Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

NIQAB

One in four French Muslims ‘in revolt’ against secular laws

Around one in four French Muslims, mostly young people, support an ultra-conservative form of Islam, including the wearing of the full-face veil, but the vast majority accept France's strict secular laws, a study showed Sunday.

Published: 18 September 2016 15:49 CEST
One in four French Muslims 'in revolt' against secular laws
A woman in a niqab poses next to her husband in Paris. Photo: Stephane de Sakutin/AFP
The Ifop survey carried out for a major study of French Muslims by Institut Montaigne, a liberal think-tank, showed that the vast majority of people who identify as Muslim accept curbs on religion in public.
   
But 60 percent considered girls should nonetheless be allowed to wear the headscarf in school, 12 years after it and other religious symbols were banished from the classroom, the survey published in Le Journal du Dimanche weekly showed.
   
And around one in four — 24 percent — supported the wearing of the burqa and niqab, the full-face veils that were banned in public places in 2010.
   
The survey of 1,029 people aims to inform the government's plans to overhaul French Muslim bodies in the wake of several jihadist attacks, most of them the work of French extremists.
   
It was carried out between April 13 and May 23, before this summer's furore over the banning by several towns of the full-body burkini swimsuit, which has made Islam a hot-button topic eight months before the next presidential election.
 
Institut Montaigne's report grouped French Muslims into three categories: “completely secular”, devout but accepting restrictions on religion in the public domain, and a more reactionary group that uses Islam for the purposes of “revolt”.
   
Those in the secular category, which made up 46 percent of the total, did not reject Islam but demonstrated their religious feeling mainly by eating halal meat.
   
The second group (25 percent) was “proudly Muslim” and wanted a greater role for religion in the workplace but opposed the burqa and polygamy.
   
Most “problematic”, according to the report, was the third group which was composed of “mostly young, low-skilled people with low levels of participation in the labour market” living on the outskirts of cities.
   
“Islam is for them a way of asserting themselves on the margins of French society,” the report found, noting that most people in that group approved of the burqa and of polygamy, which is permitted by Islam.
 
Around half of under-25s fell into this category, compared to around 20 percent of over-40s, revealing a generational gap between moderates and younger hardliners, the report found.
 
Two issues — the right to wear the headscarf and access to halal food — emerged as enjoying support among all Muslims, whether practising or not. Two-thirds of all respondents said they supported the right to wear the headscarf, even though two-thirds of the women questioned said they themselves did not wear the garment.
   
And eight out of ten people believed that public school canteens should offer halal options — a demand that has been rejected by several town councils who see it an encroachment of religion in schools.
   
The survey also showed that, contrary to commonly-held perceptions, French Muslim women are more conservative than men on some issues. Only 56 percent of women said they would attend a mixed swimming pool, compared with 75 percent of men.
   
The study also showed that, while most respondents consider their religion is important to them, most do not regularly attend a mosque, with only 29 percent of attending a mosque on a weekly basis.
   
France has Western Europe's biggest Muslim population. The study estimated the number of French people identifying as Muslim to be far smaller than often thought, at around 3.7 million, or 5.6 percent of the
population of over 15 years.

ISLAM

OPINION: 10 years after France banned the niqab, French governments are still stigmatising Muslims

Ten years ago France introduced a controversial ban on women wearing the full Islamic face veil in public, but the legislation did not have the desired impact and French governments are still making the same mistake towards the country's Muslim citizens, writes Agnes De Feo, author of a new book on the subject.

Published: 13 October 2020 12:04 CEST
OPINION: 10 years after France banned the niqab, French governments are still stigmatising Muslims
A French muslim woman named Karima, pictured here wearing the niqab. Photo: Agnes de Feo
Since 2008 French sociologist Agnès De Féo has been studying the subject of the niqab – the full Muslim face veil worn by women – in France. She has spoken to over 200 women who wear it.
 
