The real reason France wants to ban the burqini

Last week, Faisal Al Yafai argued the ban was sexist and discriminatory. Here, he presents the best argument in favour of banning the burqini

A Tunisian woman wearing a "burqini" on a beach near Bizerte, north-east of the capital Tunis. (AFP / FETHI BELAID)

Politicians have a significant advantage over the rest of us: they have the ability to act. Even when the reasons for their decisions are illogical, counterproductive or downright racist, they can still make them – and leave the rest of society to deal with the consequences.

So it is with the burqini ban in France. The justifications layered on top of the ban are rather spurious. The least plausible is the nonsense peddled about “hygiene” in the sea – that vast space into which we pump our industrial waste – but it is even more disheartening to see French citizens furiously defending the ban using the very wool their politicians have pulled over their eyes. Most arguments, in other words, have been rooted in politics rather than philosophy – and grubby politics at that.

And yet I do think there is a philosophical heart to this argument. French politicians are seeking something important, even if at times their language has made it seem otherwise.

The burqini ban is a debate in which it is possible to see a division between the way some countries in the West view liberty. For the US and the UK, liberty is understood as the absence of constraints: people can basically be left to do what they like. But for some European countries, especially France, but also Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands, liberty is more forceful – it means enforcing certain freedoms through political power.

What makes Anglo-Saxon liberals nervous about the burqini ban is that it is hard to see the difference between the forceful use of political power in defence of liberty, and the attacking of differences, or minorities, by the state.

The best argument that can be marshalled against the burqini is that, as prime minister Manuel Valls put it, it is the “transmission of a political project”, and as such it is more than just a swimsuit. It is, firstly, far from clear if such a political project even exists. But what Mr Valls means is that the wearing of the burqini, like the burqa, is, for the French, the thin end of a religious wedge. For Muslim women, choosing what to wear gradually changes from a choice by conviction to a choice by community. What starts as something freely chosen ends as something everyone else is doing, and the peer pressure grows. That, at least, is the reasoning.

Therefore, in order to protect the right of the individual to choose, the possibility of choosing the burqa – the first link in that chain, according to this theory – must be banned.

If that sounds plausible, it only does so because of a mistake at the heart of the argument: that Muslims form a collective, rather than merely a group of individuals.

Muslim women who choose to wear the burqini or burqa – a mere handful in France – are not part of an organised “political project”, they are just individuals wearing what their conscience dictates.

But France, in its fierce defence of the individual, is suspicious of religious collectives. The ideal religious expression for the French is minimal and individual, where faith is pushed to the margins.

Those who most vocally defend French secularism look at a country such as Egypt, for example, where the veil and other public expressions of religiosity have increased in the past few decades and wish to halt what they see as a rising tide of faith. Instead of seeing women and men choosing their clothes and faith freely, they see a collective, a political project.

Yet the truth is we all “choose” things – how to dress, how to speak, what music to listen to – by reference to our social tribes.

We choose them for reasons of social class and culture and education. We choose them because our friends choose them. That doesn’t mean politicians shouldn’t seek to maximise the amount of liberty people have. But doing so, by minimising people’s choices, especially in an area such as religion, which is so closely tied to identity and conscience, is counterproductive.

There is also context, current and historic. French Muslims face a great deal of discrimination today. And during France’s colonial conquests in North Africa, women were forcibly stripped of the veil, as a method of control. Both of those contexts need to be considered when making political decisions today, and French elites are still unable or unwilling to tackle them.

Banning the burqini, like banning the burqa, is a provocative act. Both have been done in a deliberately inflammatory way. Yet there is method in the madness, even if it seems few among French politicians have fully understood it.

These are complicated questions. Whether more religious societies are inherently good; whether outward expressions of faith create cohesion or division; whether public policy can do anything to reduce the role of faith, and whether they should do so. All are valid, important questions for societies to tackle.

But they can only be tackled carefully and with consensus. Simply banning a bathing suit without consulting those most affected, and then dressing up the decision as something to do with hygiene or terrorism, is perhaps the worst way to tackle sensitive questions.

There is a real political and philosophical debate to be had about these topics. But when the entry point is imperiously banning a piece of beach wear, then the conversation is likely to be struck dead in the water.

On Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai