A number of well-meaning lefty acquaintances are slightly distressed over Nicolas Sarkozy's recent decision to support banning the burka from France. Is this not too much of an encroachment on religious freedom, ask a good many liberal interventionists who feel obliged to prove, time and again, that being anti-Islamist does not mean being anti-Muslim. A libertarian bridles at the thought of the state dictating what outer garments a person can and cannot wear in public places. But before you condemn Sarko l'Americain for his hyper-secularism, Christopher Hitchens invites you to consider his defense of the Fifth Republic with an anecdote along the lines of "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" (except much more minatory):
A sign on the door of my bank in Washington politely but firmly asks me not to enter the precincts if I am wearing a hood, a cap with a visor pulled down or any other garment that prevents the staff and the other customers from seeing my face. As far as I am aware, no suit for discrimination has been filed against this branch of the bank at least: Most people know without having to have it explained to them that a person entering such premises with a mask of any kind has incurred a presumption - slight but no less definite for all that - of noninnocence.
Of course you would have to be crazy to try to rob a bank while wearing a burka, even if you were a heavily armed man: The whole point of the garment is that it weighs you down, restricts your movements and abolishes your peripheral vision. It's like being condemned to view the world through the slit of a mailbox.
Which, as Hitchens goes on to write, is rather how repressed misogynists in the Muslim world would like their wives and daughters to view the world. Fadela Amara, an Algerian-French humans rights activist who is also Sarkozy's Housing Minister, expressed shock at how many women in her country are “being put in this kind of tomb,” which Amara didn't feel compelled to clarify as a voluntary burial.
When President Obama spoke from Cairo last month, the burka prohibition was the only internal Muslim debate to which he alluded and upon which he took a definitive stand--for the reactionary side. This was a failure of moral leadership noted at the time by David Frum, who then enlisted the excellent Ayaan Hirsi Ali on his NewMajority.com blog to explain the multiculturalist-in-chief that oppressive headgear is not elected by every Muslim woman living in Amsterdam or Hamburg or a Parisian banlieue. Indeed, so self-isolated are religious ghettos in these European citiies that it's often impossible for the state to determine just how many burka wearers are subject to clerical or domestic coercison--which is another way of saying most of them probably are. Hirsi Ali's political career was launched, it's worth remembering, after she pressed the government of her adopted Netherlands to look more assiduously into the number of female genital mutilations performed on Dutch kitchen tables. The birthplace of Spinoza found that recommendation too insensitive to tolerate.
But Hitchens' practical point is just as useful: Try beating a speeding ticket by presenting the highway patrolman a driver's license with your face entirely shrouded. Or turning up at an airport to board a plane with a similar means of identification. If defenders of the burka are willing to respond to such challenges by saying that certain instances may in fact warrant the public removal of a garb that is religiously mandated to be worn in public at all times, then how can they claim legitimacy for their position either according to confessional or civil libertarian lines?
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