Middle East Muddle
Daniel Martin Varisco
In late August, a Muslim woman on a beach in Nice, France was forced to remove her top and was allegedly fined for wearing a burqini, a modest full-body swimsuit that has been banned in Nice and several French towns. The photo of the incident went viral, furthering the divisive debate in Europe about clothing that is said to challenge secular values. Only a few days later women protesters in cities around the world, including four in France, celebrated “Go Topless” day to draw attention to women’s rights. What a woman wears or does not wear has now become a political issue.
Above all else, these forms of covering are icons of Islamic identity in distinct cultural contexts. In some societies, like Saudi Arabia, there is tremendous family and social pressure to wear the niqab. Do all these women really want to wear such a form of dress? Of course not, and many disrobe their cultural padding as soon as the airplane is in the air on the way to Paris or London, where they may buy the latest fashions. Other women say it is their own decision out of a sense of family loyalty or because they believe this is what God wants them to do. Whatever the reason an individual provides, these restrictive coverings also serve as symbols of the oppression of women in patriarchal Islamic contexts. The point is not that all Muslim women are oppressed, nor even suffer greater gender stereotypes than anywhere else. The vast majority of Muslims do not live in Saudi Arabia and are not Salafi. In the West, you will pass many Muslim women on the street and have no idea what their religion is.
The latest controversy going through the courts in France is a ban on the swimsuit known as a burqini,created by a Muslim woman living in Australia. The name is perhaps part of the problem, since it is actually a body suit rather than something that covers the entire body. Indeed it could easily be confused with a regular body suit used by divers. The face is always showing, as a Google search readily reveals. If nothing is worn over the burqini, it actually reveals the curves of the body more than the bathing outfits worn by Victorian women only a century ago. The recent case in Nice, where a police patrol forced a woman to remove her outer clothes and fined her 38 Euros for wearing a burqini, went viral in cyberspace. Covering her body is interpreted as an assault on France’s “secularism”. While France bans public displays of headscarves, yarmulkes and large crosses in public institutions, it is quite a step to target the burqini, a simple body suit, as an assault on secularism when it is on a beach. It is alright for a woman to go topless on a French beach, but probably not in a public school. Would the police arrest nuns playing in the water?
France, the nation that coined the term terrorisme, needs to get over the French Revolution mentality of liberté and the idea that secularism means the denial of religion, or is so frail that the wearing of a religious symbol is perceived as a threat. A woman wearing a burqini on the beach is not proselytizing, nor forcing other women to cover up. She may not even be Muslim, since sales of the burqini are made to women of all faiths. Lost in the image of the burqini-clad woman in Nice is what several bystanders said as the police forced her to remove her outer garments; they shouted for her to go back to her country. The French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has promoted such Islamophobia by stating that the burqini is a symbol of the enslavement of women. Really? Most female slaves in the past were stripped naked. Does the Prime Minister think that there is such a thing as clothing that is not symbolic? It is still illegal to simply walk about nude in France, so how can not covering be a sign of a moral problem? It’s a beach after all. Nude or in a body suit, it is time to stop being so clothed-minded. The decision on August 26 by a top French court to suspend the ban is a welcome break to a controversy that is nothing but Islamophobic bias.