President Sarkozy’s campaign against full Muslim veils took a comic turn yesterday when an Islamist butcher claimed that his niqab-wearing “wives” were no different from the mistresses that Frenchmen traditionally enjoy.
Lies Hebbadj, 35, was defending himself after the Government made him a national example last weekend by citing his supposed polygamy as the example of the un-French ways that the State wants to combat. He came to attention after a policeman in Nantes, his home city, fined his 31-year-old French-born wife €22 (£19) for driving while dressed in a head-to-toe niqab.
Brice Hortefeux, the rightwing Interior Minister, demanded that the Algerian-born Mr Hebbadj be stripped of his French nationality, acquired in 1999, because he allegedly had three other wives and used them all to defraud the welfare system.
It turned out that he was only legally married to one. “If we are stripped of nationality for having mistresses then there would be a lot of French people stripped of nationality,” Mr Hebbadj joked. “As far as I know, mistresses are not forbidden, neither in France, nor in Islam.”
Mr Hebbadj’s defence after three days of national headlines heightened a sense that Mr Hortefeux’s offensive had backfired and embarrassed Mr Sarkozy in the eyes of all but the hard-rightwing. The media, leftwing opposition and Muslim leaders accused the Government of turning Mr Hebbadj into a bogeyman to whip up anti-Muslim feeling.
Jean-Marc Ayrault, the Mayor of Nantes and its Socialist MP, said that Mr Hebbadj’s situation had long been known to the local authorities. As a radical activist who had visited Pakistan and London, he had been under surveillance by the state security service. Lawyers said that he could not legally lose his French nationality in any event because he had held it for more than ten years.
Mr Hebbadj, who owns a halal butcher’s shop and drives a new Range Rover, has become an unwitting symbol for both sides in the row over Mr Sarkozy’s plans for a law that will bar women from covering their faces anywhere in public.
The measure, announced last week and due to be tabled in Parliament next month, is intended to protect the dignity and equality of women. Some 2,000 women are believed to wear the full niqab in France. More broadly, the planned law is aimed at allaying public fears over the rise of radical Islam among a small fringe of France’s big Muslim population. Two thirds of the French support legal limits on full veils, popularly known in France as the burka, according to polls.
Mr Sarkozy risks having a full ban overturned as unconstitutional, but he has said that he is willing to take that risk. The Government’s whole policy towards Muslim dress and customs was deplored today by Le Monde newspaper. “The burka is a trap. A stupid trap. An unworthy trap,” it said. Mr Hortefeux should be “stripped of his ministerial post”, it added.
Mr Hebbadj and his wife are contesting the police officer’s judgment that her niqab amounted to an impediment to safe driving.