Georgie Anne Geyer

by Georgie Anne Geyer

What do Yasir Arafat, Shimon Peres, Anwar Sadat, Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi and the Ayatollah Khomeini have in common? They all have been interviewed by Universal Press Syndicate foreign correspondent GEORGIE ANNE GEYER. For nearly 40 years, Geyer has delivered distinctive foreign commentary from an impressive variety of fronts. Geyer's intuition, backed by her knowledge of five languages, worldwide contacts and voracious historical research, distinguishes her as a foremost authority on global politics.

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BURQA CONTROVERSY IS SIGN OF THINGS TO COME

WASHINGTON -- It may seem odd at first that one of the big stories in France this winter involves a piece of clothing -- the conservative Muslim woman's burqa or full-body covering -- but this fight is only a prelude of what is to come in many places.

First of all, the burqa is incredibly ugly aesthetically, covering as it does the woman's entire body except for her eyes like a kind of death shroud. But ugliness is far from the major problem. Even the supposedly liberal-minded French have virtually decided that the burqa has little to do with individual rights and everything to do with a disrespect, or at most no feeling at all, for the French culture and nation -- and they are right.

Sometime this winter or early spring, the question will probably be decided: Will the relatively few Islamic women who wear the burqa (an estimated 1,900 of the 5 million Muslims among France's 64 million people) be refused service in hospitals, buses, welfare offices and all other public facilities? Might they even be prohibited from walking down that grandest of the grand boulevards, the Champs-Elysees? Or will the burqa be completely banned, as 57 percent of the French in recent polls responded "Oui" to?

Or will President Nicolas Sarkozy and some of his leading ministers have their way? The president has said he wants Parliament first to approve a unanimous resolution declaring that the full-face veil is unacceptable in France -- then, from that vantage point, they will push for laws designed to ban the burqa as much as possible in public places without making it unconstitutional under French law.

It used to be -- 15 years ago and even up to 2004, when the wearing of Muslim headscarves by girls was banned in French schools -- that the most liberal countries in Europe were in the thrall of the multicultural dictum that all cultures were equal, but that all immigrants, no matter what their background or beliefs, would simply "fit in" to their new European homes.

Not only had many European countries literally opened their doors after World War II to the Third World, especially those from former colonies, but they bombarded immigrants with privileges: welfare payments, their own language groups and sometimes schools, apartments formerly only for citizens.

That those attempts at rational assimilation have failed is now a bitter pill across Europe; in fact, it is more like an illness affecting countries from The Netherlands, to Germany, to England and Italy -- and France. In country after country, while the majority of Muslims from the Arab countries, Africa and Asia have been hard-working family people, substantial and often growing minorities have adopted radical Islamic philosophies at best and joined radicalized activist terrorist groups at worst.

If one looks for tepid enthusiasm for their "new homelands" among these groups, most from impoverished backgrounds or "failed states," one will waste a lot of time. They dwell on their backgrounds and glorify them, and huddle among their own.

But perhaps the French "discussion" on this subject is the most important, given France's history as the philosophical and style center of Europe. President Sarkozy has initiated a national debate on the "French identity," showing the degree to which the French feel threatened. More important, the French have been in the vanguard of seeing that too many of the Muslims, huddled together in ugly suburban high-rises, are now a threat to the French state, and that such former untouchables as the burqa have now become the symbol of a radical political Islam.

Anyone who believes that the burqa does not represent politics or the subjugation of Muslim women does not have his/her history right. In the two most socially advanced countries in the Islamic world -- Turkey and Tunisia -- the veil was outlawed early by progressive leaders.

Nor does the idea hold water that the wearing of the burqa, or headscarf, will die out if you just let it be. In Egypt, the veil was dying out when I first went there in the 1960s and '70s, yet today, some 80 percent of the women, especially the young, wear at least the headscarf. Overpopulation with its concomitant fear by women of hordes of men on the streets and political unrest are the reasons for this apparent retrogression in the great center of the Arab world.

Actually, the actions of Europe on this matter should be considered very simple. Muslims, in choosing to go to Europe, should either have this minimal respect for European customs or stay home. Nobody is forcing them to come. Burqas are not only an affront to European women, they are a security threat, for who knows really what is beneath them? Even the French Council for Muslim Worship supports controls on burqas for IDs and for eligibility for state services. Common sense.

In recent newspaper accounts, French doctors told how they were threatened repeatedly, several times a week, by angry Muslim men who refused to allow their pregnant wives or daughters to receive treatment by male doctors, even in life-or-death situations. Andre Gerin, a parliamentary member who sat through six months of hearings on the burqa controversy, told The Washington Post of the hospital story: "The scope of the problem is a lot broader than I thought. It is insidious."

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