My wife and I have never felt so unusually anxious as we lately did during our summer break in Cannes, where we have our second home and have been regularly visiting for the last 25 years. The city and its beautiful beaches are noticeably less crowded and its normally buzzing Plages de la Croisette are half empty. Its top brand shops are painfully begging for the return of their regular rich clienteles who blindly rush to buy almost every label on offer.
The fact is that the entire Cote d’Azure (French Riviera) in the South-East region of the country is no longer the same when it comes to comfort and serenity. Tension suddenly seems to have become the order of the day. Sunbathers and crowds are being advised to be more vigilant and remain on their guard. Children’s freedom on the beaches, normally taken for granted, is spontaneously being curtailed by anxious parents. In short, a French neighbour told me “sadly, nothing is going to be the same after the Nice attack”.
There is serious fear that France’s national motto — Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity), as stipulated in Article 2 of the French Constitution — is under threat for the first time since September 1958, when the French voted to embrace their national governing law. People are worried that their values are being unprecedentedly challenged, following the decision by the mayors of around 30 towns to ban women from wearing the full-body swimsuits known as ‘burkini’ on the beaches. [On Friday, France’s highest administrative court suspended the ban on burkini swimsuits that was imposed in a town on the Mediterranean coast. The ban in Villeneuve-Loubet “seriously and clearly illegally breached fundamental freedoms”, the court found. The ruling could set a precedent for up to 30 other towns that had imposed bans on their beaches, chiefly on the Riviera.]
The court ruling notwithstanding, the ban has led to a wide-ranging and heated debate in the country and across Europe over the issue of personal freedom.
What a contrast! The land where the swimwear Bikini was first popularised by the country’s famous actress Brigitte Bardot is hotly debating the burkini. The recent bans were taken as a reaction to the cowardly criminal action in Nice on the evening of July 14, 2016, when a 19-tonne cargo truck was deliberately driven into the crowd celebrating Bastille Day along the beautiful Promenade des Anglais on the city’s sea front. A Tunisian resident, Mohammad Lahouaieji-Bouhlel, was driving the ‘death truck’ that killed 86 people, including many children, and injuring 307. Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) claimed responsibility for the attack.
The Mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, was the first to ban the burkini, saying it was necessary to “protect public order and rules of secularism”. He also said that beachwear, which clearly displays religious affiliation at a time when France and places of worship are the target of terrorist attacks, “is liable to create risks of disrupting public order”. Surprisingly, the vast majority of French has come out in support of the ban, while some Muslims say they are being targeted unfairly. Latest opinion polls, according to an Ifop survey, suggest that no less than 64 per cent of French people are in favour of the ban, while another 30 per cent indicate indifference.
The controversy has reached the government’s ranks. On the one hand, Prime Minister Manuel Valls joined the debate and vehemently expressed his support to the mayors’ decision, taking the issue to a new level by arguing that women wearing the burkini were “testing the resistance of the French Republic”. On the other hand, the 38-year-old Morocco-born Minister of France National Education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, came out against the ban. She considered them as “unwelcome measures” and she strongly objected to the idea that the clothing a woman wore on a beach “could have any link to Daesh”. The Left-leaning French daily Liberation described the new local laws as “stupid and a gift” to Daesh propaganda.
What French law says on secularism and religious traditions is now hotly debatable. In 2010, France, unlike Britain, became the first European country to ban the full-face veil in public. Earlier, in 2004, the country also introduced law that forbid the wearing of religious emblems in schools and colleges. In 1905, the French Constitution separated church and state and enshrined secularism in education and simultaneously guaranteed the freedom of religions and freedom to exercise them, but it made no mention of clothing.
A French Anti-Islamophobia association, CCIF, challenged the Cannes mayor’s decision in court, but lost the case. The administrative court, which authorised the ban, claim the decision falls within the remit of the 2004 law. The court considered the burkini as a religious sign and hence its decision to ban it.
This in fact increases the tension in the country as the controversy in some cases turns ugly. Obviously, it is a controversy France could have done without. The Cannes mayor tried very hard to explain the merit behind the action and related it to the existing circumstances, particularly the several terroristic attacks his country has suffered since the beginning of 2015. “The burkini is like a uniform”, Lisnard says, “a symbol of extremism. This is why I am banning it this summer.”
On the other side of the argument, Muslim leaders in France are saying this action is taking the whole issue too far and turning it into a campaign against Muslim citizens at large.
However, Lisnard’s decision surprised many in Cannes’ Muslim community as he is famously known for his openness to religious and ethnic minorities in the city. He has recently allocated a large plot of land in Cannes to be used particularly to build the Iqra’a mosque, known to be financed by a Saudi donor.
Surprisingly, like many of his colleagues, the columnist at the Catholic daily La Croix, Jean-Christophe Ploquin, disagrees and presents a more reasonable understanding. “In France”, he says, “everybody is free to dress the way they like as long as they abide by the law. Everybody should therefore be free to wear a burkini.” But the burkini, he argues, “offers a separatist vision of society and applies pressure on other women in the Muslim community”.
In other words, for the French on an average, the burkini issue deeply touches the core of two fundamental values: The desire to maintain the fabric of the nation and women’s emancipation. But unfortunately, this debate may seriously get out of hand and cause extreme upheaval if terrorism continues. The continuation of Daesh’s barbaric attacks in Europe can dangerously inflame social hatred and increase community division.
Mustapha Karkouti is a former president of the Foreign Press Association, London. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@mustaphatache
