From the editor’s desk

Should we outlaw the burka

France’s decision to ban the wearing of the burka in public by law symbolises the difficulty of reconciling rights when they conflict. This lies at the heart of the dilemma of multicultural societies and applies not just to France but to Great Britain and elsewhere. They do not wish to be culturally imperialist by treating ethnic minorities with disrespect, but nor do they want to set aside their own core values, such as opposition to the exploitation and abuse of women. A society like Britain which insists that girls from very conservative Muslim families should nevertheless be sent to school to receive a good education has already taken sides in that debate. The real issue is about proportionality.

Not many French Muslim women wear the full body and face veil with just a slit for the eyes. The number has been put as low as 2,000, mainly in Paris, and a substantial number of them, it is said, are converts to Islam. That suggests that, in some cases at least, the burka is a conscious choice. Advocates of the burka claim it is required by Islam, a fact visibly disputed by the vast majority of Muslim women who wear, for the sake of female modesty, a headscarf if they choose to cover their head at all. Critics of the burka say it represents an extreme demonstration of the control of women by men, who make them hide their appearance, their identity and almost their very existence from strangers. That is very depersonalising. Part of the critics’ concern is about the growth of a fundamentalist reading of Islam, of which the burka is a symptom. That is taken to be a threat to French values, not just the civic doctrine of laïcité but to liberté, égalité and fraternité – the very mottos of the Republic.

Perhaps the outside world should hesitate to sit in judgement on the French in such matters, for the balance of forces needed to uphold social cohesion are very different from one society to the next. Sufficient to say that a legal ban on a certain mode of dress, whatever it signifies, would not strike the British as justified except in rare circumstances, for instance where identity needs to be established for security purposes. Public opinion was starting to resist a range of measures introduced by the last Labour Government, doubtless all well intentioned, which began to amount to an irksome attempt on the part of the state to control how individual citizens lived their lives. The incoming coalition has read the runes correctly and is starting to turn back these incursions into personal freedom, some petty but some more serious, by the state. The British would not tolerate something as dirigiste as a state-imposed dress code, even though many British people would personally deplore the suppression of female identity that the burka seems to signify. It is by education and cultural influence that the values of Western civilisation will prevail in the end, and anything that divides or antagonises minority communities is unhelpful.