Why be a citizen?
A Moroccan Muslim woman has been refused citizenship in France for wearing the so-called burka and supposedly living in “total submission to her male relatives”. Her initial refusal was in 2005, but she has now had her final appeal, to the State Council, rejected. The woman is married to a French citizen and has three children, who are also French citizens, and began wearing the garment (actually called a niqaab, although Moroccans sometimes call it a l’tam or lithaam) only after she came to France, at her husband’s request. The Independent noted yesterday that this was the first time the council had rejected appeals where the refusal had been on lifestyle grounds; previously, it had only done so on the grounds of fundamentalist sympathies. (More: Dictator Princess.)
I do not speak French, so if there had been interviews with the woman, named only as Faiza M, printed since the refusal. The Independent reported that the couple “practise Salafism, which involves a strict interpretation of Islamic dress-codes and personal status law”; this is not entirely true, since not all “Salafi” women dress like this, and not all women who do are “Salafis”. While the scholars of Saudi Arabia maintain that covering the face is compulsory, others who are influential on “salafis” in the West, like Nasir al-Albani, who lived in Jordan, did not agree. One newspaper also noted that the woman had allowed herself to be treated by a male gynaecologist; what the alternative was has not been made known.
While some of us may not agree with the way this woman dresses or lives, it cannot be lost on anyone that it is not just Islam that demands a certain degree of submission from a married woman - I have actually never heard the word submission used in this context in Islam, while it does indeed appear in the New Testament and on certain Christian (albeit not Catholic, which is the majority Christian denomination in France) websites. I wonder which male relatives she submitted to, since a woman is not a servant to her in-laws in Islam - she is, in fact, entitled to a house to share with her husband, free from the interference of in-laws.
I also find it difficult to believe that this lady has “no idea about the secular state or the right to vote”; the right to vote is something that is known of in Morocco, which has a parliament although the monarchy has more power than it does in any monarchy in Europe. Surely she would have heard discussion of laïcité among female friends, or even relatives, albeit most likely scathing; or perhaps they meant she presented no possibility of agreeing with it? Neither the veil, nor this aspect of her lifestyle, nor her probable opinions, are illegal, and they do not impinge on the lives of others either.
A blogger at Harry’s Place, in mentioning this case, asked:
Why be a citizen of a country that you have no interest or knowledge of, but in fact live in complete alienation to?
The simple answer is that the woman had lived in France for several years, was married to a French citizen and had French children. The vast majority of people do not choose the citizenship they have, nor do they have to earn it; they are born with it. They do not have to love their country (or, in most countries, pretend to, or even at least pretend not to hate it) or maintain a lifestyle typical of the majority in that country. Most people who take citizenship in a country in which they have settled do not do so because they love it so much, although they might refuse to do so for the opposite reason; they do so because they want to make their residency permanent, and because it makes life easier. A fair proportion of the country’s Muslim minority would not care for the French obsession with secularism, even if they do not manifest their religion the way this woman does (and I would imagine that there remain pockets of opposition to it even among the white French); besides, if a male immigrant was to apply for citizenship while his French wife had a lifestyle like Faiza M’s, the authorities might not have paid so much attention to that as they did to this woman’s dress.
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