Burkini - Why the French keep trying to ban Islamic body wear

·         LIFEGUARDS in Australia wear them. A mainstream British retailer sells a fashion version of them on the high street. But the “burkini”, a body-covering swimsuit (named with the portmanteau of “burqa” and “bikini”), has been banned this summer by the mayor of Cannes from his stretch of Mediterranean beach, as well as by a dozen other mayors of French seaside towns. In countries with a tradition of liberal multiculturalism, such a ban is greeted by incomprehension, if not ridicule.

Why are the French so offended by Islamic body covering?

The government’s defence of the burkini ban rests on worries about religious tension and public order after recent terrorist attacks, coupled with two underlying principles. The first is laïcité, a strict form of secularism enshrined by law in 1905 after a struggle against authoritarian Catholicism. This principle is supposed to keep religion out of public life, and has been the basis of previous French bans: on the headscarf (and other “conspicuous” religious symbols, including the Jewish kippah and oversized crucifixes) in state schools (in 2004), and the face-covering niqab in all public places (in 2010).

The other principle is women’s equality. It may appear bizarre, or frivolous, to argue that women should bare more flesh. But many on the French left are willing to put it even before liberty, another founding value of republican France. The logic of the burkini, says Laurence Rossignol, the Socialist women’s minister, is to “hide women’s bodies in order better to control them”.

What outsiders fail to understand, the French argue, is that such body wear is not just a casual choice but part of an attempt by political Islamism to win recruits and test the resilience of the French republic. Prime Minister Manuel Valls dismisses as naive those who see it as being no different than a wetsuit. The burkini, he says, is part of a “political project”.

The difficulty is that, after a series of deadly terrorist attacks over the past 18 months, France is in a state of heightened tension. Perceived provocations on both sides are amplified.

 It is not just civil-liberty activists who consider the mayors’ ban excessive, or stigmatising. Some French scholars of Islam, such as Olivier Roy, consider it “absurd” to conflate the burkini with hard-line Islamism, not least because the latter does not permit women to bathe publicly in the first place.

Politicians, though, are unlikely to cede ground. France looks set to defend, if not tighten, its strict approach to head-covering.

Yet on Friday France's highest administrative court struck a blow against controversial 'burkini bans'. The Council of State suspended the prohibition in Villeneuve-Loubet, just west of Nice, saying it "seriously, and clearly illegally, breached the fundamental freedoms to come and go, the freedom of beliefs and individual freedom."

edited from The Economist