Veil woman to run for President - timesofmalta.com

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A Frenchwoman who wears an Islamic face veil, despite a nationwide ban, wants to run for president in next year's elections. Kenza Drider said she wants to defend the rights of all French women. She is among a group of women mounting an attack on the law that has banned Muslim face veils from the streets of France since April. They want to prove the measure contravenes fundamental rights. The law's backers, including President Nicolas Sarkozy, say the veils imprison women. Ms Drider said she plans to declare her candidacy tomorrow in Meaux, a city east of Paris run by top conservative politician and Sarkozy ally Jean-Francois Cope, who championed the veil ban. Two other women stopped for wearing veils are facing trial tomorrow, also in Meaux.

Ever since the ban came in I've seen more women wearing the everything-but-the-veil outfit - full wahhabi shrouds and all that, just with the veil bit yanked down to around mouth level. It kind of renews my faith in humanity.

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I'd vote for her, but I can't see her getting the number of local parrainages she needs. No white person's going to support her and the Muslims'll all be worried about looking like jihadi maniacs.

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Why Quakers were the burqa wearers of the 17th century | Sarah Apetrei | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

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In 1630, a certain oatmeal maker was examined by the highest church court in England, accused of preaching without a licence. Before an audience of bishops, he kept his hat firmly on his head. Doffing it momentarily to a secular representative, he turned again to the bishops, crying: "But as ye are rags of the Beast, lo! – I put it on again." Refusal to observe "hat honour" – the custom of removing one's headgear in the presence of a social superior – was a way of saying, in the most confrontational manner: "I reject your authority." (In the case of the oatmeal maker, this was an especially radical rejection: the bishops were agents of Antichrist.) It was a gender-specific affront, since hat-doffing was a peculiarly masculine form of humiliation. Hat dishonour and burqa-wearing are not, of course, the same thing at all. But they do both illustrate the symbolic power of head-covering, and its relationship to political "headship". Twenty years or so after the case of the oatmeal maker, following civil war and the collapse of traditional pillars of social stability (the monarchy, and the church courts), the early Quakers also famously rejected hat honour. This was a prophetic sign not only that unjust inequalities were being dissolved, but that men were subject to the authority of God alone. Keeping one's head covered was a provocative statement of dissent towards the entire system of deference and consent which apparently held together English society. The Quaker leader George Fox later recalled: "O! The blows, punchings, beatings and imprisonments that we underwent, for not putting off our hats to men! Some had their hats violently plucked off and thrown away, so that they quite lost them." Many male Quakers were indeed imprisoned for this crime; the main offence among Quaker women was their tendency to interrupt ministers in the pulpit, and hold forth to a generally unappreciative audience. It's difficult not to take sides with the Quakers. They emerge as heroes of liberal modernity, championing social equality and victimised by a repressive regime. But what now seems merely the flouting of rather a silly convention must have resonated powerfully with their contemporaries. Looked at from another perspective, the noble Quakers could be (and were) branded dangerous religious fanatics. After all, a monarch and an archbishop of Canterbury had been beheaded. Property rights were being questioned. Apocalyptic revolutionaries were plotting to take over the world. In this climate, the Quaker gesture meant more than the wearing of a hat: it signified the rejection of the head itself, the seat of authority and order. By criminalising the wearing of the burqa, the French government has shifted the debate around Muslim head-covering from important questions about female sexuality and equality to a much more volatile confrontation between sacred and secular authority. Muslim women do not always necessarily don the niqab for purely religious reasons. But this legislation has politicised the act, so that no woman in France can now cover her face – as a gesture of piety (seeking identification, perhaps, with the wives of the Prophet) or anything else – without also defying the political establishment. Banning the burqa formalises the antagonism between the Islamic world and the secular west. And yet, being placed in this position of defiance may lead to unexpected and not wholly destructive outcomes. (On the defensive, Quaker apologists developed some of the most innovative arguments for religious toleration, for sexual equality, and for pacifism; though this is not, of course, a rationale for persecution.) Perhaps it's not entirely to be regretted that pious women are appropriating the discourse of human rights, and engaging in a confrontation with paternalistic authorities that claim to know what is best for them. The burqa-clad woman, masked but for a slit revealing mysterious eyes, has become almost fetishised in the west as an emblem of sexual oppression and the sinister facelessness of Islamism. There's no knowing what impact the French burqa ban will have on inter-cultural relations, but it is to be hoped that it may, paradoxically, create a space for those women's voices to be heard. For better or for worse, like the Quaker radicals, they can now use the language of gesture to voice their dissent.

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That would be an appropriate comparison if the Quakers had insisted on keeping doffing their hats and kneeling to their betters when we moved to a more equalitarian society.

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And if they had should we have outlawed it?

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You know I am not exactly fond of that stupid law but, otoh, yes, I do think there is a contradiction between being French and the socio-religious order you need to support in order to wear/impose a burqa.

As I said, one of the reason I think the law is stupid is that you do have a handful of women wearing it as they convert/escalate their religious commitment and that, while a bit distasteful within the French worldview (relative religious discretion is assumed), isn't an impossible issue.

So, back to the Quakers, had they insist on doffing hats and kneeling to all and sundry, I think it'd be okay to not allow them to settle in France.

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Well I guess it also depends on what sort of country you want to be. For me this and the banning of outdoor prayer are just plain puerile, even before we get onto questions of human rights. The political equivalent of those far right associations that go out handing out pork-based meals to the homeless.

I guess if the majority of the population wants the rest of the world to see them that way, that's their prerogative. Not like I can stop them.

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These laws are clearly made to ingrate Sarko with the far-right. But, again with the street prayers - Do we really want a bunch of people immobilising the sidewalks for 10 mins? A friend of mine said he's done that in some small, quiet, London street... i.e. it comes up to prayer time, he looks around for a semi-seclused spot and, hop, does his prayer stuff.

Fine.

Here, it seems there were 20-30 people meeting specifically for the purpose of praying and doing so on the street because the local mosque was too small. It should have stayed as a neighbourood issue and the alternative proposal of letting them used a disused fire station seems perfect to me. I would also look at the planning bit. Why is the local mosque too small? It'd be bad if the local authorities had been dicking them around for purely political reasons, something I am certain politicians aren't above. Starting with Sarko himself...

So, yes, those laws are bad. But, otoh, yes, France doesn't want to have parts of its population living like its Saudia-by-the-Seine. If you like that lifestyle, don't settle in France. I think that's fair. Our home, our rules.

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Sure, but these are more like "Our rules, made purely to show you that you're a second class citizen". We could just as easily decide that being ginger or Jewish or boss-eyed is incompatible with French citizenship.

Yes, they could pray at home or whatever and yes burqas are stupid, but we're giving them the moral high ground here.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

Sure, but these are more like "Our rules, made purely to show you that you're a second class citizen".

Ideally, they shouldn't be citizen at all.

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Yes, they could pray at home or whatever and yes burqas are stupid, but we're giving them the moral high ground here.

No question, we are. Hence, they are bad laws. And unforceable. Not even designed to be enforced as they're purely for show so that Sarko can get its right wing vote going. But, fundamentally, yes, French society has an issue with hard core traditionalist/passe-ist wahhabi-look alike Islam.

And I have no problem with having a problem with that form of Islam. In these days of cultural relativism, it may be the non-PC thing to do but I do believe that the French overall zeitgeist is superior.

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