A mainstream
British retailer sells a fashion version of them on the high street. But
the “burkini”, a body-covering swimsuit (named with the portmanteau of
“burqa” and “bikini”), has been banned this summer by the mayor of
Cannes from his stretch of Mediterranean beach, as well as by a dozen
other mayors of French seaside towns. In countries with a tradition of
liberal multiculturalism, such a ban is greeted by incomprehension, if
not ridicule. Within France, however, it enjoys widespread political
backing, not just from the far-right National Front but also from the
mainstream right and left. Manuel Valls, the Socialist prime minister,
has argued that the burkini is “not a fashion item”, but represents the
“enslavement of women”. Why are the French so offended by Islamic body
covering?
The government’s defence of the
burkini ban rests on worries about religious tension and public order
after recent terrorist attacks, coupled with two underlying principles.
The first is laïcité, a strict form of secularism enshrined by
law in 1905 after a struggle against authoritarian Catholicism. This
principle is supposed to keep religion out of public life, and has been
the basis of previous French bans: on the headscarf (and other
“conspicuous” religious symbols, including the Jewish kippah and
oversized crucifixes) in state schools (in 2004), and the face-covering niqab
in all public places (in 2010). The other principle is women’s
equality. It may appear bizarre, or frivolous, to argue that women
should bare more flesh. But many on the French left in particular regard
the need to protect women from a male-imposed doctrine as being at
stake—and are willing to put it even before liberty, another founding
value of republican France. The logic of the burkini, says Laurence
Rossignol, the Socialist women’s minister, is to “hide women’s bodies in
order better to control them.”
Over the years,
such efforts have long been met with dismay, if not derision, outside
France. When the French began to debate a ban on the burqa in 2009, for
instance, Barack Obama declared in Cairo that Western countries should
avoid “dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear” under “the
pretence of liberalism”. Some civil-liberties groups within France have
tried—but so far failed—to get the burkini ban overturned in the courts.
Yet French governments bristle at the notion that their various
attempts to defend laïcité amount to intolerance or an
infringement of the freedom of expression. They may note that in 2014
the European Court of Human Rights upheld France’s burqa ban. What
outsiders fail to understand, the French argue, is that such body wear
is not just a casual choice but part of an attempt by political Islamism
to win recruits and test the resilience of the French republic. Mr
Valls dismisses as naive those who see it as being no different than a
wetsuit. The burkini, he says, is part of a “political project”, and
complacency plays into the hands of Islamists.
The
difficulty is that, after a series of deadly terrorist attacks over the
past 18 months, France is in a state of heightened tension. Perceived
provocations on both sides are amplified. It is not just civil-liberty
activists who consider the mayors’ ban excessive, or stigmatising. Some
French scholars of Islam, such as Olivier Roy, consider it “absurd” to
conflate the burkini with hard-line Islamism, not least because the
latter would not permit women to bathe publicly in the first place.
Politicians, though, are unlikely to cede ground. The nature of French
identity is likely to feature prominently in next year’s presidential
election. Some contenders, such as Nicolas Sarkozy, a centre-right
former president, argue that the Muslim veil should be banned on the
campuses of state universities. France looks set to defend, if not
tighten, its strict approach to head-covering.