France's burka barrier

The controversy over the full-face veil in France has excluded the people it most concerns – the women who wear it

For a week now, the hundred or so French women who wear the sitar (a veil that covers the face, incorrectly referred to as the burka) or the niqab have been at the heart of the French political debate. Nicolas Sarkozy made a speech to parliament stating that the burka was not welcome in France as it was incompatible with women's rights and adding that France shouldn't be afraid to defend its values. A new commission has been set up to determine the best ways to combat the adoption of the full veil, and will eventually propose a law banning it from public spaces.

The role of the state today is different to the one it had in 2004, when a law made it illegal to wear the hijab in schools. This isn't about the republic aiming to preserve the neutrality of its secular institutions by forbidding pupils to wear religious symbols. This time, it is about intervening directly in the private choice of women, because that choice would be incompatible with living in France. The different opinions generated by the debate reveal the difficulties faced by the French state over the past 50 years in determining how best to accommodate its 5 million Muslims.

In France, the niqab is considered a threat to women's rights. This is the president's position. Even a woman who freely chooses to wear it doesn't have a place in France. She automatically becomes a consenting victim who is unworthy of any solidarity. A year ago, a Moroccan woman who wore the niqab was refused French nationality, a decision blamed on her "submission to her husband and her religious misogynist doctrine". But to punish women and not think about ways to fight their male oppressors makes little sense; it goes against the idea that French laws must be the same for everyone.

For others, the niqab is a deviation from genuine French Islam, which is open and tolerant. For the majority of French Muslims, the culprit is salafism – a fundamentalist branch of Islam imported from Saudi Arabia that has about 5,000 followers in France. The Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (French Council of Muslim Worship), the organisation responsible for Islam in France, explains that Islam doesn't prescribe the niqab and that wearing it is a cultural choice. However, the full veil's very existence challenges the official Islam adopted in France, and is one of the consequences of Muslim leaders' failure to ensure the integration of veiled young women after the 2004 law, and to protect the Muslim community from the many Islamophobic acts which followed.

Increasingly, veiled young women chose to look inwards, withdraw from society and benefit from the networks of solidarity offered by salafism, rather than fighting for their choice in the political sphere. The choice to wear the niqab is often linked to the breakdown of the French social model of integration, rather than religious radicalisation stemming from disadvantaged neighbourhoods under the control of extremist or terrorist movements – which is the alarmist argument of Ni Putes Ni Soumises, the group founded by Fadela Amara, who joined the government when Sarkozy created his cabinet and whose street credibility is greater among politicians than it is in the banlieues.

The terms of the debate have changed since 2004. The feminist movements and the left, in particular, now say they reject the ghettoisation effect a ban on the burka would have on women wearing it. France's official position appears isolated when Denmark and Belgium are welcoming their first veiled elected politicians and Obama is reminding the world, in his Cairo speech, that western countries should not tell Muslim women what to wear. France's European neighbours debate the burka with more caution. In those countries, it is not the cultural or religious values of the burka that are being discussed, but legislation around security issues and identification.

What the burka crisis underlines is that the debate on Muslim women's empowerment is crucial. But it has to be conducted with the participation of those who are primarily concerned and also be useful to citizens as a whole, rather than simply reinforcing the political class and its electoral objectives.