preview

Pros And Cons Of Banning The Veil

Good Essays

conclude that banning the veil isn’t as just about assuaging the suffering of the Muslim woman as much as it is about protecting French republican notions of sexuality, notions considered fundamental and foundational against the disturbing influence of Islam (Scott pp. 123). Women choosing to wear a Burqa however may be doing so as a symbol of demanding control over their bodies and rejecting the sexuality and objectification of the republic culture. What’s appalling is the assumption that a veiled woman means submission and oppression. Based on their own perceptions of what is empowering and what is suffering, proponents of the ban have been speaking on behalf of the Muslim woman: ‘As a non-muslim, I would never wear a burqa and therefore you should not wear a burqa’. By foisting their own perceptions of what is right and wrong, they are stigmatizing Muslim women and imposing restrictions on their freedom of choice. A veil could …show more content…

There is an increasing anxiety about French identity in light of the changing demographic structure. Moreover, the majority of practicing female Muslims in France who choose to wear the veil have immigrants roots. They are part of the wave of immigrants into France from its former colonies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. During the French colonization of the Maghreb, Muslims were depicted as inferior people, incapable of self-government. Expressions of bias against Muslims stem from a deep-seated psychological preoccupation with ‘the other’. As Professor Bate explained, a process that anthropologists have come to call schismogenesis - the formation of Self in terms of what we apprehend in the Other. In the French psyche, the immigrants are defined by what the French are not. The ban on the veil is a manifestation of this, the way in which Frenchness has come to be constructed in contradiction to a Islamist

Get Access