Banning the Burqa: The Battle over Dress & Freedom

At the end of last week, it became clear that Belgium had become Europe’s first country to vote for a ban of the Islamic dress, the burqa, in its lower house. On Thursday, all legislators of the Lower House who were present in the chamber voted for the nationwide ban. The upper house will need to affirm the vote. The French government is also in the process of drafting a bill which will ban the full Islamic head dress, despite the distinct probability it could be struck down for being unconstitutional.

The Belgian ban violates so many conventions the list would be too long to mention in a short piece. International conventions, the European Union’s own laws, and an assortment of other protocols, have all been breached in spectacular fashion. The governments of both Denmark and the Netherlands have made their position on this clear: such a ban impinges on religious freedom. The breach has been deemed necessary in the battle between fundamentalism and perceived Western values. Importantly, it seems to assert a new, more vigorous form of secularism that undermines the very liberal regime it purports to protect. Consider the views of Silvana Koch-Mehrin of the European Parliament, who has argued that the covering of women ‘openly supports values that we do not share in Europe’ (RIA Novosti, May 2). Belgium’s move may well signify a broader European push.

‘We’re the first country to spring the locks that have made a good number of women slaves, and we hope to be the first followed by France, Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands; countries that think,’ claimed the somewhat hyperbolic Belgian centre-right politician Denis Ducarme. The implications here are clear: the burqa, being a symbol of oppression and enslavement, must be banned to miraculously free the oppressed of Islam. Those nation states that do so are invariably entities of thought rather than states of obscurantism. Ducarme leaves little room to manoeuvre on the subject: his mind is made up with crystalline clarity. The same can be said about France’s Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, who said on May 2 that countries will simply seize on this to justify ‘repressive laws against women.’ Far from deterring the Sarkozy government, it has simply emboldened it. Every one has a distinct view on how to protect ‘their’ women.

Ducarme does have precedents to build on in making such arguments. We need go no further than Turkey, which found itself validated in banning women’s headscarfs from Turkish universities in a vital court decision. In the 2005 decision of Leyla Sahin v Turkey, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights propounded a definition of secularism mooted as dangerous by various legal scholars. The court had effectively provided legal padding to other governments to undertake the same intrusive measures. France itself, which is on the fast track to banning the burqa with Belgium, went so far as to ban religious symbols from secondary schools in 2004.

The paradox of such a ban is that symbols such as the burqa can be inverted. Do we care to remember how Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja of the Australian Democrats played with the hijab with effect in 2003? For the Belgian political establishment, it is a sinister shackle on feminine expression, an archaic symbol that suggests bastions of darkness that societies can best live without. Kouchner similarly sees such dress as a matter of incarceration. Remove the burqa, and the light of freedom shall burst forth with its emancipative powers.

Yet this ban invests the burqa with a certain power, making it a weapon for, ironically, female expression. Some advocates of the hijab and more pervasive coverings have also deemed such dress to be themselves a form of liberation against masculine oppression, or, if nothing else, an outward sign of modesty. Thus, we come full circle.

Meddling in such matters of religious expression through prohibition and punitive fines serves merely to fuel anger. This is why such intrusions can rarely ever be effective in eradicating, let alone combating the threat of Islamism. As Natasha Walter put it in the Guardian (Jan 20, 2004), ‘[W]e should take a stand against those who would force women to wear a headscarf – and those who would force them not to wear it.’

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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