Global General

French Senate passes ban on full Muslim veils

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-09-15 07:02

Anne (L), an assumed name, a 31-year old French woman who has been fined for wearing a niqab while driving, speaks with her husband Lies Hebbadj as they leave the police tribunal in Nantes June 28, 2010. [Agencies]

However, the bill has its Muslim defenders, like a women's rights group active in heavily immigrant neighborhoods.

"How can we allow the burqa here and at the same time fight the Taliban and all the fundamentalist groups across the world?" said the president of NPNS, Sihem Habchi. "I'm Muslim and I can't accept that because I'm a woman I have to disappear," she told APTN.

Raphael Liogier, a sociology professor who heads the Observatory of the Religious in Aix-en-Provence, says that Muslims in France are already targeted by hate-mongers and the ban on face-covering veils "will officialize Islamophobia."

"With the identity crisis that France has today, the scapegoat is the Muslim," he told The Associated Press.

Indeed, the justice minister said that the French "ask about the future of their society, of their nation" as they "see the internationalization of our society."

"The Senate must guarantee the permanence of our values ... which forge our identity," she said.

Ironically, instead of helping some women integrate, the measure may keep them cloistered in their homes to avoid exposing their faces in public.

"I won't go out. I'll send people to shop for me. I'll stay home, very simply," said Oum Al Khyr, who wears a "niqab" that hides all but the eyes.

"I'll spend my time praying," said the single woman "over age 45" who lives in Montreuil on Paris' eastern edge. "I'll exclude myself from society when I wanted to live in it."

The law banning the veil would take effect only after a six-month period designed to convince women to show their faces.

The Interior Ministry estimates the number of women who fully cover themselves at some 1,900, with a quarter of them converts to Islam and two-thirds with French nationality.

The French parliament wasted no time in working to get a ban in place, opening an inquiry shortly after the French president said in June 2009 that full veils that hide the face are "not welcome" in France.

It was unclear, however, how police would enforce the law, from handing out fines to hunting down any men who might force the veil on their wives and daughters.

"I will accept the fine with great pleasure," said Drider, vowing to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if she gets caught.