France’s proposal to ban the burqa is not the right way to get Muslim women to stop wearing the full Islamic veil, Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan said.
‘The French...are responding to the burqa, the niqab by restricting freedom and I think that’s not going to work,’ Ramadan said during one of his first visits to the United States since a travel ban imposed on him by the administration of President George W Bush was lifted. The travel ban, which US authorities eventually pinned to Ramadan having donated money to a Swiss charity that helps Palestinians, was lifted earlier this year.
‘We have to be very cautious not to translate every sensitive issue into a legal issue,’ said the professor of Islamic studies at Oxford University.
‘Don’t go that direction, speak more about education, psychology, changing mentality. It takes time but...for me, we can do the job as Muslims by saying the burqa and niqab are not Islamic prescriptions,’ he said.
President Nicolas Sarkozy has declared the burqa not welcome in France, calling it an affront to French values that denigrates women. France’s National Assembly will begin debate in early July on a bill banning Muslim women from wearing the full Islamic veil, Prime Minister Francois Fillon told lawmakers in France earlier Tuesday.
A final draft of the legislation outlawing the face-covering veil from all public spaces as well as state institutions is to be approved by the cabinet on May 19, said aides to Fillon.