Uncovering Women’s Rights: The Burqa Ban and The Fight for Equality in France

Fadela Amara is the author of “Ni Putes Ni Soumises” (Neither Whores Nor Submissive) and the former president of the feminist organization of the same name. She was a member of the French Socialist Party and a leader in the movement to ban Muslim headscarves in schools. Amara worked in the French government as the Secretary of State for Urban Affairs and most recently as the Inspector General for Social Affairs. 

Fadela Amara, I am thrilled to meet you. I teach a course on the theories of justice and their applications in public policy. We sometimes ask ourselves how we can reconcile individual freedoms and the public interest. Students are very interested in the French ban on ostentatious religious symbols at schools, including veils, and more recently the public ban on burqas, a law that you yourself worked on. Specifically, do these laws affect religious freedom of expression, and what is the public interest that justifies them?

This is certainly a substantive debate. When we look at the French context, and especially the ghettos in France, we may believe that these laws restrict freedom and are stigmatizing, and maybe even racist. The truth, however, is that the context in which residents of these areas live is very difficult. The majority of younger residents are from immigrant families, mostly from North Africa. These housing projects suffer from very high unemployment and poverty rates. In fact, in these housing projects, normal French values do not exist. The laws of the (French) Republic and the law of the strongest go against each other, and of course there is the law of silence. So the residents of these housing projects, especially women, face all sorts of strong pressures and oppressions.

In 1989, when the veil first appeared in our country, we did not legislate anything. We believed that it was the school’s responsibility to decide how to handle the situation when two young Iranian girls came to class wearing veils. But two became ten, which became 200, which became 400, and something very strange began to happen.

We must remember that whenever we do an analysis of this situation we are looking at a situation of violence against women. In particular, other girls who wore the veil were assaulting girls who did not wear the veil, and they were being subjected to violence and pressure to the point at which they had no choice but to begin wearing a veil, otherwise they were treated as whores. And then we realized that given these dynamics the rights of girls and young women who chose not to wear the veil were, in fact, being confiscated by others. These fundamental rights included the right to choose how one should dress, the right to move freely, and the right to have sexual relations once of age.

All of these restrictions were being led and promoted by fundamentalists but also by youth who were being indoctrinated by the fundamentalists and became almost the fundamentalists’ little foot soldiers. This was a project to propagate political Islam; it was a political project whose ultimate goal was a theocratic system where the first victims were women. But at the same time, men would also be victims since it meant the abolition of democracy.

So with this taking place over the last few years – and I am speaking not only as an activist but also as a practicing Muslim woman – I realized that the veil is not in fact a religious symbol, contrary to what some may say. Secondly, I realized that secularism – and I’m not talking about atheism, but secularism – represents the possibility for believers to practice their religion, and yes including religions that come from other countries, in the private sphere. This principle is very important because it allows us to live together respecting one another so long as public spaces are free of ostentatious symbols or religious promotion especially of the aggressive kind.

When the veil issue came up the debate became extremely tense. So I felt that we must absolutely put an end to the pressure and protect girls, especially those girls who did not wear a veil but were becoming victims of fundamentalists and others. Therefore we began, in 2004, to put in place legislation forbidding ostentatious religious symbols in schools, including the veil, and then in 2010 we effectively banned wearing full-face coverings such as the burqa in our country.

It was a very difficult debate because when viewed from the outside one may think that this affects individual freedoms. But in reality, these two laws allow us to protect the women and girls who live in poorer neighborhoods when they come face-to-face with aggressive pressures. So in this particular context, we know quite well what is happening in our neighborhoods, and we are certain that these laws protect women, guarantee their emancipation, but most importantly allow these women to stand firmly by this law telling those who would try and force them to wear a veil, “We are not going to wear a veil. It is our country’s law, and we will obey the law of the land.”

More broadly, what other policies could we put in place to promote equality between men and women in the housing projects since the veil, in some ways, is an epiphenomenon and there are many other things that are going on in these housing projects?

We have had feminist movements in France since the 1970s, movements that have made a lot of progress since then. The feminist movement brought the abortion law, a woman’s right to contraception, women’s right to education, and the right to equality. We even passed legislation on women’s representation in elections, even though it isn’t always guaranteed, unfortunately.

So yes, there has been great progress, but we must also be aware that such progress has mostly benefited the higher socioeconomic classes. The young girls who are part of the working classes have not felt the gains from these battles. There was a historical fissure where the women of the upper classes benefited from emancipation and equality of rights. On the other hand, the women in the housing projects did not. In fact they were backsliding. With an even stronger presence of “ostentatious symbols” the veil became a tool of oppression against women. I am very direct about this. For me it is not a religious symbol; it’s a symbol of women’s oppression. And so the great battle is to bring together all these women who belong to different socioeconomic classes so that they can, in solidarity, fight all forms of oppression against women in our country.

Our country remains, despite much progress, a macho country where men hold real power. So there are many, as we say in France, “bastilles to take.” I believe that we must remain highly vigilant because even though we speak a lot about Islamists, we must not forget about Catholic extremism, which is always at the margins and takes advantage of the slightest weakness of the Republic trying to take back the gains women have made. Yes, we must remain very vigilant.

In concrete terms, what can we do for the girls and young women in housing projects, in terms of public policy, to help them claim their rights to equality of opportunity?

