The Niqab of the Paris Opera: A Tale of Censorship

Despite divergences of opinion amongst Muslim religious scholars as to whether covering the face of a woman in Islam is compulsory or not, practice testifies that many Muslim women customarily do. The paraphernalia of names that describe the various garments used to do so is not a cunning trick devised to confuse, but the expression of the diverse dress styles representative of the vast geographical territories where Islam as a religion, civilization and culture flourished over the centuries.

Today, a growing number of women who strongly identify as Muslims do find refuge or solace in dissimulating their bodies, hair and sometimes faces, while a portion of those who don’t, mention aspiring to taking up the hijab as a goal to put them in line with the precepts of their religion.  Yet another portion of women who refer to themselves as moderates or liberals choose not to embrace the veil in any form. This leads to an infinite set of combinations depending on social contexts, practices, lifestyles, style preferences and social status.

Yet, over the past decade, it is not the diversity amongst Muslim women but the niqab, a veil that covers a woman’s entire face with the exception of the eyes that has been stealing the limelight.  The portentous media attention it arouses comes from simplistic associations with extreme versions of Islam that equate it to a terrorist threat.

The women wearing the outfit, which arguably takes a little getting used to- awaken a range of feelings spanning from disavowal, fear, sadness to repulsion.

I remember sitting an Arabic exam in a packed auditorium in Asnières, a suburb town of Paris in 2002. I remember blinking when I spotted a student in full niqab. Thinking it incongruous and shocking that the teacher quietly took her to a corner where she discreetly lifted up her veil so that her identity could be ascertained.

I then lived in Riyadh where by law I had to wear the abaya. I remember wondering what on earth could have prompted that French girl to opt for the niqab, the piece of clothing that had become the stogy staple of my visual Saudi Arabian diet.

Sadly, what I have now come to perceive as the appropriate handling of an isolated incident by a caring teacher would no longer be left to the personal appreciation, tact or delicacy of that teacher. In abidance with the October 2010 law banning full face coverage in public places, the teacher – a state functionary- would now have to toe the line by reminding her student of the EUR150 fine she is exposing herself to by covering her face in public, and deny her access to the auditorium.

The law passed in October 2010 states that ‘No one, in public spaces, is allowed to wear an outfit designed to dissimulate his face’, indicates that France has clearly opted against a sartorial version of Islam it deems incompatible with its values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

Prior to its activation, in April, the government website Legifrance published a memorandum that stated somewhat grandiloquently that the French Republic entertained an open relationship with itself. The French colloquial expression, a dubious word play, was ‘La République se vit à visage decouvert’.

This month, the shunned presence of a veiled woman in the Paris Bastille Opera inadvertently reignited a dormant debate that questions the pertinence of such a law and the implications of its practical implementation.

It was during the intermission of the performance of Verdi’s Traviatta, on October 3^rd, that a woman sat front row, clad in a veil covering her face, was asked to either uncover or leave the premises of the opera house. The incident allegedly happened after members of the choir took offence upon noticing her veiled face. They expressed their outrage to the management of the opera, and recoiled from carrying on with their performance should the woman, visible to them, not remove it. The query was consequently relayed to the woman’s husband by a member of staff; the couple took heed and left. The choir resumed its singing.

This prompted me to question what must have possibly been going on in the singer’s heads. Did they perceive her veil as a badge of backwardness standing between her and a true appreciation of their art? Or did they feel it was their duty to defend the institution of the opera against a cultural sign they perceived to be incompatible with its aesthetic values? Did they not consider for a second that her mere presence at their performance was a sign of appreciation, and that she probably took as much pleasure in witnessing it, as they in delivering it? Were they blinded to that consideration by a sense of rejection and superiority because of that law? Or was it simply the symptomatic reaction of a society well versed in the art of the strike?

In any case, the incident was rude. It turned out that the incriminated opera aficionados were not French citizens but tourists from the Gulf. At best, they probably went home with an unpleasant anecdote. At worse, they felt humiliated to the point of having no wish to pay further visits. But France is left with a sticky precedent of cultural faux-pas that resonates of rampant xenophobia. It is left to deal with the implementation of a law that instead of championing Republican values of secularism, inadvertently propelled the niqab to the status of an instrument of rebellion against those very values.

Instead of leaving the door open to analysis, instead of asking honest questions, of wondering if the niqab is the expression of a rite of passage, an indicator of an identity crisis, an act of rebellion or a mere fashion trend, the law, commonly referred to in the French media as the ‘anti-niqab law’ closes the doors of understanding by advocating banishment. It marks the women who choose to wear it, and cling to that choice out of personal conviction with a stigma.

This is a worrying and paradoxical development given that in some Muslim countries where it is imposed, the covering of the face for women sadly is a tool of subservience.

Yet, in other countries it is a widely accepted, willingly endorsed sign of religious belonging. This was the case of Iran before a secular Reza Shah banned the chador (The traditional veil worn in the region for millennia) and all hijab in 1936 because he deemed them incompatible with his modernizing ambitions. This happened to the dismay of a population that clung to its sartorial traditions of respectability.  Some felt ashamed to be deprived of something they saw as part of their identity. The 1979 Iranian revolution that saw his deposition proved that it is not possible to negate cultural trends inherent to a religious identity, however much one would like to bring them in line with modernity.

Instead of shielding itself behind the law, the French republic perhaps ought to openly meditate the shortcomings of forbiddance and imposition as ways of enforcing its sacrosanct secular values. Instead of reinforcing the stereotype that difference is not acceptable, by promulgating a law that prompts its population to denounce women in niqab, the French government ought to broaden its definition of secularism to encompass cultural diversity in order to create a social fabric within which its citizens would be encouraged to display civility. That perhaps is a harder job that casting aside sartorial trends that irk France’s mainstream sense of aesthetics and legendary elegance.

Photo by Rana Ossama, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license