On the 10-year anniversary of the French parliament backing the controversial law forbidding women from wearing the niqab in public places, De Feo explains the real impact of the ban and why French governments need to change their view of the country's Muslim citizens.
 
On October 11, 2010, a law was passed in France to penalise those Muslim women who wore the full face veil – le voile integral or niqab in Arabic – which at the time only affected a few hundred women.
 
So as not to target Islam directly, the law was given a neutral title. Officially it was to ban “concealing the face in the public space”.
 
Ironically, 10 years later, because of the Covid-19 epidemic and the requirement to wear face masks, concealing the face is now mandatory in France rather than banned.
 
Conversely, shaking hands with the opposite sex has gone from being a compulsory social gesture to being banned.
 
Ten years ago strict Muslims were criticised for wearing a full face veil and refusing to shake hands with the opposite sex, which was seen as akin to lacking civility. 
 
 
READ ALSO
 
The niqab has now become extremely rare in France.
 
The number of women wearing it in 2020 has fallen below the level of 2009, when the controversy around the proposed law began to flare.
 
But this drop should not be seen as an impact of the law itself, because it actually resulted in an exponential increase in the act of wearing a niqab in the years following 2010.
 
That's because the law had an incentive effect: it incited women to transgress the ban by embracing the prohibited object.
 
Prohibition made the niqab more desirable and created a craze among some young women to defy the law.
 
In fact more women wore the niqab after the law was introduced than before.
 

A French woman named Fanny, pictured here wearing the niqab. Photo: Agnes de Feo
 
These neo-niqabees were drawn to this symbol, because it made them feel like heroines, defying the forbidden. 
 
These new partisans of full face veils born after the law all had something in common – that they had no religious background. Among this group there was an over-representation of converts to Islam from atheist or agnostic backgrounds. Nothing predisposed them to choose this path of sartorial radicalism.
 
This craze for the forbidden created a new form of religious observance, away from the mosques, a virtual form developed on Salafist social networks.
 
At fault for this phenomenon was the huge and overblown media coverage of the bill from June 2009 onwards, which played on mainstream opinion in France.
 
Following the law some “good” French citizens saw themselves as responsible for enforcing the law themselves. They directed insults, threats and even physical violence towards women who carried on wearing the full face veil.
 
These women responded to the attacks not by abandoning the niqab but by resistance. They saw them as trials sent by God.
 
So a standoff then developed between these two sides, which each side justifying the use of insults against the other.
 
Some women who wore the niqab had enough resilience to get through it, while others choose to go to the UK or the Maghreb in North Africa.
 
 
But many simply cut themselves off from all social links with the outside world and entered a spiral of “marginalisation”, in particular by no longer going outside their home and taking their children out of school.
 
These are the niqab-wearers who would then go on to fight in Syria.
 
 
While the title of that law made it seem that it covered all displays of religion, once again it was the Muslim headscarf or hijab that was targeted in particular.
 
Young girls who refused to remove the hijab were excluded from public schools.
 
As a result of this 2004 law, there has been an explosion in the number of women born in France choosing to wear the hijab.
 
Previously the wearing of the hijab only concerned women born in the Maghreb and who arrived as adults in France.
 
It was also after this law that we saw the creation of Muslim schools to accommodate these girls who had been forced out of public schools.
 
These are the same schools that President Emmanuel Macron now laments the existence of and accuses of wanting to be separate from the French nation.
 
Once again a government in France continues to stigmatise French Muslims by accusing them of “separatism”, as Macron did in his recent speech and plan to tackle radical Islam.
 
But it is the French governments themselves who have created this separation over the last two decades by pushing Muslims to retreat in a self-marginalisation.
 
The only solution today is for France to accept its Muslims as full French citizens in total equality with others and by treating them with dignity.
 
In other words by applying the Republican principles of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity towards its Muslim population.
 
 
 
 
 
 
SHOW COMMENTS