Burkini Ban has been Overturned in France: 5 Lessons to Know and Remember

Why We Need to Realize the Bigger Picture

I’ll leave the last word and lesson to two ladies who say it better than I. This is from Darakshan Raja, co-founder of the Muslim American Women’s Policy Forum:

France hasn’t banned structural Islamophobia or racism. Neither has it suspended its emergency laws that were put into place after the Paris attacks. If we speak about the policing of Muslim bodies, restricting spaces, banning communities, and institutionalizing discrimination, then it’s important to name the larger systems at play here.

The burkini ban has sadly not produced a larger conversation on how Muslim women’s bodies are policed by the state within the larger structure of anti-Muslim racism in France. No one wakes up out of the blue and states today I feel like banning the niqab, veil or the burkini. If things have been able to get that far, it means there is already a larger system in place that is socially acceptable.

This is why the sole focus on policing women’s bodies and false equivalences between Muslim-majority states forcing the hijab/niqab have served as a derailing tactic to take the attention away from the larger environment in France. Somehow anytime Muslim women’s status is brought up in Western countries, people continue to bring the attention back to Muslim-majority states and are comparing lived realities in ways that are counterproductive.

This is why solely focusing on policing of women’s bodies globally or just Islamophobia, without connecting the two and linking it to state violence, mischaracterizes the problem. The policing (literal sense) of Muslim women’s bodies in France has to be placed within the larger context of structural Islamophobia, state emergency laws, and the suspension of rights.

And this is from Rim-Sarah Aloune, a French citizen and Ph.D candidate who spoke out heavily against the ban:

It is disturbing to see all of these hardcore French nationalists claiming that Muslims are taking over France, THEIR country, THEIR culture, THEIR Christian roots (Sic).

These folks did not seem to be bothered by the fact that they brought the first generation of these so dangerous “Muslims” from former French colonies in France to build the country in the 60s, to do the job that “true real decent” French would not do. But the “Fatima” and the “Mohammed” were supposed to remain hidden from the public space, because they built the country, but they could not be part of it.

People have such a short memory.

In other news, one of François Hollande’s assistant wore a headscarf….while being part of the delegation visiting the Vatican. I haven’t heard from extremist secularists and “True French” yet.

Talk amongst yourselves, folks.