Tori Amos once sang, "and the man with the golden gun thinks he knows so much."
On June 22, 2009, President of France Nicolas Sarkozy said to Parliament that the burqa is not welcome in France and that the French people cannot accept women cut off from a social life and imprisoned behind a screen. If I didn't know any better, I would have thought Sarkozy was my BFFL, and luckily, he doesn't know that I can only resist the charms of the French language when it puts on a feminist façade.
Like Sarkozy, other major political figures, including Prime Minister François Fillon and President of the Union for a Popular Movement Jean−François Copé, support a ban of the veil (which will be used to refer to both the burqa and the niqab). On Jan. 26, the 32 lawmakers who had been called to reflect over the question of the veil for six months recommended that the government ban it in all public services, such as hospitals, public transportation and administrative offices.
I can understand the reasoning that necessitates the visibility of a person's face and also the oversight in using just the term burqa as all−inclusive, even though the burqa differs from the niqab. What I find truly problematic though is that these political figures dress up their rhetoric in a linguistic burqa, veiling the stripping of agency from women and the risk of stigmatizing the six million Muslims living in France. The proposed law takes away the choice from women while demonizing the Salafi sect of Islam (the Sunni Islamic movement requiring that women wear a veil) as only a propagator of gender inequality. Sarkozy's statement implicitly valorizes a modernity Western cultures embody, as if France has progressed enough to overlook the continuing fight for gender equality.
Although the most recent figure I've seen indicates that only around 2,000 women wear the veil, 32 lawmakers had to convene for six months to propose a law forbidding it. Why did an issue directly affecting just a minuscule percentage of the population receive such attention? If Sarkozy truly regarded the rights of women as requiring consideration to this degree, wouldn't requiring that the law's specialists discuss the issues of women's rights vis−à−vis the veil result in a more productive and ultimately constructive legislative session? Just imagine the universal impact and the anti−misogynistic message that would have resulted if the group had discussed gender inequality within a larger context while taking into account the question of the veil. But as the burqa symbolizes the subjugation of women, according to Sarkozy, the centrality of the discussion remained only on the veil, since the French government cannot accept a physically visible manifestation of the inequality of the sexes, while its pervasiveness throughout societal institutions remains ignored.
Thus, the feminist veneer masking the issue frames the proposed law as a step toward freeing the women supposedly subjugated under the veil. However, as the 32 lawmakers did not actually focus on women's rights, it seems likely that the small minority of women wearing the veil will fall through the legislative cracks and deal with the aftermath without any support if the law passes, which will further marginalize these women who cannot simply change their lifestyle without suffering societal reprisal.
Though Copé rationalized his full support of the ban by framing it as an issue of security and the type of society in which one would want to live, I think I'll choose to be wary of misguided rhetoric hiding behind veils, rather than the women expressing their faith in a visible fashion. The solution isn't simple, but we can begin by giving women full agency.
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Elisha Sum is a junior majoring in English and French. He can be reached at Elisha.Sum@tufts.edu.