We cannot tilt public policy only to benefit women in the housing projects. We must work on the substantive foundations. In other words, the higher the concentration of fundamentalists who live in housing projects, the harder it will be for the country. You see, they rekindle archaic traditions such as forced marriage, female circumcision, etc. We must direct public policy towards social mixing, first off. We have to reexamine our urban policy, which includes our housing policy, where the rich should live in the same communities as the poor, etc.

Secondly, in order to achieve our objective of female emancipation and equality, we must absolutely fight against unemployment in the housing projects. You see, an unemployment rate of 44 percent for those aged 25 and below is extremely high. This extreme unemployment has the effect of causing young men to sometimes take up oppressive ideologies. Then they go and oppress the weakest, which are the young girls and women of the housing projects.

Third, we must fight against all forms of discrimination. Discrimination causes all sorts of havoc in our country. Yes, it’s true that a young Arab or a young Muslim in France has trouble finding a job even if he is overqualified. So we have to fight very fiercely against all discrimination.

The fourth thing is that schools must play a major role in teaching respect for women and girls. This isn’t only for boys from housing projects but all boys. It is necessary that boys learn how to respect women and how to live with them respectfully. They need to understand that household chores are not just for women. They need to understand that women can take on all kinds of jobs, such as being a trucker or even a politician, someone who takes on a mandate and is responsible for our country’s destiny. This all goes back to the evolution of people’s mentality. It’s about teaching boys not to be sexist, yet it’s not an easy job and a lot of work has to be done.

It’s not just at school but it starts in the home. Mothers transmit their values to their children. We can argue all we want but the reality is that mothers are the main educators of children in the home and mothers ought to teach their children that household chores need to be shared between boys and girls. Mothers have to play an extremely important role in the evolution of their children’s way of thinking. They should not accept that when the family finishes eating dinner, it is the only the daughter who gets up to wash the dishes. It’s important that boys also learn to clear the table and wash the dishes, etc. Boys need to know that it’s not shameful to do housework. It all comes back to living together both in the home and in society at-large. It prepares boys to live together with women. So there is a lot of work to be done with mothers and how they shape their children’s mentalities. Also, it’s important that women themselves deconstruct the conditioning that they were taught, specifically the roles that their gender predetermined for them. They must learn to be critical thinkers. This all comes back to the work that has to be done in schools and at the Ministry of Education.

You yourself have faced major obstacles but you managed to succeed. So what lessons can we take from your experience for women who want to take a similar path?

It’s important to remember that I left the Socialist Party quite a while ago to organize the Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissive) movement because I felt that there was a lot of work to be done, that a real battle had to be fought for the liberation of working class women. In fact, I quasi broke-in to become a government minister. After all, Ni Putes Ni Soumises was talked so much about; it was so enormous in France, in Europe, even on the international scene, especially in Arab countries. When the presidential elections took place and Nicolas Sarkozy won, he wanted me to be part of his cabinet because I was well known as an activist for a long time and I had worked on issues in the housing projects. It was difficult because he is from the right and I am rather left wing, so we had to come to an understanding of which issues were most important for France. But it was difficult.

What I would recommend to young female activists, and what I have recommended to the activists in Ni Putes Ni Soumises, is that they must become engaged in politics because it is within the party that one must create the conditions to succeed. The emergence of power for women does not exclude men at all. I am very fond of diversity in general but women must find their place and make sure they have the capacity to take up responsibility in the same way that men do. This means that women who climb the political ladder have a double responsibility: they must remember that the struggle for real equality is not over and they must continue to put pressure to advance the cause to have real parity between men and women.

For example, when I was a minister in the government I put together policies specifically for women’s issues. As you know, in the housing projects there are many women who have never finished high school. So I developed policies specifically for women to get the training and education they needed to find a job and begin the process of autonomy and emancipation. I also put together policies targeting immigrant women so that they could become proficient in French. These policies also helped illiterate women find a job so they could earn money and become autonomous. Otherwise, they would have remained dependent without any power of their own.

We also created policies with the Ministry of Education – and I was very adamant about this – that there be a day set aside for girls and boys where we talk about respect and sexuality, not only about STDs even though that is very important, but questions related to attraction, respect, etc. This was very important. Besides, Ni Putes Ni Soumises was invited to make many presentations at schools and they continue to do so. The organization even created a booklet, which is rather explicit but nonetheless very educational, which allowed students to really debate the issues. This booklet has been read by hundreds of thousands of students in France and it has worked very well.

You have quite a diverse experience having been the president a of large NGO, Ni Putes Ni Soumises, a minister in the French government, and now in the Ministry of Social Affairs in the auditing section. How would you compare your experiences and could you comment on how you might have done things differently?

Firstly, I strongly believe in the battles waged by civil society movements. I believe that civil society can move politics and politicians. I’m very fond of civil society but I also believe that by taking on political responsibility we can change things for the better. The two are not the same. Civil society exists to bring forward problems that arise in our country and to advance causes. But the politician, it is he who decides, and so it’s important that activists in civil society movements have the courage to enter politics, to take on political mandates, to hold that decision-making power.

This is what I did as president of Ni Putes Ni Soumisses, and then I became a minister in the government. Therefore, I encourage all young activists to become politically engaged because it is only in this way that we can profoundly and quickly change things.

 

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the interviewer or this publication.

Special thanks to Boris Angelov for conducting the translation of this interview. 

Feature Photo: cc/(Omar Chatriwala)