There are a few products worth importing from France, such as cheese, statues and affordable health care. Then there are things that I wish would stay on that side of the Atlantic (or vanish completely): Xenophobia and religious intolerance, for starters.
As uncomfortable as it must be to practice Islam in post-9/11 America, the French government, under the leadership of former president Jacques Chirac and current president Nicolas Sarkozy, has done everything in its power to make France inhospitable for the nation’s 5 million Muslims (Western Europe’s largest Muslim population), many of them immigrants from Northern Africa and the Middle East.
Many of France’s Islam-phobic policy changes over the last decade have been promoted under the banner of secularism, a founding value of the French Republic. In 2004, for example, France banned the hijab, the headscarf typically worn by Muslim women in public schools.
Isolated, this law fits with the French desire to maintain the commons as a religiously neutral space and encourage gender equality, but in the broader context of increasing xenophobia and heightened vigilance over immigration, the hijab ban came off as an attack on the visual, religious identity of French Muslim women.
In a similar vein, President Sarkozy now endorses a ban on burqas and other full-face veils — not just in schools, but anywhere in public. In June of last year, Sarkozy called the full-face veil a “sign of debasement” and stated bluntly that burqas and similar apparel are “not welcome” anywhere in France.
This week Jean-François Copé, the parliamentary leader of Sarkozy’s party, submitted legislation, to be debated in March, banning any “outfit or accessory whose effect is to hide the face” from “places open to the public or on the streets.” Except during carnivals, anyone who refuses to remove veils would be fined the approximate equivalent of $1,090.
What disturbs me about the burqa is it that it represents such a literal, visual suppression of female identity — yet banning the burqa would weave a symbolic veil for the religious identity of French Muslim women. The new law would demand that burqa-wearing women (granted, a small minority of French Muslim women) suppress part of their religious selves if they want to participate in French society, just as women in Saudi Arabia or Iran must mask their bodies before walking out the front door. In effect, banning full veils could confine some women to their living rooms, which would be counter-productive to Sarkozy’s plan to somehow force the French cultural identity on immigrants. If an immigrant woman is told in one country that she wears too little and in another that she wears too much, where is she to feel at home?
This is a moment in European politics that makes me grateful for the American obsession with individualism, which, in its nobler form, is expressed in our vehement defense of First Amendment rights. Though both bikinis and burqas have been labeled from time to time as symbols of degradation, I could put on either outfit, open my front door and walk to the library without experiencing any legal ramifications.
Of course, the U.S. has its own crude manifestations of xenophobia. Take, for example, the aftermath of December’s botched terrorist attempt on Northwest Airlines Flight 253, when retired Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas G. McInerney told Fox News that all Muslim men between the ages of 18 and 28 should be strip-searched at airports. By looking across the ocean, we know how silly our own prejudices must appear.
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