Legislation is due to be tabled this month banning the burqa and niqab in public places in France, including transport, universities, hospitals, job centres and post offices. Women would have to “keep the face uncovered throughout their presence” or face “a refusal to deliver the service demanded”. This is despite the fact that less than 2,000 – out of an estimated 1.5 million Muslim women who live in France – are known to wear it.
One of Nicolas Sarkozy’s allies spotted a potential flaw in an outright ban on wearing the niqab in the street, which had been suggested by some politicians, when he asked, “What are we going to do about the Saudi women who like to come and spend money on the Champs Elysées?” But, apart from wealthy visitors, Muslim women who wear the niqab have been told by Sarkozy that their choice of dress “is not welcome in France”.
Only the collapse of the Belgian coalition government prevented it being the first country in Europe to ban the burqa and niqab in public. Parliament was only hours away from taking a vote when the prime minister resigned over a row about electoral boundaries. The proposed law would have fined women wearing a niqab in public for a first “offence” and threatened them with a week in prison if they were stopped again.
Coming after the ban on building minarets in Switzerland, these developments show an intensification of Islamophobia in Europe. Next month Socialist Review will take an in-depth look at the rise in Islamophobia in Britain.
In November of last year, there was a brief moment of light amid the darkness that was 2020. Scotland became the first country in the world to make period products free for all. Just as the weekend and the eight-hour-day are now regarded by many as a given, future generations may be in disbelief that...
On 4 November last year, when many of us were watching the aftermath of the American presidential election, the US formally left the Paris Climate Agreement. Written in 2015 at the United Nations’ COP21 climate conference in Paris, the agreement is often considered to be the most significant document of international climate cooperation. Back then,...
To say 2020 was dramatic would be an understatement. The world situation has been completely transformed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the inadequacy of governmental and state responses. As we head into 2021 it feels like we are entering uncharted territory. To make specific predictions would be unwise. But the Covid-19 crisis raises fundamental questions...
The 2020 crisis we’ve endured isn’t an aberration of the system but, as Alex Callinicos argues, an aspect of its permanent crisis.
