Burka a proxy for killers we can’t catch
WHEN a society starts obsessing over a piece of woman’s clothing, as if eliminating it would banish its worst nightmares, then you know it is in a state of moral panic. Women’s clothes, whatever part of the body they do or don’t cover, are never the source of the problem. They are always merely the symptom – even when that garment is a full veil that covers every square centimetre of flesh except the eyes. So, when politicians start proposing burka bans in response to terror, as German interior minister Thomas de Maiziere did last Friday, it’s clear they are getting desperate. Unable to deal with actual aggressors or sources of radicalisation, they clutch at the one thing of substance that seems easy to grasp – the fluttering black fabric of the niqab and the burka.
In proposing a ban on the face veil in a limited number of public places such as schools and universities, de Maiziere declared that “we unanimously reject the burka, it does not fit with our liberal-minded society”.
The trouble with censorship is that one ban tends to follow another, and Germany might want to look across the border to France for a lesson in what happens when you begin with a “limited” restriction like this.
That country began in 2004 by banning the headscarf in schools and universities, and progressed in 2010 to a facial veil ban in all public places. And now, five French mayors have banned the burkini – full-body swimwear worn primarily, but not solely, by Muslim women – from the beach. Hatred of burkas, burkinis and the women who wear them is now all the rage, licensed as it is by authority.
Meanwhile, what has happened in France, according to Agnes de Feo, a sociologist who has studied the impact of the burka ban, is that more women have started to wear the veil as a way of rebelling, of making a political statement. More women have retreated into their homes to work and live. More Muslim women feel they are unwelcome in France. “We created a monster,” said de Feo. “Those who have left to go and fight in Syria say that this law is one of things that encouraged them. They saw it as a law against Islam. It had the effect of sending a message that Islam was not welcome in France.”
Fear has grown around the burka in the years following its initial prohibition in France. Partly this has been triggered by the arrival in Europe of Islamic terrorism, but this is also the story of how a piece of clothing has become the focus of difficult feelings. When people in Europe voice discomfort with the veil, or even the burkini, they give many different reasons for their anxiety. Perhaps they say, as French Prime Minister Manuel Valls did while expressing support for the local council burkini bans, that “it is the expression of a political project, a counter-society, based notably on the enslavement of women”. Perhaps they say, like Thierry Migoule, a town official in Cannes, the first resort to ban the burkini, that it is “clothing that conveys an allegiance to the terrorist movements that are waging war against us”. Or perhaps their concern is for community and integration. German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week said she believed that “a completely covered woman has almost no chance of integrating herself in Germany”. It’s hard, however, to work out how a woman who feels compelled to wear the veil would be better integrated by effectively being banned from such spaces. The stories that have emerged recently from France smack of confusion and panic – and perhaps that’s not surprising given that the country is reeling from its own version of 9/11, the terror attacks of Paris, and more recently the Bastille Day atrocity in Nice. In Corsica, where one French mayor put in place a burkini ban, the reporting of how it was triggered was initially muddled. The first media stories suggested that a beach fight was started after a Muslim man tried to stop tourists from photographing his wife, who was wearing a burkini. Later, it emerged that the fight had nothing to do with burkinis. Nevertheless the burkini had already been blamed. Just as the sight of female flesh is said by some Muslims to inflame male desire, so the sight of a full body wetsuit can incite a brawl. Like many people, I find the burka an assault on my feminist values. But banning it has made it into something more. We have made the burka the repository of all our difficult feelings about Islamic extremism and terrorism to such an extent that we now find it impossible to see the woman beneath the veil. She is hidden from view not just by the fabric itself, or by patriarchal oppressors, but by our own dread and angst. And that can only oppress her all the more.