France unveiled

There is something about the burqa that is provocative.

For the Muslim women who wear it, the head-to-toe covering is an article of faith designed to deflect the unwarranted attentions of men.

For many, it is a symbol of oppression and subservience: a manifestation if you will of the inequality of women among fundamentalist Muslims.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy says he is firmly in the latter category and his recent diatribes against the burqa have stirred up a controversial storm.

In a state of the nation-style address to the first joint sitting of both houses of France's parliament in 136 years, Sarkozy proclaimed: "The burqa is not welcome on the French Republic's territory. It is not what the French Republic wants for the dignity of women … we cannot accept in our country that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from society and all identity."

It is a populist sentiment in a majority that blames its minority for much of its woes.

Sarkozy and those likeminded think that women who wear the burqa have blindly rejected their rights to equality in the name of spirituality.

Poppycock.

If that is the case, Sarkozy should also lump monk’s robes, yarmulkes, headscarves, turbans, nun’s habits and other such religious attire to show evidence of his sincerity.

Modesty in dressing is a dictate of many religions, their offshoots and their orders.

Unless you live in the foothills of Afghanistan or a polygamous commune in America’s Midwest, the degree of severity is generally left to individual discretion, which is more often than not fashioned out of conventions, traditions and practice.

Muslim women, with the exception of a minority, have always had options around the principles of purdah, which in Islam is an emphasis of modesty.

The proposed burqa ban takes away those options, denounces their spiritual beliefs and compromises their freedom of religion.

It makes a mockery of France’s secularism and brings to boil a seething intolerance of Islam that has thrived over decades of bias.

If anything, Sarkozy’s crusade to save the covered woman is counter-intuitive and will see an escalation of conflict between Islam and the West.

It will, as history has show in French-occupied Algeria, galvanize the disaffected to defy the orders.

There, French colonizers forcibly unveiled Algerian women to deter them from joining female guerrilla fighters. In protest, Algerian women took to the veil in large numbers to insult the occupiers.

France it seems has not learnt its lesson.

Sarkozy and his dress code cops can expect the same defiance today if they enforce the burqa ban.

Because in today’s pluralist society, telling people what they cannot do, generally concludes in them doing exactly that.