one vote against ....

The French Senate voted almost unanimously to ban face-covering Islamic veils in public, opening the way for the enactment of the colloquially called anti-burqa law. Interestingly, 246 senators overwhelmingly outnumbered the one and only opponent of the law who voted against it. Similarly, in July, the bill sailed through the Assemblée nationale by a vote of 335 to 1. Despite the intense public debate, within the serene confines of France's legislature the law united government and opposition and was met with virtually no resistance. 

It is telling that not only the rights of the estimated 2,000 French Muslim women who wear variants of the full cover, but also the broader right of self determination of hundreds of thousands of French Muslim women which the bill symbolically challenges have not been deemed worth defending by the French legislators.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Muslim associations in Malmö and Lund - a snapshot [part 1]

Image
translated from 'Muslimska föreningar i Malmö och Lund – en ögonblicksbild'  originally published in islamologi.se on December 2nd, 2010 and translated by Spyros A. Sofos By Erica Li Lundqvist & Leif Stenberg During a visit to the urban district of Rosengård in Malmö in order to photograph the "cellar mosques", we suddenly got lost in the suburban jungle. A group of children and young people noticed us wondering and asked us what we were doing. "We are looking for a mosque", we said, after which they replied in chorus: "There are many!" And they pointed in all directions. The development of Muslim neighbourhoods in Malmö and Lund has been gaining momentum since the first Muslim community was established in Malmö in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today, Islam is a natural, albeit controversial, part of Swedish society. Nevertheless, very little commentary on Islam in Sweden is premised on comprehensive empirical investigation. [1] A prob
Read more

The voice behind the veil

Image
The debate about the face veil, and more generally the acceptability of other forms of female Muslim attire in the West, is not a novel one. Muslim notions of modesty, have often been subverted and colonized by patriarchal practices seeking to restrict women's autonomy. As such, the veil issue has mobilized social forces inspired by liberalism and feminism and generated valuable criticisms of patriarchy in Muslim communities. On the other hand, the 'out of place' look of veiled women in European public spaces has provided fertile ground for the transformation of the veil issue into a potent mobilizing symbol for xenophobic, right wing forces only too happy to jump into the bandwagon of the secular, liberal and feminist opposition to the veil and, often, to incorporate these discourses into their own arguments. In this way, for example, spokespersons of the conservative Spanish Partido Popular such as Alberto Fernandez, a Barcelona city councillor, shed crocodile tears about
Read more

Brown and white men and other stories ...

Image
Courtesy of Washington Post A cartoon that appeared recently in the Washington Post reminded me of a topic I have often discussed in classes and have written about in my book Islam in Europe , notably the construction of the Muslim woman as "subaltern". The cartoon powerfully points out the aporia of the woman over whose body two men, representing ‘Islamic traditionalism’ and ‘European secularism’ respectively are challenging each other. Gayatri Spivak has pointed out this aporia in her discussion of widow self-immolation in colonial India: "The relationship between the imperialist subject and the subject of imperialism is at least ambiguous. The Hindu widow ascends the pyre of the dead husband and immolates herself upon it. This is widow sacrifice… The abolition of this rite by the British has been generally understood as a case of "White men saving brown women from brown men." White women-from the nineteenth-century British Missionary Registers to M
Read more