore has continued to grow, and other seaside towns have repeated the ban, and the courts have become involved, and the ‘twitterati’ have voiced their outrage at this assault on our liberal society, the more my second thoughts have come to the fore.
For anyone who has studied the history of France, the division between state and church is entirely understandable, although it was not actually put into law until the beginning of the 20th century. France, still a predominantly Catholic country, has been wary of the power of the Church for centuries. The unpopular Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, and their influence on Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV in the 17th C, were followed in the 18th C by French thinkers and writers of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire, Montesquieu and Diderot, who saw religion as divisive and intolerant, and finally in 1789 by the overthrow of Crown, aristocracy and Church in the French Revolution. After a period during which Church assets were confiscated and priests had to swear allegiance to the Republic, Napoleon came to an uneasy truce with the Church, essentially leaving it alone as long as it confined itself to spiritual matters. The Concordat, as it was known, lasted just over a century from 1801 until 1905, when the Third Republic decreed the separation of Church and State.
This law meant there was strict official neutrality in religious matters. Clearly this meant not allowing any proselytising in public buildings, including schools where future ‘citoyens’ were being educated. In 1937, French schools were instructed to keep religious signs out of school buildings. This was non-controversial at the time. Following the massive influx of Muslims from the former colonies in the 1960s and 70s, however, things began to change. It was not the original immigrants who questioned the secular nature of their adopted country, but second and third generation Muslims who, having led different lives from their parents, see things differently. The 1937 ban was overturned in 1989, but reinstated in a modified form in 1994 to ban ‘ostentatious’ signs. Clothing and other symbols were a different matter, however, and until the early 21st C it was for individual schools and their heads to decide how they dealt with each case. Between 1989 and 1996 there were an increasing number of incidents which were taken through the courts, and early this century the loi 224-2004 du 15 mars 2004 was enacted amidst a great deal of controversy and brought into effect at the beginning of the new school year in September 2004. This law, sometimes referred to in the press abroad as ‘the French headscarf ban’, is basically in support of the separation of Church and State and bans the wearing of all symbols or garb which show affiliation with any religion in public primary and secondary schools. This does not affect the numerous religious schools which exist in France.
What has all this got to do with the burkini, you ask? Well, a great deal as it happens, as it all emphasises the extent to which France values its status as a secular (laïque) state. The burkini, unlike the bikini, is not simply a garment of choice on the beach. (Whilst it may help prevent melanoma, it can hardly be comfortable). The burkini is a statement or symbol of religious allegiance. However, since a beach is not a school, there was nothing in French law to say it could not be worn. It thus fell to individual mayors, like headmasters, to make decisions for their areas of jurisdiction. Are such decisions right-wing, intolerant and Islamaphobic, as many on the liberal left would like to present them, or are they in fact well-judged responses to a creeping and insidious infiltration of secular society by a religion which appears to have little tolerance or respect for those who do not share its beliefs? Are we going to be forced to adapt our society to their religious customs and scruples or are they going to adapt their customs and scruples to the societies in which they now live? Which way around should this work?
An incident related by journalist Gavin Mortimer in the online Coffee House edition of The Spectator a few days ago was both alarming and illuminating. His girlfriend, a nervous driver, was threatened at a French petrol station whilst alone and in her car as she made a sign of the cross before continuing her way on the motorway. Her aggressor was a Muslim male who banged loudly on her window, told her menacingly that in France ‘you don’t make the sign of the cross’ and then added for good measure that the next time she went out she should cover herself up. The man’s veiled wife, or daughter, was in the passenger seat of his car. Female friends of Mr Mortimer’s in France apparently have a fund of similar stories, with Muslim friends on the receiving end of threatening behaviour from fellow but more fundamentalist co-religionists. Various quite serious incidents have been reported in the press. He feels that liberal writers in Britain are failing to understand the degree of extremism now prevailing in France, where Salafists, followers of the most puritanical Islamist ideology, are an increasingly vociferous minority. They want all women covered at all times and, opines Gavin Mortimer, the burkini is part of their strategy. He shares the view of presidential candidate Nicholas Sarkozy that not only is it a religious statement, it is a political statement.
As with the question of free speech (Issue 51 April 2016), what we should tolerate in a liberal society is a reasonable subject for debate. Those who take the view that it is offensive for the French to police what ‘women should and shouldn’t wear’ are missing the point. Surely it is, as Alison Pearson suggests in her column in The Telegraph, ‘the repressive, misogynistic culture’ to which these women belong which ‘denies females agency over their own bodies’. That they ‘choose’ to succumb to that cultural tyranny in the countries they or their parents originally come from is one thing; that we should accept that tyranny in countries where we have our own cultural identities and traditions is another. The old adage ‘When in Rome…’ springs to mind. (And the origins of that seemingly go right back to Saints Augustine or Ambrose, or at the very least Pope Clement XIV in 1777; so perhaps given its Christian origins, the concept does not form part of Muslim cultural inheritance…)
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