Word: burkas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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PARIS, France — France, a country with nearly four million Muslims, is now considering a ban on the traditional Muslim burka. President Nicholas Sarkozy recently declared that the garb is “not welcome” in his country, since France would not accept that “women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity.” While some have touted this move as a chance to remove women from the strictures thrust on them by an oppressive fundamentalist culture, others disagree...
After living in Paris for the summer, I have found that it is a rare sight to see women in this traditional Muslim attire. Here, it is doubtful that anyone actually avoids stares by wearing the burka in public, because they do stand out. However, a personal choice of how to dress, even if it does have religious associations, should not be proscribed by the government...
...what about the rights of Muslim women who honestly feel faith-bound to voluntarily don a burka? Or those prohibited by law from attending public school with the headscarves they wear everywhere else? Why is no one ranting about nuns' habits being "degrading" (as Gerin called the burqa), just as no one lashed out at creeping extremism when then-First Lady Bernadette Chirac covered her head during Vatican visits...
...tree so withered and broken that only a single scarred branch is still struggling heavenwards. Yet all life has not gone: a tiny leaf, green against the cerulean blue of the sky, stubbornly clings to a twig. For the circle of burka-clad women huddling around the forlorn trunk in the hot, dusty sunshine, it is a sign of hope...
...while preppy college students may seem an immeasurable distance away from burka-clad women with tribal tattoos across their faces, soldiers say that Harvard has found a place in Iraq, and Iraq a place at Harvard...