French anti-burqa law won't offenders

April 30, 2010 - 11:24PM

AFP

France will jail and impose huge fines on anyone who forces a Muslim woman to wear a full-face veil, according to a leaked version of a proposed law revealed on Friday.

While women will face only a 150 euro ($A214) penalty if they choose to don a burqa or a niqab, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to slap one-year prison terms and 15,000 euro ($A21,410) fines on those who make others wear them.

"No one may wear in public places clothes that are aimed at hiding the face," says the text of a new law that is to be presented to parliament in July, according to a copy seen by the pro-government newspaper Le Figaro.

The law will create a new offence of "incitement to cover the face for reasons of gender", the paper said, and this offence will incur a 15,000 euro fine and a year in prison.

Legislators decided to impose a much smaller fine on women caught wearing the veil in public "because these women are often victims", one of the authors of the law told Le Figaro.

Women caught wearing the full veil can choose to attend a "citizenship course" instead of paying the fine, the paper said.

Sarkozy decided this month to opt for a total ban on the full-face veil, despite warnings from the State Council, France's top administrative body, that the law could be struck down as unconstitutional.

The president has declared the burqa and the niqab - veils worn by Muslim women in parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Gulf - unwelcome in France, calling them an affront to French values that denigrate women.

There has been a fierce debate in France, home to Europe's biggest Muslim minority of between five and six million people, with supporters of a ban arguing that veils are a sign of creeping fundamentalism that must not be allowed to take hold.

But opponents accuse Sarkozy of pandering to the far right with such moves and note figures showing only 1900 women wear the full veil in France.

Belgium on Thursday became Europe's first country to vote for a ban, sparking dismay among Muslims and warnings of a dangerous precedent.

© 2010 AFP

Belgium to vote on face veil ban

Belgian lawmakers are set to vote on a proposed ban on wearing face-covering veils in public, a day after neighbouring France proposed enacting similar legislation.

The scheduled vote on Thursday in Brussels comes after the federal parliament's home affairs committee voted unanimously on March 31 to endorse a nationwide ban on clothing that does not allow the wearer to be fully identified.

The ban would include the full-face niqab and the burqa, a shapeless full-body cloak that covers the face with a fabric grille.

Those who ignore the ban could face a fine of up to $34 and/or a jail sentence of up to seven days.

Belgium's governing parties and opposition both appear to agree on the ban, and the full house is expected to easily endorse the draft law.

If enacted, the bill would make Belgium the first European country to ban the garments.

'Respect the law'

Xavier Baselen, a member of Belgium's Reformist Movement party, which drafted the law, said the ban is needed for reasons of public order.

"It's true that when you live in a country you have to accept the laws of that country," he told Al Jazeera.

"In Belgium we decided [that] to be visible in the street is [a] real important law at a public order point of view.

"So people who come to live here have to respect the law the way we have to respect the law in other countries."

But Salma, a 22-year-old in Belgium, told Al Jazeera that she fears being targeted for wearing the niqab and is often harassed on the streets for it. However, she said she will not remove it.

"If you forbid the niqab, you deprive that person of their right of expressing themselves," she said.

"I will continue to wear my niqab. I will remove it if a representative of the law will ask me to identify myself, but will put it back on straight away."

French proposal

The move is to come a day after Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, announced moves to enact a full ban on the face-covering veil in public as well.

Sarkozy told a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the veil "hurts the dignity of women and is not acceptable in French society", Luc Chatel, a French government spokesman, said.

Chatel said the bill banning the veil from all public spaces would be presented to ministers in May.

"We're legislating for the future. Wearing a full veil is a sign of a community closing in on itself and a rejection of our values," he said.

Criticism and praise

The French proposal has attracted both fierce criticism and praise in the home of the largest Muslim community in the 27-member European Union.

Almost 10 per cent of France's 62 million population is Muslim.

Many feminists from France's poor, multi-ethnic suburbs have spoken out in support of a ban, saying it could help young women who did not want to wear the veil but were forced to do so by their partners or families.

Others, however, see the ban as part of a rising hostility against Islam and its symbols, and argue that many Muslim women actually want to cover up.

The debate has spread as far as Afghanistan, where some women's rights activists expressed outrage at the French proposal, saying they disliked the burqa but women should be free to wear whatever they wanted.

