In recent weeks, the burkini, a previously obscure garment of interest only to a subset of Muslim women, has become the object of intense legal, cultural, and philosophical debate in France—and, by way of social media, around the world. On Friday, France’s Council of State, the country's supreme administrative authority, founded by Napoleon, in 1799, weighed in, decisively overturning a law in one of more than a dozen coastal towns that have forbidden women from wearing the full-body suit on beaches this summer. The burkini looks something like a wetsuit with a short tunic on top and provides the cover some Muslim women prefer when swimming in public. The court ruled that the ban “seriously, and clearly illegally, breached the fundamental freedoms to come and go, the freedom of beliefs and individual freedom.” The controversy, however, is unlikely to end here.
Within hours of the court’s ruling, in fact, the mayor of Sisco, on the island of Corsica, vowed that he would keep in place a local regulation that was imposed this month after tensions erupted among sunbathers on the beach. “Here, the tension is very, very, very strong, and I won’t withdraw it,” he told French television. Friday’s ruling applies only to Villeneuve-Loubet, a resort town on the Mediterranean that is home to some fifteen thousand people, although it is expected that other burkini bans will also be struck down. But the court rulings won’t change the xenophobic public opinion that produced the bans in the first place.
Last week, the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, described the burkini as a “provocation” and “an expression of a political project, a countersociety, based notably on the enslavement of women.” He called the conservative swimsuit an “archaic vision” that sees women as “immodest, impure and that they should be totally covered. That is not compatible with the values of France and the Republic,” he told the newspaper La Provence. France’s beaches, he declared, should be free of any wardrobe associated with either religion or politics. The burkini may well become part of the French Presidential contest. In his first campaign speech to regain the office he lost in 2012, former President Nicolas Sarkozy called for a nationwide law on Muslim swimwear. “I refuse to let the burkini impose itself at French beaches and swimming pools,” he said on Thursday. “There must be a law to ban it throughout the Republic’s territory.”
The simmering controversy went viral this week after pictures circulated of four French policemen with bulletproof vests and guns forcing a Muslim woman in Nice to remove an aqua tunic that covered her arms and hips. In Cannes, another Muslim woman clad in a burkini was ticketed this week for not wearing “an outfit respecting good morals and secularism,” according to Agence France-Presse. A French reporter who witnessed the ticketing in Cannes said beachgoers only made it worse by shouting, “Go home.” Elsewhere, Muslim women have been forced to leave Mediterranean beaches altogether.
The volatile mix of issues in the swimsuit controversy—identity, faith, nationalism, personal priorities, and a host of basic freedoms, not to mention fashion—underlie the long-standing tensions between Muslims and the Western societies in which they live. It’s not surprising that France is the center of the burkini crisis. Laïcité, a rigid form of secularism, has been integral to France’s political identity since the Revolution, in the eighteenth century. It does not easily tolerate conspicuous demonstrations of religion, especially those beyond the traditional Catholic faith. It has also informed the French world view, especially of other cultures. France’s colonial conquests were considered a _mission civilisatrice—_that is, a mission to export Western ways (notably French ones) to developing societies in order to “civilize” them. One of its proud colonial products was an élite of évolués, or subjects who had “evolved” by being Europeanized; many évolués ended up in France.
French colonialism largely ran its course by the mid-twentieth century—in bitter anti-colonial wars in Algeria and Vietnam, and peacefully in a wave of independence for other territories in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. That didn’t cut all ties, however. As with other empires, France had, along the way, created populations who spoke the French language, admired French freedoms, sought French jobs, or wanted opportunities in France. Some qualified for citizenship. Faced with young governments that failed to deliver, others opted to migrate to France.
Some 4.7 million Muslims now live in France—more than seven per cent of the population, one of the two highest in the European Union, according to a Pew survey released last month. Many have been there for two or three generations—or longer. Among the latest generation of Muslim immigrants, born abroad, most come from former French colonies in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Reflecting the underlying issue of the burkini crisis, the Pew poll also found that more than one out of every four French surveyed has an “unfavorable” view of Muslims in their country.
The irony of the swimsuit crisis is that the laws—and their enforcement—shamed the Muslim women who want to participate in French society. “Tying the burkini to extremism is absurd. Actual Salafis are against the burkini because they don’t think women should be swimming in public in the first place,” Shadi Hamid, the author of “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World,” told me on Friday.
The burkini was designed by Aheda Zanetti, a young Lebanese-Australian, more than a decade ago. “The burkini was designed for freedom, flexibility and confidence. It was designed to integrate into Australian society,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation this week. “Why do women have to be punished for wearing something that represents freedom, and health, fitness and enjoyment?”
The French laws suggest an escalating fear of any expression of the Islamic faith coming after a Muslim truck driver killed eighty-six people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. They starkly contrast with attempts elsewhere in the West to defuse tensions and integrate Muslim minorities. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police—famed for their Red Serge tunics and broad-brimmed felt hats—announced this summer that female officers will be allowed to wear the hijab, or headscarf. The Mounties have allowed Sikhs to wear the turban of their faith since 1990.
This month, Scotland’s police force introduced a new hijab uniform for Muslim women to insure the service is “representative of the communities we serve,” Chief Constable Phil Gormley said on Tuesday. London’s Metropolitan Police Service has had a hijab option for a decade.
In France, public fears are certainly real after nine months of horrific attacks by Islamic extremists: the massacre and mass-hostage drama at the Bataclan club, in Paris in November; the truck-driving rampage in Nice; and the murder of an eighty-five-year-old priest as he performed mass in Normandy, last month. In the past four decades, the growth of extremism has increasingly consumed the West. But the absurdity of the burkini bans—a form of state-enforced stripping—was surpassed only by the humiliation they caused. And therein lies the danger of sticking so stubbornly to banning a swimsuit.
