Jean-Francois Cope is the mayor of Meaux (pronounced "Moe"), a city ingrained perpetually in my memory for both its excellent cheese and its police officers' disdain for innocently proselyting missionaries. During the Renaissance, Meaux was also known as the locus of freedom for a circle of reformation-minded theologians and thinkers, an ironic connection considering not only my own theological experiences there, but also considering Cope's strongly-worded op-ed in the New York Times yesterday calling for a public ban on the wearing of the burqa in France and throughout Europe.
(See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/opinion/05cope.html?hp)
I never did like that Cope fellow. Perhaps it was his strong defense of the banning of the headscarf in French public schools a few years ago that first turned me off to him. His views, unfortunately, have become increasingly mainstream in the European Union: with the ban on minarets in Switzerland, the recently passed measure in the lower house of Belgium's legislature banning the burqa (and France likely to follow suit soon) and President Nicolas Sarkozy declaring publicly that the burqa is "not welcome" in France, religious freedom has taken some notable hits in the EU of late.
In his piece, Cope argues that the burqa must be banned because it poses a security risk.
There are approximately 1900 women who wear the burqa in France today, and I would challenge anyone to show what security threat, exactly, these women pose. Sure, some burqa-clad women robbed a post office in a shady suburb of Paris last fall and made off with 4500 Euros- wearing disguises and coverings is not uncommon in armed robbery cases. So why is no one calling for a ski mask ban then? A ban on wearing costumes in public? A ban on Halloween (an increasingly popular celebration in France, thanks to the thorough coca-colonisation of the American corporate empire)? Why is this called the ban on the burqa by the very proponents of the ban itself? If safety is the real concern, why not ban other disguises and face coverings in public as well then? That security concerns should be so closely linked to Muslims, in particular, seems troubling.
Cope wonders, "How can you establish a relationship with a person who, by hiding a smile or a glance — those universal signs of our common humanity — refuses to exist in the eyes of others?" It seems the problem has more to do with Cope's inability to allow such a person to exist than with the person's supposed refusal to exist. The reference to the difficulty of establishing a relationship with a person who wears a burqa probably says more about Cope's inability to embrace the Other than it does about any individual's purported refusal to exist.
Freedom of religion and of personal expression are also "universal signs of our common humanity," and to deny these is to deny the humanity of those whose religious expressions may be different from ours.
Cope goes on to note that many Muslim scholars contend that the Qur'an does not call for the wearing of the burqa. I'm no scholar here, but it does seem to me that the requirement that women wear the burqa is considered by most Muslim scholars to be outside the mainstream of Islamic thought. Nevertheless, it is not the place of the French government to interpret the Qur'an for individual women, or to dictate what the "true" meaning of its passages are. This is simply a violation of the separation of church and state, a principle that the secularist Cope ostensibly stands for. It's simple: no law in France should make its case by having recourse to an interpretation of the Qur'an.
Cope also states that "a few extremists" oppose the ban on the burqa, as though most U.S. citizens, Amnesty International, and many others aren't already clearly opposed to this fundamentally un-democratic legislation.
This op-ed from the Washington Post a few days ago had it right:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/30/AR2010043002131.html
France must not take the drastic steps that the Belgian parliament is currently taking; it must resist the xenophobic fear-mongering of the UMP party and stand for fundamental freedoms of religion and speech.
2 comments:
Great post. These kinds of issues are hot of late, and I thought Stanley Fish's recent article about the cross in the Mohave Desert made an interesting contribution. It seems crazy that burqas are proposed to be banned--I would hope that the US could never get away with such a proposal, but I bet you'll find some strong views on this kind of thing on both sides of the ideological divide here too.
When Arizona recently changed the wording to their 1070 bill, the effect was that illegals would be determined from their "suspicious" behavior and the clothes they wear. To me, although not a religious issue, this gets at the same freedom of expression issues--issues that have nothing to do with obscenity or sedition but rather have everything to do with individual rights.
At any rate, good work. I certainly would never want anyone taking away my "Youth Conference 1996, Payson, AZ--Serving with Power" t-shirt. Nor my "Mama's Boys" shirt with two missionaries among the armies of Helaman. Nevermind, after saying that, maybe I would support a moratorium on religious clothing. At least the Burqa is not kitsch, though.
I saw Fish's article, too, and while I usually don't agree with him, I actually liked what he had to say and thought he was lucid.
And hats off to Los Suns for taking a stand. I think they should all wear burqas for their next game.
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