So French municipalities finally came to their senses when they were reminded by their judicial system late last week that they cannot dictate French citizens’ fashion statement when The Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, ruled that the beach town of Villeneuve-Loubet, outside Nice, and by definition 30 other towns around the country that have banned the burkini on their beaches, do not have the right to fine Muslim French women for being attired in the full-length swimsuit.
Effectively, by overturning the ban, the court appeared to agree with human rights activists that encroaching on Muslim women’s right to dress as they please is illegal and perhaps also Islamophobic.
“By overturning a discriminatory ban that is fueling prejudice and intolerance, (the court’s) decision has drawn an important line in the sand,” said John Dahluisen, Amnesty International Europe director. It’s also a decision, he may have added, implying that fashion — how individuals, cultural minorities, youth and others choose their attire — is not a right that mayors and city councils should tamper with.
“Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only,” observed Coco Chanel, widely regarded as the greatest fashion designer who ever lived. “Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.” Fashion, in short, is how you show yourself to the world and how you make a statement about your place in it.
And that’s where the burkini (a neologism combining burqa and bikini), the full-body swimsuit that Muslim women wear on the beach to accommodate Islamic traditions of modesty, comes in. Look up an image of it online and you’ll see that it looks uncannily similar to a wetsuit, the kind worn by surfers, divers, canoeists, and others engaged in water sports, which provides them with thermal insulation and buoyancy. The wetsuit never caused controversy when it was invented in 1952.
Before the ban was overturned last Friday, however, the burkini was causing one heck of a controversy in France, a controversy that involved mayors, city councils, an aspiring presidential candidate, a foreign minister, sundry government officials and political commentators, who gave it a leading positional value in the public debate.
Wait, was that for real? The French had so reduced the content of their discourse that they would choose such a nebulous issue to spend so much time and evince so much passion over? The very French without whose contribution to it over the centuries, the Western intellectual tradition would be diminished? Gun-toting French police earnestly chasing after Muslim French women on French beaches ordering them to disrobe, pay a fine or leave? Looks like it.
Here’s a question that pops up in one’s mind: How many cops did it take last week to overpower a middle-aged Muslim woman clad in a burkini at the beach in Nice? Four. A photograph of the incident, that flashed across the globe, and caused a measure outrage, showed three armed members of the metropolitan police, with full ballistic vests on, surrounding the culprit, as a fourth knelt down across from her, presumably ordering her to disrobe or get moving.
At least 30 municipalities on the French Rivera and in northern France had enacted similar bans on the grounds that (hold on to your hat) burkinis are not “respectful of good morals and secularism.” French political culture is obsessed with secularism, or “laicite,” a term that dates back to 1842, prohibiting religious influence in the determination of state policies. In today’s France, that obsession is taken to the lunatic extreme of restricting “religious symbols in public spaces.”
The birkini brouhaha may be over for now, but what will the French come up with next to alienate their citizens of Muslim background, and to make them the laughing stock around the world for turning the most nebulous of issues into a somber one in their public debate, as they did last week?
Effectively, by overturning the ban, the court appeared to agree with human rights activists that encroaching on Muslim women’s right to dress as they please is illegal and perhaps also Islamophobic.
“By overturning a discriminatory ban that is fueling prejudice and intolerance, (the court’s) decision has drawn an important line in the sand,” said John Dahluisen, Amnesty International Europe director. It’s also a decision, he may have added, implying that fashion — how individuals, cultural minorities, youth and others choose their attire — is not a right that mayors and city councils should tamper with.
“Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only,” observed Coco Chanel, widely regarded as the greatest fashion designer who ever lived. “Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.” Fashion, in short, is how you show yourself to the world and how you make a statement about your place in it.
And that’s where the burkini (a neologism combining burqa and bikini), the full-body swimsuit that Muslim women wear on the beach to accommodate Islamic traditions of modesty, comes in. Look up an image of it online and you’ll see that it looks uncannily similar to a wetsuit, the kind worn by surfers, divers, canoeists, and others engaged in water sports, which provides them with thermal insulation and buoyancy. The wetsuit never caused controversy when it was invented in 1952.
Before the ban was overturned last Friday, however, the burkini was causing one heck of a controversy in France, a controversy that involved mayors, city councils, an aspiring presidential candidate, a foreign minister, sundry government officials and political commentators, who gave it a leading positional value in the public debate.
Wait, was that for real? The French had so reduced the content of their discourse that they would choose such a nebulous issue to spend so much time and evince so much passion over? The very French without whose contribution to it over the centuries, the Western intellectual tradition would be diminished? Gun-toting French police earnestly chasing after Muslim French women on French beaches ordering them to disrobe, pay a fine or leave? Looks like it.
Here’s a question that pops up in one’s mind: How many cops did it take last week to overpower a middle-aged Muslim woman clad in a burkini at the beach in Nice? Four. A photograph of the incident, that flashed across the globe, and caused a measure outrage, showed three armed members of the metropolitan police, with full ballistic vests on, surrounding the culprit, as a fourth knelt down across from her, presumably ordering her to disrobe or get moving.
At least 30 municipalities on the French Rivera and in northern France had enacted similar bans on the grounds that (hold on to your hat) burkinis are not “respectful of good morals and secularism.” French political culture is obsessed with secularism, or “laicite,” a term that dates back to 1842, prohibiting religious influence in the determination of state policies. In today’s France, that obsession is taken to the lunatic extreme of restricting “religious symbols in public spaces.”
The birkini brouhaha may be over for now, but what will the French come up with next to alienate their citizens of Muslim background, and to make them the laughing stock around the world for turning the most nebulous of issues into a somber one in their public debate, as they did last week?
