Should the burkha be banned?

President Sarkozy’s stand against burkhas shows how shamingly far ahead of us France is in the fight to defend Muslim women from Islamic bigots and us all from Islamic fanatics.

Women who wear the full face and body covering – and the men who generally make them wear it – often claim that the wearing of the burkha is a religious right. It is no such thing.

The burkha is a political not a religious symbol. It represents the most hard-line and intolerant strand of Islam and as such has more in common with the uniforms of other totalitarian systems than it does with the wearing of religious symbols.

Covering the face is a cultural tradition of Bedouin tribes from 7th-century Arabia where there was more sand than there is on your average London street.

A 21st-century Muslim woman should no more be expected to wear such garb in this country than she should be to follow that era’s dietary or hygienic norms.

As Dalil Boubaker, rector of the Grand Mosque in Paris, said yesterday, nowhere in the Koran does it state that a woman must cover her face.

There are passages that call for modesty of dress. But the burkha is not about modesty: it is about segregation and separation, sometimes invited, usually imposed. Its insult to women is obvious.

As President Sarkozy said yesterday, it makes women “prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity”. But the garment is also an insult to the other half of humanity.

The justification religious extremists so often give for full-face and body covering is that if men see portions of a woman they will act on their lustful thoughts.

Like most men I regard it as faintly insulting that anyone should think I can’t be trusted to see even an inch of female flesh without wanting to jump on it.

As so often, the clerical perverts reveal far more about themselves than they might wish when they make such pronouncements. But the other problem is security. People sometimes talk about this as if it is an entirely academic issue. It is not.

In Iraq the burkha has been used on multiple occasions as a cover for suicide bombers. And in Britain it has already been used as a getaway disguise by one of the four men convicted of attempting to blow up the London Tube two weeks after 7/7.

Sarkozy was right yesterday when he said: “The burkha is not a religious sign, it’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement” and he was perfectly within his rights when he proclaimed that as a result, “it will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic”.

It is almost impossible to imagine our current, culturally cringing, political leaders in Britain being so bold. While they pander to extremists at home and whip the rug from under Muslim reformers across the world, perhaps we should break with British tradition and for once join the French President in the cry: “Vive la République.”

NO. SAYS RAJNAARA C AKHTAR, Student

The French republic, in its overzealous drive to secularise the state and remove all evidence of public manifestations of religion, has just gone mad.

President Sarkozy’s address to the French Parliament on Monday included a scathing attack on the burkha, which expressly excluded all those who wear it from French values.

The deeper repercussions of this will be further alienation of a community already on the fringes of French society.

Where the burkha is concerned, the majority of women adopting this form of dress do so as an expression of their religious convictions and spirituality.

Despite the accusations of oppression and subjugation, it is a deeply personal act based on religious conviction.

My own experience of those who cover up completely is of women who are free-thinking decision makers who take their faith very seriously.

I do not wear the burkha but I would strongly defend the right of any woman who wishes to wear it.

Britain is a different case from France. Many of Britain’s Muslims are proud inheritors of British traditions. Religious differences are not an issue for the state to meddle with and at the moment our politicians perhaps have more pressing concerns with balancing their books.

However, in the past, ill-fated attempts were made to alienate women who cover their faces and cast them out of mainstream society. But these women proved that they would not be cowed and at least two of my acquaintances, who had considered “unveiling” for personal reasons, chose to continue observing the veil simply because in Britain no man or woman had the right to tell them how to dress.

This made me quietly proud and proved how positively British the attitudes of these women were. A recent study into the concerns of Muslim women in Europe found the hijab and burkha were side issues.

For them security, schooling and housing were more important. This study, and others like it, reveals the true face of Muslim women in minority communities. They are not downtrodden women in need of saving from the oppression of a piece of cloth. They have real and common fears and hopes, which we can all identify with.

They are concerned about their children, they hope for a better future, they hope to achieve professionally, they are concerned about equal pay. By allowing this single issue to monopolise the airtime and political attention given to Muslim women, a great injustice is being done.

The fact is we live in a democratic country that allows us freedom of religion. The fact is that we all hold views and convictions and have morals and ethics. We are not expected to conform on any of these, and the dress of a Muslim woman is no different.

Rajnaara Akhtar is a PhD student researching the Muslim community in Britain and perceptions of Islamic law.