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Last June, shortly after the French Communist Deputy André Gérin launched the idea for a parliamentary commission on the burka, a Parisian journalism student went in search of the controversial article of clothing. The quest ended in failure: From the cosmopolitan neighborhood of Barbès to that of Belleville, shopkeepers repeatedly insisted that, while they sold plenty of headscarves and the occasional niqab, no clients had ever sought to purchase a burka...
Ever since the parliamentary commission issued its report in January 2010, however, one is hard-pressed to open a French newspaper without seeing a totally veiled visage. Socially marginal as it may be, the integral veil has come to occupy considerable public and political space. What “iceberg” has all this public and political attention revealed...
...wear integral veils are simultaneously victims and perpetrators. They represent a surreptitious (if at the same time excessively visible) threat, namely the insidious spread of radical, Salafist Islam—and hence a religious and implicitly political menace. The proposed ban targets the practice as fundamentally at odds with French republican principles: both secularism and a (historically recent) commitment to gender equality. The new law thus seems, at first glance, to be a logical— and legal—extension of the commitments outlined in a 2004 law on “laïcit?...
...fact, this new legislative proposal represents a significant departure from the previous law and a disturbing radicalization of French political tactics. The responses of jurists to the government’s proposed legislation make it very clear: The “burka ban” does not uphold the principles of French republican law—it overtly violates them...
...resume concluded with the assertion that Wheeler speaks French, Old English, Classical Armenian, and Old Persian...