Europe frets over burqa

An immigrant’s obligation to the society he has left and duty to the country that provides him with a home clash in the furore over burqas. The controversy suggests that Europe is a sea of billowing black veils. Actually, it’s the alien symbol that outrages public imagination, not the fact.

Only a few thousand out of a million Muslim women in Britain are veiled. The French estimate it at between 400 and 2,000. Burqas are hardly ever seen. Ironically, when you do spot one, it probably drapes an European Muslim’s wife, a convert who is more zealous than a born Muslim.

Class distinction is the third irony. Humbler Arab tourists in London may be veiled but not the wives of Arab kings and presidents. Nor sheikhas and sultanas from the Gulf. They flaunt Parisian haute couture without even the wisp of a veil.

The biggest irony is Europe’s insistence on forbidding something that the Islamic world considers the antiquated and irrelevant relic of pre-Islamic times. Syria recently banned burqas. Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia have imposed restrictions even on wearing the niqab or hijab, as the headscarf is called.

The excitement is in Europe. Though only France and Belgium have actually banned burqas (Italy is reportedly planning to follow them), opinion polls indicate that grassroots level sentiment is remarkably similar in all 27 European Union countries. They are against allowing Muslim women to be shrouded in black from head to toe.

Even in Britain where Damian Green, the immigration minister, says there is no question of forbidding the burqa for the wives and daughters of 2.4 million Muslims, 67 per cent of the population would welcome a ban. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s law enjoys the robust support of more than 80 per cent of French citizens. The figures for Germans and Spaniards who want a similar ban are 62 and 59 per cent respectively.

A possibly quite irrational fear of Muslim influence helps to explain this sentiment. Europe, with 13 million Muslims, feels threatened by immigrants not only from North Africa but from Islamic countries as far away as Bangladesh. An internet posting is headed, “Germany, Wake Up! Muslims Are Taking Over, And You’re Asleep at the Wheel!” Germany’s four or five million Muslims are guest workers from Turkey. France’s six million or more Muslims and the million or so in Spain are from the Maghreb.

Historical memory buttresses contemporary conditions. Moors ruled large parts of Spain for centuries. Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina are reminders that the Balkans were part of the Ottoman empire whose armies swept up to Vienna.

Un-British

Britain does not share those memories. Moreover, the British fought for religious freedom whereas the French Revolution exalted the non-religious state. Damian Green thus thinks a legal restriction on a personal religious symbol would be “rather un-British” and contrary to the conventions of a “tolerant and mutually respectful society.”

But a Conservative member of parliament, Philip Hollobone, is preparing a private member’s Bill to compensate for what he calls the government’s failure to uphold the public interest. Though threatened with legal action for discrimination under Britain’s Equality Act, Hollobone refuses to meet female constituents in burqas. He calls it commonsense. “If you want to engage in normal, daily, interactive dialogue with your fellow human beings, you can only really do this properly by seeing each other’s face.” He calls the burqa “the religious equivalent of going around with a paper bag over your head with two holes for the eyes.”

He is not alone even among politicians. Jack Straw, the former labour justice minister, also asked his constituents in the heavily Asianised Lancashire town of Blackburn to uncover their faces if they came to see him. He can’t recall a single occasion when the lady concerned refused to lift her veil.

The burqa provokes intense debate with Imran Khan, the former cricketer and now chairman of Pakistan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf party, warning that any attempt to ban it could radicalise Muslims and undermine the British way of life.

Many British Muslims fear they have been stereotyped as terrorists since the 2005 London bombing that killed 52 people. Their resentment feeds on opposition to British foreign policy, particularly the war on terror and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Surveys show that 40 per cent want Shariat law in certain areas (which would mean geographical ghettoisation) while one out of five sympathises with the feelings and emotions of suicide bombers. These positions are not surprising considering that 60 per cent of Britain’s more than 1,500 mosques follow the Deobandi school.

Community leaders like Sadiq Khan, a Labour MP involved with the official task force set up after the London bombings, regrets that “vast numbers of Muslims feel disengaged and alienated from mainstream British society.” Yet, according to Farooq Murad, head of Britain’s Muslim Council, Britain is the most welcoming country in Europe for Muslims.

Immigrants are economic refugees. What no one mentions is their obligation to assimilate with the host society. Those who feel strongly about cultural totems like turbans, dreadlocks or burqas should not leave the country where they are treated as normal.