Publicly saying anything that comes to one’s mind while hiding behind the facade of freedom from oppression is a sign of ignorance, and can become a new means of oppression in itself. This was the case on June 21 when French President Nicolas Sarkozy condemned the burka, a common headscarf worn by Muslim women. Sarkozy stated that the wearing of the burka is not an expression of religious freedom, but rather a practice that reduces women to subservitude. What defines a certain people has wrongly become stigmatized as a form of abuse.
French policies banning the burka were initially restricted to educational and government organizations; every citizen was expected to leave their modes of religious expression outside these institutions in order to maintain secularism within the organs of the state.
But today, the situation has taken a different turn altogether. Sarkozy wants to “free the women in burkas and provide them with an identity.” How many of these women he encountered personally before making this assessment is a question that will remain unanswered. Moreover, he does not seem to realize that the vast majority of these women choose to remain veiled, and want to associate themselves with a Muslim identity as well as a French one. Thus by making such remarks, and by planning on implementing consequential policies, the president is in fact stripping these women of the right to self-identification and individuality.
The true definition of secularism is the separation of state and religion. It means that no state has the right to enforce religious laws or hold prejudices for or against any religious background. It does not, however, mean that citizens cannot practice their own religion privately. A Muslim woman wearing a veil or a Jewish man wearing a kippah are no different from other French people. They are just French Muslims or French Jews. They are free to practice their religion as they please and express themselves how they wish, while living in a country that claims to be a true democracy.
Impeding religious practices, however, is a serious violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which asserts “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.” It’s also contradictory to France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which states that the law can only prohibit actions detrimental to society as a whole. I fail to see how wearing a veil in France harms French society.
But the main concern here is not secularism. The problem is the confusion of the term secularism with uniformism. Sarkozy has not only muddled the two, but has pushed the dialogue to an extreme. It will not be too long until people will legally be forced to alter the color of their skin, their height, and their names to conform to French norms. Sarkozy’s use of the word freedom, in essence, is a mutilation of the idea. People should be free under their own terms and conditions.