The vast majority of Muslim women, in France and elsewhere, do not wear a full veil, but the niqab, as it is known, which covers the face apart from the eyes, is widely worn on the Arabian peninsular and in the Gulf states.

The burqa is worn in some areas of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan.

Islam through a Christian women

http://www.veecos.net/portal/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3006:islam-through-a-christian-women&catid=20:intellect-articles&Itemid=18

It was a long duration that I spent trying to introduce Islam to a non-muslim. I found it an opportunity to do something for this person, for my beloved teacher, for my nation and above all in the sake of my Merciful God. I tried my best to be clear and useful in giving information and in answering the questions I received, because I feared to be the cause that someone hates Islam.

The beginning was in October 2008, when a Romanian girl wanted a chat on skype. As I do with everybody I accepted the invitation and tried to know what she wants. As I set as a problematic for my on-going research that the majority of skype users prefer to talk to the opposite sex (I am still investigating this hypothesis).

We started the chat about general and variant topics, I tried to find a point where I can talk about religious matters as I noticed later that she is an orthodoxy. I liked to talk about this topic also because I wanted to know about others beliefs.

The chat went on for nearly 17 months with an average of 2 hours per day. It was a clear and a direct discussion, expressing our different points of view. But unfortunately after this long period I couldn’t move further to my Goal. The girl was firmly attached to her religion, because she doesn’t believe in Islam as she call it “an established religion not a true one”. Although I can say that she learnt some issues about Islam.

The questions rose after analyzing this experience were; what was wrong in my introduction about Islam, is it my lack of communication? Or the strong belief of the other part was the cause? Or may be there is something external that interrupted receiving the message?

The Lack of communication:
Yes maybe is the cause. The girl one day was angry, because she interpreted the link I sent her as forcing her to revert to Islam. Later she set some issues that seems to her that are against women, like: polygamy, the witness of women, the marriage of the prophet PBUH with Aisha and Zayneb... etc. I quoted what some muslim scholars said concerning these issues, but later I received her E-mail saying that my answers made things worse then before. Is it because I didn’t know how to quote?

The belief of the girl:
The girl as I mentioned before is an orthodoxy. The word orthodox literary means: (of, pertaining to, or conforming to the approved form of any doctrine, philosophy, ideology, etc)(1) , so it suggests that this girl considers that she is on the right path, so she is not ready to listen to what other religions says. I set a hypothesis that the orthodoxy are the most people who are not easy to revert to Islam. I collected the list of new muslim converts I found that among the 56 person 7 are orthodox(2) .

The external causes:
Once I asked this girl about her opinion about Islam, she sent to me a link and said: “Here is a link, what our orthodoxy teach about Islam. You can read it, because I believe the same, what our Holy Church teaches us”(3) . I analyzed the article she sent and understood according what she reacted in the discussion we had. The article gives false information about Islam, for example: “The religion of Islam is predominantly a distortion of the Old Testament Mosaic religion and the (Pharisaic) Talmudic religion, to which was also added a dose of the pre-Islamic Arabian pagan customs, and a light sprinkling of heretical teachings about Christ”(4). So according to this, Islam distorted both Judaism and Christianity and is a continuity of Paganism. This may raise hatefulness and Islam phobia. The article and the teaching of the church could convince its adherents by touching and twisting the true bases of Islam, such as the spread of Islam, the revelation and the life of the prophet PBUH. I would mention only one quotation to see how intelligent was the church to make people away from believing anything about this religion. It is said that: “Mohammed's lineage, and that of many inhabitants of Arabia, was from Abraham's maid Hagar; she bore Ishmael, of whom the Angel prophesied in Gen. 16:12 that he will be a "wild man, his hand will be against every man and every man's hand will be against him".

It is true that I might be incapable in introducing Islam as it should be, because of bad transmitting of the message and because of the church teachings, but also the bad situation of muslims in the world (weakness, uncivilized, ..etc) helped in conception of the bad image.

(1)- http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/orthodox
(2)- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_converts_to_Islam
(3)- An e-mail received in april 8th 2010.
(4)- http://www.trueorthodoxy.org/non_christian_islam.shtml