The French burkini ban will provoke violence and divide society
If the aim of the terrorists who took so many innocent lives in Paris, Nice and elsewhere was to foment hatred and conflict, then the French authorities have more than fulfilled their ambitions
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Your support makes all the difference.It is strange, to British eyes, to see an armed policeman ordering a woman on a beach to take off some of her clothes. And yet that is precisely what has been happening in France – the inevitable consequence of the ban on the so-called burkini, now in place in 15 French municipalities. A number of women opting for more modest beachware have already been fined, with a philanthropic French business figure stumping up for many of the penalties.
No great genius for prediction is required to know where this story is going next. One day soon, in a sort of Rosa Parks moment, a blameless woman is going to refuse to comply with the request to remove her garments, or refuse to pay the fine. At some point, there is every possibility that some misguided French magistrate will lock up a woman on the basis of her religion. That will provoke protests and worse across France, and more widely.
If the aim of the terrorists who took so many innocent lives in Paris, Nice and elsewhere was to foment hatred and conflict, and to provoke the French state into an overreaction, then the French authorities have more than fulfilled their unsavoury ambitions. Victimising and bullying Muslim women on holiday is not only bad PR, it is wrong in principle and entirely counterproductive.
France has a proud tradition of secularism. The fear of creating a society divided into mutually antagonistic communities based on race, culture or religion is pathological. Which is to say that it is in fact unhealthy for the nation, as the practical consequences of a perfectly laudable principle will be simply to divide French society even more violently. Without the ban on the burkini, women wearing a variety of costumes could enjoy the seaside in proximity to one another, at least. With the ban, those who choose one particular type of clothing are to be humiliated and excluded from a normal, healthy activity. With laws like this, Islamist extremist and preachers of hate hardly need to do very much work to stoke up discontent.
The British need not be smug about these matters. For one thing, what happens to our closest continental friend and neighbour matters to this country, too. British efforts at controlling extremism have not always been crowned with success, and Britain has seen terror on its own shores. The multicultural, tolerant society, where people are given the choice of integration and assimilation, but not forced into it, has not always worked as well as everyone would wish. Still, countries can always learn from one another, and it is in a spirit of fraternity that we should urge the French authorities, and higher European courts, to think again about their ban on the burkini, which is only weakening the cohesion of French society.
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