Burkini ban harks back to French colonialism
IMAGES of a Muslim woman being forced to remove some of her clothing by armed male police officers at a beach in Nice went viral last week, sparking global outrage. The officers were enforcing a French ban on the burkini – a full-body swimsuit that allows women to swim with the majority of their skin covered.
France’s highest court ruled last week that the burkini ban was illegal.
Despite the ruling, police have continued to target women with modest swimwear along the French Riviera, Nice and Côte d’Azur. Several mayors have vowed to uphold the ban.
But why is a western European country
– that prides itself on being liberal-minded and democratic – telling women what to wear? Officials claimed that the burkini goes against the French value of laïcité (secularism). A French court ruled that banning the burkini was “necessary” to fight terrorism – without explaining how skin-concealing swimwear posed a threat to France’s national security.
The French fixation with what Muslim women wear is not about secularism or security. It originates from French colonialism in North Africa, particularly Algeria, where so many French Muslims have their roots.
The veil was as much a French obsession then as it is now. Public burnings of headscarves by “liberated” Algerian women were regularly organised by their French colonial masters.
Frantz Fanon’s essay Algeria Unveiled was written a year later. In it, Fanon argued that the French believed that Algerian society’s capacity for resistance could be destroyed through women. For many Algerians, the veil helped preserve their national existence. For the French colonisers, unveiling Algerian women symbolised the capture of the country.
Between 1957 and 1960, the French army forcibly transferred 2 million Algerians from their villages in the mountains to internment camps near the city. They were photographed by army photographer, Marc Garanger, so that identity cards could be produced. After seeing the photos, Garanger’s commander ordered that all the women be photographed without their veils. Garanger recalled that the women were so humiliated about revealing their face and hair to anyone outside their family, that they stood before him “as if they were naked”. There are violent parallels between these 50-year-old photographs and the ones that emerged last week: French men with guns ordering Muslim women to undress.
France continues to police Muslim women’s bodies. Since 1989, hundreds of Muslim female students have been suspended, and even expelled, for refusing to remove their headscarves at schools. By 2004, the headscarf was banned completely at French public schools. In 2010, a bill was passed banning the covering of the face, denying Muslim women the right to wear a veil in public. In 2013, a nursery school assistant was fired for refusing to remove her headscarf. Hundreds of similar cases of workplace discrimination were documented by French Muslim rights groups.
Throughout it all, mainstream French feminists remained silent, tacitly approving the French government’s actions. Yet, these same feminists, and other champions of women’s rights, denounced the burkini ban. Muslim women have as much right to wear a face veil or headscarf, as they do the burkini. You cannot cherry-pick which pieces of clothing Muslim women have the right to wear.
France’s ban on the veil, headscarf and other forms of Muslim women’s dress is not laïcité, liberte egalite or fraternite. It is institutionalised Islamophobia and racism. The bodies of Muslim women continue to be the battlefield on which France demonstrates its cultural dominance.